Joseph McDowell smiled. “Oh, yes, indeed. Two magistrates with jurisdiction in North Carolina? I should say we’re spoiled for choice there. I am a magistrate myself, and Cleveland. Shelby? Sevier?”
We nodded. Lawyers may be sparse in the backcountry yet, but we do have laws and we ordinary citizens enforce them.
After we passed through Gilbert Town, we had made camp Wednesday evening on the land of Colonel John Walker, some five miles northeast of town, less than a mile from Cane Creek. We stayed there through Thursday as well, for the wounded needed a respite and the rest of us were by no means in fighting trim, either. Hard travel and meager rations were taking their toll.
“We have magistrates aplenty among us,” said Joseph McDowell. “More of the militia officers than you can shake a stick at, in fact. Since you are asking about this, is it in your mind to have a trial, Campbell?”
William Campbell’s craggy face looked haggard, and, though he was my age exactly—five years shy of forty—there were dark circles under his eyes and faint lines about his mouth. The cares of command and the privations of the journey were outweighing the joy of victory in his countenance. He had been reading the book of North Carolina law by the flickering light of the campfire. At McDowell’s question about a trial, Campbell sighed. “Yes, a trial. I think we must, gentlemen. Despite my general orders, the tormenting of the prisoners goes on, and this grim news of the hangings at Ninety Six will only enrage them more. Colonel Cleveland was right. We must mete out justice to the guilty ones. Not to the ordinary soldiers, mind you, for some of them were forced to fight. But among us we know who the scoundrels are—the men who use the war as an excuse to pillage, the murderers, the house burners who make war on helpless women and children. Yes, I think we can hold them to account for their crimes.”
We fell silent for a moment. No one objected, some of us because we knew this step to be inevitable and the rest because they wanted their enemies to be punished.
McDowell spoke up again. “There’s a place about ten miles up from Gilbert Town, on Robertson’s Creek. We fought the battle of Cane Creek not far from there, and it’s on our way. We could make it there by nightfall, and make camp. Bickerstaff’s Old Fields. There used to be a plantation house there, but it’s long gone. I think it would serve. It’s secluded. Some of the Bickerstaffs still live nearby, though. They’re Tories.”
“I believe someone of that name was among the wounded Tories,” said Shelby.
“Yes,” said McDowell. “He died, though, before we left the field. I don’t suppose his kinfolk will be glad to see us camping on their land, but that’s their hard luck.”
Again, no one had any alternatives to suggest. McDowell knew the area better than any of us, for it was perhaps a day’s ride from Quaker Meadows. A day’s ride, that is, if you didn’t have to herd eight hundred prisoners on foot as you went. This pace was especially hard on the wounded men, for each day of green corn and jolting travel weakened them further.
The night before, as we camped in Gilbert Town, we had talked about billeting our wounded men in homes around Gilbert Town, but there was so little food and so much unrest in the area, that we decided against it. They would be better off taking their chances on the trail with us.
We reached Bickerstaff’s Old Fields at dusk, and camped within sight of two stark redbrick chimneys, all that remained of the plantation house that had once stood there. I wondered if it had fallen victim to the running battles that had crisscrossed the area in recent years, and, if so, whether one of our militias had torched the place.
As the men sat around their campfires, settling down for the night’s rest, we sent officers around to each group, to tell them that tomorrow we would hold trials for the prisoners who were known to have committed crimes or outrageous acts of cruelty in the course of the war. If any of them wanted to denounce any of the prisoners before the tribunal, they should inform their commanding officer without delay. We heard the murmurings as the word spread.
In anticipation of the response from the men, the militia commanders sat together, waiting to see who would accuse the prisoners. McDowell had acquired a jug of whiskey, probably from some well-wisher back in Gilbert Town, and he shared it out amongst us, carefully pouring a dram or two into the battered tin cups from our knapsacks. As I sipped mine, I thought about the coming trial and what would inevitably follow.
“I wouldn’t like to be in the prisoner’s position, if the situation were reversed,” I said. “Many of these men are well-acquainted with one another. They have been neighbors and even kinsmen since well before the war began. They may have disputes and resentments that have nothing to do with the present hostilities. How are we to know the difference?”
