ries on the frontier, and the Cherokees
likewise came to their help. The patriots for the moment abandoned hope,
and bowed before their victorious foes.

Cornwallis himself led the main army northward against the American
forces. Meanwhile he entrusted to two of his most redoubtable officers
the task of scouring the country, raising the loyalists, scattering the
patriot troops that were still embodied, and finally crushing out all
remaining opposition. These two men were Tarleton the dashing
cavalryman, and Ferguson the rifleman, the skilled partisan leader.

Colonel Ferguson.

Patrick Ferguson, the son of Lord Pitfour, was a Scotch soldier, at this
time about thirty-six years old, who had been twenty years in the
British army. He had served with distinction against the French in
Germany, had quelled a Carib uprising in the West Indies, and in 1777
was given the command of a company of riflemen in the army opposed to
Washington. [Footnote: "Biographical Sketch or Memoir of
Lieutenant-Colonel Patrick Ferguson," by Adam Ferguson, LL.D.,
Edinburgh, 1817, p. 11. The copy was kindly lent me by Mr. Geo. H. Moore
of the Lenox Library.] He played a good part at Brandywine and Monmouth.
At the former battle he was wounded by an American sharpshooter, and had
an opportunity, of which he forbore taking advantage, to himself shoot
an American officer of high rank, who unsuspectingly approached the
place where he lay hid; he always insisted that the man he thus spared
was no less a person than Washington. While suffering from his wound,
Sir William Howe disbanded his rifle corps, distributing it among the
light companies of the different regiments; and its commander in
consequence became an unattached volunteer in the army. But he was too
able to be allowed to remain long unemployed. When the British moved to
New York he was given the command of several small independent
expeditions, and was successful in each case; once, in particular, he
surprised and routed Pulaski's legion, committing great havoc with the
bayonet, which was always with him a favorite weapon. His energy and
valor attracted much attention; and when a British army was sent against
Charleston and the South he went along, as a lieutenant-colonel of a
recently raised regular regiment, known as the American Volunteers.
[Footnote: Though called volunteers they were simply a regular regiment
raised in America instead of England; Ferguson's "Memoir" p. 30, etc.,
al