American Revolutionary War: Battle of King's Mountain
The clash at King's Mountain between Patriots and Tories began Britain's long descent to Yorktown. By Tom Wicker They were strong, mostly gaunt men in doeskins, perhaps a thousand of them, with knives at their belts and long huntsmen's rifles across their saddle horns. They rode from beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains--the western edge of civilization in eighteenth-century North America--from the valleys of such fabled rivers as the Watauga, the Holston, and the Nolichucky; from backwater farms and fields unknown to most Americans; from far beyond the authority of King George III, whose subjects they were in name only.
They valued home, family, and neighbor more than a newborn nation that existed scarcely more in fact than in their hearts. They were ready and some were eager to fight, less for the abstraction of national freedom than for their property and the physical safety of wives and children. Above all, because they had had to learn on a savage frontier to stand up for themselves, they were bound in risk, hardship, and endurance by hatred of a tangible and mounting threat.
By the autumn of 1780, the primary theater of the American Revolutionary War was in the South, colonists and British having fought each other to a standoff in New England and the mid-Atlantic. General George Washington's Continental Army had regained control of Boston and Philadelphia and remained, ragged and undermanned, in camps scattered around New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Sir Henry Clinton's Redcoats continued to occupy New York City.
In 1778, recognizing stalemate but calling on British command of the seas, Clinton had dispatched three thousand troops to invade Georgia. The colony was subdued with relative ease, and in 1779 British forces moved into South Carolina. Thus encouraged, and with high hopes for rallying a host of southern colonists to King George (Tory sentiment was stronger in the South than elsewhere) Clinton himself embarked from New York in early 1780, with thirteen thousand additional troops.
His idea was to move north from his Georgia-South Carolina base, subduing the southern colonies one by one. His first target was the major port of Charleston, South Carolina. After a forty-day siege, American General Benjamin Lincoln was forced to surrender the city on May 12, 1780. Still confident of a general Tory uprising, Clinton dispersed his forces throughout upcountry South Carolina, then a roadless wilderness. The British occupied numerous strong points but unwisely engaged in plunder and terror, thus damping whatever Tory ardor there might have been.
Clinton re-embarked for New York and the pleasures of an American city sophisticated for that era, leaving General Lord Charles Cornwallis, an able and experienced veteran of European wars, in command in the South. In response, following the fall of Charleston, the Continental Congress scraped together a makeshift army of untrained volunteers and militiamen from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. This force went south under the command of General Horatio Gates, whose New England army at Saratoga had thwarted General John Burgoyne's British invasion from Canada.
However, General Gates, the "Hero of Saratoga," proved in the South to be greatly overrated. His crude army of three thousand men was routed by Cornwallis near Camden, South Carolina on August 16, 1780. Gates himself was prominent among the panicked Patriots who fled the battlefield--many not stopping until they reached North Carolina.
With the crushing defeat of the last sizable American force in the South, Cornwallis apparently had an open path for the invasion of North Carolina, Virginia, and the colonies beyond. In September 1780, he moved north in three formidable columns: himself commanding the main force in the center, Colonel Banastre Tarleton leading the British Legion cavalry and light infantry on the right (eastern) flank, and Major Patrick Ferguson, an energetic but vain Scotsman, at the head of a Tory force on the left (western) flank.
Ferguson at age thirty-six was a remarkable soldier who had been in the king's service since he was fifteen years old and had considerable combat experience in Europe, the West Indies, and with Clinton in America. Ferguson's military style had won him the nickname "Bull Dog." Whether as an idiosyncrasy or an affectation, Ferguson customarily directed his forces in battle with shrill blasts on a silver whistle.
Reputed to be the best marksman in the British Army, he once had had the Continental Army commander General George Washington himself in his sights. Wearing a "remarkably large cocked hat," Washington had been on a personal reconnaissance of the British position at Brandywine Creek when he was spotted by Ferguson. The Scotsman tried to capture rather than shoot his quarry, and the American commander took flight and escaped.
"I could have lodged half a dozen balls in or about him before he was out of my reach," Ferguson later remarked, after learning the identity of the tall officer who had eluded him. "But it was not pleasant to fire at the back of an unoffending individual who was acquitting himself coolly of his duty, so I left him alone."
Even in the era of muzzle-loading muskets, Ferguson actually might have "lodged half a dozen balls" in Washington's body: He was not only a crack shot, but had invented and was using a highly accurate breech-loading rifle which could get off many more shots per minute than the standard-issue British "Brown Bess" smoothbore musket. Unfortunately for the British, Ferguson's rifle was never manufactured in great numbers.
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