“Well, I for one don’t care,” Ben Cleveland declared. “The fact that they fought against us is all I need to know. The ones we kill—we won’t have to fight ’em again.”
“No, Sevier is right,” said Shelby. “We mean to punish thieves and killers, not honest soldiers. I think we will have to consider the accusations very carefully before we agree even to try a man, much less condemn him.”
“I want veto power,” I said. “Over the men from the Watauga settlements, I mean. I have known some of them as friends and neighbors—fought alongside them, helped with their barn-raising, danced at their weddings. I think among them I’ll know a thoroughgoing scoundrel from a misguided Tory.”
“Fair enough,” said Campbell, and the others saw the sense of my argument, and nodded as well. “We all have the power to stop a man from being hanged if it is warranted.”
We were talking of the weather and the journey ahead, when a contingent of officers from both sides of the Carolina border approached us, hats in hand. “We heard that you were asking for charges against some of the prisoners, sirs,” said the spokesman. “And we came to make our report if you gentlemen are ready to hear it.”
They addressed their remarks to Joseph McDowell, for he was the commander they knew best, being from this area of the state, but William Campbell took charge of the meeting. “Go on,” he said. “No … wait a moment.” Then he called out to one of his own junior officers. “Major, have you the wherewithal to make a written record of this? We shall need one.”
The Carolina officers waited while the Virginia soldier secured paper and ink. When he had got them, he sat down near the fire with a leather-bound book propped on his knees, nodding that he was ready to make note of the names and charges against the prisoners.
The leader of the Carolina officers, a dark-haired, cadaverous-looking fellow who put me in mind of a goose, spoke up. “I’m from South Carolina, sirs. Well, about half of us are,” he gestured toward the rest of the group, who stood a little behind him, shuffling their feet and looking ill at ease.
“You may recall that battle at Camden, some six weeks back or so. Well, sirs, that was dark days for South Carolina. Cornwallis had just about wiped out all the Whigs in the state, and there was no one left to stop his army from doing anything they wanted to the helpless citizens. They went after the known Whigs in the area like hounds after a fox. Some of them tried to hide, of course—it’s only sense to do that—but if the Tories came to a man’s house and found him gone, why, they’d burn it right down to the ground. And if a father or a son refused to say where the absent man was hiding, the Tories would hang him without a second thought.”
Another officer spoke up, “I heard that when one fellow’s wife wouldn’t say where he’d gone, they ripped open her stomach with a bayonet.”
“That’s right,” said the leader. “And that is what we’ve been living through, from Camden to Gilbert Town, everywhere in the path of Cornwallis’s army. Maybe we killed some of them at King’s Mountain, but we know for a fact that there’s some of the ringleaders penned up here with the prisoners, and we want them to pay for what they did.”
“You have to deal with them,” said the second officer. “If you let them go in an exchange of prisoners, I reckon they�
��ll go back home and do worse than before, on account of being furious over losing the battle. I say we put them down like the mad dogs they are.”
“They did the same to our men after Camden, and just lately down at Ninety Six,” the leader reminded us. “Maybe if we hang a few of them here, it will make the rest think twice before they go to tormenting their neighbors again.”
William Campbell had listened to this recitation in tight-lipped silence. When the officers finished speaking, Campbell turned to look at the rest of us, and in our faces he saw the same angry resolve. “Very well, gentlemen. I am persuaded. We will convene a court-martial in the morning to try those accused of such crimes. Field officers and captains can serve as jurors. Tell the men to bring us the names of any they wish to see tried for these offenses.”
“We’ll be at it all day,” said Shelby.
Shelby was right about that. The trials did last all day. So many accusations were brought against Tory prisoners that, even though the proceedings were as swift and efficient as we could make them, the hours dragged on, as our soldiers took the oath and then told their harrowing tales of torture and murders perpetrated upon the helpless citizens caught between two armies. One Tory after another was brought in and made to hear the charges against him, then the jurors would deliberate and pronounce the accused innocent or guilty. There was no need for them to deliberate about the punishment to be given, for that was the same in every case: hanging, immediately following the trials.
