University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.

Our narrative begins in South Carolina, during the
summer of 1780. The arms of the British were at that
time triumphant throughout the colony. Their armies
overran it. Charlestown, the chief city, had stood a
siege, and had fallen, after a protracted and honourable
defence. One-half of the military strength of the lower
country, then the most populous region, had become prisoners
of war by this disaster; and, for the present, were
thus incapacitated from giving any assistance to their
brethren in arms. Scattered, crushed, and disheartened
by repeated failures, the whigs, in numerous instances,
hopeless of any better fortune, had given in their adhesion
to the enemy, and had received a pledge of British
protection. This protection secured them, as it was
thought, in their property and persons, and its conditions
simply called for their neutrality. Many of the
more firm and honourably tenacious, scorning all compromise
with invasion, fled for shelter to the swamps
and mountains; and, through the former, all Europe
could not have traced their footsteps. In the whole
state, at this period, the cause of American liberty had
no head, and almost as little hope: all was gloomy and

unpromising. Marion, afterward styled the “Swamp
Fox,” and Sumter, the “Game Cock”—epithets aptly
descriptive of their several military attributes—had not
yet properly risen in arms, though both of them had
been engaged already in active and successful service.
Their places of retreat were at this time unknown;
and, certainly, they were not then looked to, as at an
after period, with that anxious reliance which their
valour subsequently taught their countrymen to entertain.
Nothing, indeed, could be more deplorably prostrate
than were the energies of the colony. Here and
there, only, did some little partisan squad make a stand,
or offer a show of resistance to the incursive British
or the marauding and malignant tory—disbanding, if
not defeated, most usually after the temporary object
had been obtained, and retreating for security into shelter
and inaction. There was no sort of concert, save
in feeling, among the many who were still not unwilling
for the fight: they doubted or they dreaded one
another; they knew not whom to trust. The next-door
neighbour of the stanch whig was not unfrequently a
furious loyalist—as devoted to George the Third as the
other could have been to the intrinsic beauty of human
liberty. The contest of the Revolution, so far as it had
gone, had confirmed and made tenacious this spirit of
hostility and opposition, until, in the end, patriot and
loyalist had drawn the sword against one another, and
rebel and tory were the degrading epithets by which
they severally distinguished the individual whose throat
they strove to cut. When the metropolis fell into the
hands of the British, and their arms extended through
the state, the tories alone were active and formidable.
They now took satisfaction for their own previous
trials; and crime was never so dreadful a monster as
when they ministered to its appetites. Mingled in with
the regular troops of the British, or forming separate
bodies of their own, and officered from among themselves,
they penetrated the well-known recesses which
gave shelter to the fugitives. If the rebel resisted, they
slew him without quarter; if he submitted, they hung
him without benefit of clergy: they spoiled his children
of their possessions, and not unfrequently slew them
also. But few sections of the low and middle country
escaped their search. It was only in the bald regions
of North Carolina that the fugitives could find repose;
only where the most miserable poverty took from crime
all temptation, that the beaten and maltreated patriots
dared to give themselves a breathing-space from flight.
In the same manner the frontier-colony of Georgia had
already been overrun and ravaged by the conquerors;
and there, as it was less capable of resistance, all show
of opposition had been long since at an end. The invader,
deceived by these appearances, declared in
swelling language to his monarch, that the two colonies
were properly subjugated, and would now return
to their obedience. He knew not that,

But, though satisfied of the efficiency of his achievements,
and himself convinced of the truth of the assurances
which he had made to this effect, the commander
of the British forces did not suffer the slightest relaxation
of his vigilance. Earl Cornwallis, one of the best
of the many leaders sent by the mother-country to the
colonies in that eventful contest, had taken charge of
the southern marching army soon after the fall of
Charlestown. He was too good a soldier to omit, or
to sleep in the performance of any of his duties. He
proceeded with due diligence to confirm his conquests;
and, aptly sustained by the celerity and savage enterprise
of the fierce legionary, Colonel Tarleton, the
country was soon swept from the seaboard to the mountains.
This latter able but cruel commander, who enacted
the Claverhouse in South Carolina with no small
closeness of resemblance to his prototype, was as indefatigable
as unsparing. He plunged headlong into fight,
with a courage the most unscrupulous, with little reflection,
seeming rather to confide in the boldness and

impetuosity of his onset than to any ingenuity of plan,
or careful elaborateness of manœuvre. Add to this
that he was sanguinary in the last degree when triumphant,
and we shall easily understand the sources
of that terror which his very name was found to inspire
among the undrilled, and, in half the number of instances,
the unarmed militia which opposed him. “Tarleton's
quarter” was the familiar and bitterly-derisive phrase
by which, when the whigs had opportunities of revenge,
his blood-thirsty treatment of the overthrown and captive
was remembered and requited.

The entire colony in his possession—all opposition,
worthy the name, at an end—the victor, the better to
secure his conquest, marched an army throughout the
country. His presence, for the time, had the desired
effect. His appearance quelled disaffection, overawed
all open discontents, and his cavalry, by superior skill
and rapidity of movement, readily dispersed the little
bands of Carolinians that here and there fell in his
way. Nor was this exhibition of his power the only
proceeding by which he laboured to secure the fruits
of his victory. With an excellent judgment, he established
garrisons in various eligible points of the country,
in order to its continual presence: these stations
were judiciously chosen for independent and co-operative
enterprise alike; they were sufficiently nigh for
concert—sufficiently scattered for the general control
of an extensive territory. Rocky Mount, Ninety Six,
Camden, Hanging Rock, Dorchester, and a large number
of military posts beside, were thus created, all
amply provided with munitions of war, well fortified,
and garrisoned by large bodies of troops under experienced
officers.

These precautions for a time compelled submission.
The most daring among the patriots were silent—the
most indulgent of the loyalists were active and enterprising.
To crown and secure all, Sir Henry Clinton,
who was at this period commander-in-chief of the
southern invading army, proclaimed a general pardon,
with some few exceptions, to all the inhabitants, for

their late treasonable offences—promising them a full
reinstatement of their old immunities, and requiring
nothing in return but that they should remain quietly
in their homes. This specious and well-timed indulgence
had its due effect; and, in the temporary panic
produced by Lincoln's defeat, the fall of the metropolis,
the appearance of an army so formidable as that of the
British, and the establishment of military posts and
fortresses all around them, the people generally put on
a show of acquiescence to the authority of the invader,
which few in reality felt, and which many were secretly
but resolutely determined never to submit to.

Thus much is necessary, in a general point of view,
to the better comprehension of the narrative which
follows. The reader will duly note the situation of the
colony of South Carolina; and when we add, that the
existing condition of things throughout the Union, was
only not so bad, and the promise of future fortune but
little more favourable, all has been said necessary to
his proper comprehension of the discouraging circumstances
under which the partisan warfare of the South
began. With this reference, we shall be better able
to appreciate that deliberate valour, that unyielding
patriotism, which, in a few spirits, defying danger and
above the sense of privation, could keep alive the
sacred fires of liberty in the thick swamps and dense
and gloomy forests of Carolina—asking nothing, yielding
nothing, and only leaving the field the better to re-enter
it for the combat. We now proceed to the commencement
of our narrative.