I think if we had intended strict justice, untempered by mercy, we might have hanged a hundred of the prisoners, and I think Ben Cleveland would have been glad to see it done, but the rest of us had decided to settle for a token retribution: hang the worst of the offenders as a warning to the rest.
There was one man, though, that we all agreed must be punished. Col. Ambrose Mills was the highest ranking Tory officer to be tried, and, even before testimony against him had been presented, his reputation preceded him. One of the South Carolina soldiers, who had served with Colonel Williams, stepped up to testify that Mills had incited the Cherokee into attacking frontier settlements. The jury duly—but briefly—deliberated on the truth of this accusation, and announced that they found the prisoner Mills to be guilty as charged. Of that particular crime, I am by no means sure that Ambrose Mills was guilty, but that was of no consequence. What we did know beyond a doubt was that Mills had been the commanding officer of the Tories who raided Colonel Charles McDowell’s camp on the Pacolet River, back in August. Young Noah Hampton was killed in that raid, and his father was here, an officer in the Burke County militia. Was it a crime to lead a raid on an enemy camp, even one composed of sleeping men? Strictly speaking, it was not. But Andrew Hampton, grieving still for his murdered boy, expected that incident to be avenged, and so it would be. Ambrose Mills was sentenced to die, and he would be the first man to mount the gallows tree.
In all, thirty-six men were condemned to death. Many of those accused were unknown to me, because over the mountains we had no raids from Loyalists to the king. The British sent the Indians to do their dirty work in the backcountry. But in Burke County and in Gilbert Town, and especially over the border in South Carolina, the hostility had been great, and the bitterness was an open wound. Much of the testimony came from the men from those areas.
When two Burke County brothers, Arthur and John McFall, were put before the tribunal, the first witness described the McFalls’ raid on the home of a Whig named Martin Davenport. They had gone to his farm to kill him, but, finding him gone, they had abused his wife and ordered her to cook breakfast for them. Davenport’s ten-year-old son was ordered to feed the McFalls’ horses. When he told them to feed their own horses, John McFall whipped the boy.
At the end of this recitation, William Campbell turned to Joseph McDowell. “Major, you must be acquainted with this fellow, as he comes from Burke County. What do you have to say about him?”
Major McDowell reddened, looking from the jury to the accused brothers, and then back at Campbell. “Well, sir … I do know the McFalls, yes, but…” He seemed reluctant to say that the offense did not warrant the death penalty. At least, that’s what I was thinking, but before anyone could voice that opinion, Ben Cleveland roused himself, red-faced and wrathful. Looking up from his notes, he bellowed, “Well, I know John McFall! Martin Davenport, whose home he invaded, is one of my soldiers, one of the best. McFall insulted Davenport’s wife and whipped his child. Such a man ought not to be allowed to live!”
“And what of the other McFall?” asked Campbell.
Now Major McDowell did speak up. “I don’t think we need hang the both of them,” he said. “After all, Arthur McFall was wounded in the battle. Between that and the execution of his brother, I think he will mend his ways. I say we let him off.”
No one voiced an objection, so after a few moments of silence, Campbell said, “Very well, Major. John McFall is sentenced to be hanged, but Arthur McFall will be spared. Who is next?”
“James Crawford,” said the officer acting as bailiff.
I looked up, and saw one of the few men on trial that I did know. The last time I had seen James Crawford was in the shadow of Roan Mountain on the second day of the march. He had been the man who deserted my militia and persuaded young Sam Chambers to abscond with him. He had given us many uneasy hours, worrying what he might have told Ferguson about our plans and whereabouts, but in the end it did not matter. Forewarned that we were coming, Major Ferguson elected to take a stand and fight, and that was the end of him, so perhaps, with some help from Providence, Crawford did us a good turn after all. But he had not meant to. What he did was treason, pure and simple: he deserted one side and went tattling to the other. He could have got us all killed with his treasonous folly.
But, although he most certainly was a traitor, Jim Crawford was no coward. I had fought beside him in skirmishes with the Indians on the frontier, and it might be that I even owed him my life a time or two. Back then he had fought bravely and well.
Now here is where I differ from my comrades, the rest of the men who settled the backwater country. Most of them are Scotch or Irish, and they are brave to a fault and loyal to the grave, I’ll give them that, but here’s the thing: they will hold a grudge tighter than a gold sovereign. If you ever do them a kindness, they will consider themselves in your debt forever, and that is an admirable sentiment, but the converse of it is that if you incur their anger by injuring either their pride or their person, they will neither forgive nor forget your transgression. Never. If they lived long enough to see the mountain crumble to dust and the river run dry, they would still be holding on to that grudge, and it would be as fresh and green as the day it was conceived.
Perhaps it is that strain of French Huguenot blood that makes me differ from my Scotch-Irish neighbors, but, though I am as quick to anger as any one of them, I get over it. Let a few days or weeks pass, and my resentment withers away. I can forgive. You never know when someone who has trespassed against you will turn up in some later hour of need and become your angel of deliverance.
So there it was … If we could have run James Crawford to earth in the day or two after he had deserted the militia, or even any time before the battle took place, I could have killed him myself and then eaten a hearty dinner immediately thereafter, such was my wrath at him. But now, more than two weeks had passed, and tempered by the joy of our victory over Ferguson, my anger toward Crawford had cooled. My sense of justice told me that the man was certainly guilty, and in strict accordance with the law, he deserved the same fates as the other guilty men, but I kept remembering what a good soldier he had been in former days.
Our eyes met.
In his, I saw no hint of fear or supplication. He expected nothing from me, and I knew that his defection to the Loyalists was not an act of betrayal toward us, but an act of allegiance toward a king whose divine right he must sincerely believe in. If he had begged for mercy or cursed and blamed me for his fate, it would have ha
rdened my heart. But he did not.
The jury foreman was saying, “… find the prisoner James Crawford guilty of treason, and sentence him to hang…”
I held up a restraining hand. “Just a moment. James Crawford is one of my men, and I wish to exercise my right of veto. Let him go.”
Shelby, seated to my right, gave me a look of mild surprise. “There can be no one here with more witnesses to his treachery than James Crawford,” he murmured.
“I know it. But I have been in other battles with him, and he acquitted himself well in them. As long as the frontier is in danger of attack, Crawford’s is a life worth saving.” I could see Ben Cleveland’s scowl of disapproval, and I knew that by his lights, the man should hang with the rest of them, but Cleveland lives far from Indian country, and so in this case he and I were using different measures to pass judgment.
William Campbell made a note of my veto, and nodded for the guards to escort Crawford back to the prisoners’ camp. “Well, Colonel Sevier, you have spared Crawford. Now what of his partner in treason, Samuel Chambers? He is next to be tried.”
“He’s little more than a boy. He does what he’s told, and his misfortune was listening to Crawford’s bad counsel. I don’t think we can spare the dog and kill the pup.”
“He has learned his lesson, I’ll warrant,” said Shelby.
“Yes, sirs, I have!” Sam Chambers called out, tears running down his cheeks. “I was sorry before we had gone ten miles that day, but I was afraid to turn back.”
“Take care whose advice you take from now on,” growled Cleveland, but he made no objection to our decision.
“Reprieved,” said Campbell. “Next case.”
The trials went on and on, until they began to run together in my mind. Most of the crimes were the same—violence against the wives and children of Whigs, robbery, and destruction of property. One case is etched in my memory, though I did not know the accused. Capt. Walter Gilkey, a Tory officer who lived somewhere near Gilbert Town, had gone to the home of one of his Whig neighbors, and when he asked if the man was at home, the man’s son, aiming a pistol at the intruder, replied that his father was gone. Captain Gilkey drew his own weapon and shot the boy, wounding him in the shoulder and confiscating his pistol. The chief witness against Gilkey was the wounded boy himself. The lad had recovered from his injury, and, perhaps inspired by it, he had joined the militia and fought with us at King’s Mountain. When he was called upon to testify, he bared his shoulder, revealing the scars from the gunshot would. “He done that to me, that Gilkey. He made life a misery for all the Whigs he knew of in the settlement.”
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