King's Mountain

by Sharyn McCrumb

  * * *

  We had ignored his objections before the executions and since. Shelby was philosophical about it. “DePeyster is from one of the northern colonies,” he pointed out. “As are Allaire and the little Tory doctor, Uzal Johnson. They think the British are going to win the war, and that all their army’s actions are justified on account of that.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think they’re going to win.”

  He smiled. “Why not, Sevier? Has Providence vouchsafed you with a vision of the future?”

  “No. I worked it out for myself, thinking about my farm.”

  Shelby raised his eyebrows. “Your farm, Sevier? Pray tell.”

  “It’s this way: my farm is only a hundred miles or so away. Just a day’s ride past the mountains yonder. I’ve been gone three weeks now, and even though it’s harvest time, I think things will be all right when I finally do get home. But three weeks is about the limit that I can trust things to get along without me there to run them. And I’m only a couple of mountains away. Now, these American colonies are an ocean away from England. And they’re being troublesome. The British may be able to keep their hold on us for a few years, if they really put their minds to it, and if they’re willing to spend the fortune it will take to maintain an army so far away, but they can’t run this country from the other side of the ocean, any more than I can run my farm from the other side of the mountains. Sooner or later, I have to go home—and so do they.”

  Shelby smiled. “But, as you said, the British are winning up north against the Continental Army.”

  “Well, they didn’t win here. We proved that we can beat them. And sooner or later, they’ll have other things to worry about. They have a whole continent full of enemies over the water. All we need is for one of them to start a war with the British, and that will distract them from our little revolution. I think that when they have to pick their battles, they’ll leave us be and fight enemies closer to home.”

  “So will you and I, Colonel Sevier,” said Shelby, no longer jesting. “It cannot be long before the Indians notice that we are gone, and lay plans to attack the backwater settlements.”

  * * *

  The rain continued steadily all day and into the night, and still we plodded northwest, heading for the river. Judging by the swollen creeks we passed along the way, the river would have risen many feet higher than its normal depth. We would need all the help that Providence would give us if we were to cross it safely. I pitied those who were making the journey on foot.

  It was only two hours until midnight by the time we reached the Catawba, and as I feared it was rising steadily.

  “Well, this is a heaven-sent blessing,” said Joseph McDowell, coming up beside me as we surveyed the rushing brown water.

  “I’d hate to see one of its curses then,” I said, shivering in my sodden coat.

  McDowell laughed. “No, Colonel, think about it. We have come in the nick of time. The river at this stage of the flood is just fordable. But if Cornwallis has troops riding in pursuit of us, they will be unable to follow us. By the time they get here, the river will be impossible to cross. We are safe. And Quaker Meadows lies just beyond the river. You can stop, and rest, and eat in safety, before you continue your journey home.”

  “Thank God,” I said.

  EPILOGUE

  The Battle of King’s Mountain ended, but the fighting did not. I got back over the mountain only to learn that Nancy Ward, the Cherokee Beloved Woman, had sent word that the Indians planned to attack. So instead of getting to rest on my laurels at Plum Grove, I had to haul myself right back into the saddle and ride out again to fight.

  The dying hadn’t ended, either. Before I had even set foot in the house, my boy James met me at the door with tears in his eyes. He had made it back safely, but my brother Robert had not. Nine days into their journey home from King’s Mountain, just past the Gillespie Gap, on the road to Roan Mountain, Robert had suddenly taken ill and within minutes, he had died there in a little field beside the river. They buried him there.

  The little Tory doctor had been right when he counseled him to rest and recover before he had tried to head for home. Robert had been afraid of getting caught by Cornwallis’s men if he stayed, but the irony was that instead of coming after us, Cornwallis had left Charlotte Town, going the other way. He wrote off North Carolina as a lost cause, and was heading up to Virginia, hoping to join the fighting up north where things were going well for the British, I suppose. But I had been right about how hard it was to run a war from across an ocean. The British got tired of the trouble and the expense, just as I thought they would. The war sputtered on for almost exactly a year after King’s Mountain, and then Cornwallis surrendered to Washington at Yorktown, and the United States was officially a new country.

  William Campbell did not live to see it, though. He was on his way to Yorktown for the last gasp of the Revolution, when he was suddenly taken ill—I heard it was apoplexy—and he died at a farmhouse not far from his destination.

  We stopped fighting the British then, but it seems there’s always somebody who needs sorting out. The Indian wars went on.

  Seven months after King’s Mountain, old Ben Cleveland got kidnapped from one of his tenant properties by some Tory rascals, who wanted him to sign safe conduct passes for them, so that they could come and go through enemy territory. They stashed Ben in a cave some thirty miles up the mountain from Wilkesboro, and set him to copying out the passes. He wrote as slowly as he could, knowing that his brother and some of their militia would be on his trail. Sure enough, as he was writing the last one, his deliverers discovered the cave up on Howard’s Knob, and they succeeded is rescuing Ben and taking his captors prisoner.

  Ben Cleveland hanged them all, of course, back in Wilkesboro, on what they call “the Tory Oak.” I wonder if he misses the war.

  Isaac Shelby is doing well. He has moved west into the Kentucky wilderness, and talks of gaining the territory’s independence from Virginia. Once you learn that you can prevail against the powers-that-be, it’s hard to stop challenging the authorities to get what you want. If he gets his territory to statehood, he’ll be the first to govern it, I’ll warrant.

  The Seviers continue to prosper. In addition to the brood I had with Sarah, now well on their way to being adults, my bonny Kate and I have five children, beginning with George Washington Sevier, born a few months after the war’s end. Robert’s widow Keziah, left with two young boys to raise, married Maj. Jonathan Tipton a year after King’s Mountain, and they have gone back to the Carolina side of the mountain. I wonder if the major moved out of this area in order to avoid being swept up in the conflict between his older brother and myself. I wish them well. I like Jonathan as much as I dislike his older brother, and that is a great deal indeed.

  It was on account of John Tipton that, eight years after the battle of King’s Mountain, I ended up back in Morganton—in jail.

  The Overmountain Men had their own little war of independence, but it did not go as well as the first one. Four years after Yorktown, those of us in the three counties west of the mountains decided to declare our independence from North Carolina. The state had ceded its territory west of the mountains to the Continental Congress to pay off North Carolina’s war debts.

  It was not all my doing, this drive for separation from North Carolina, but those in favor of secession put me in charge of it, and after that my fate was bound up in the fledgling state, whether I wanted it to be or not. We had heard about the establishment of Kentucky, independent of Virginia, and it seemed to us that what we were doing was just the same as that, and ought to be no more difficult to accomplish. But politics is even more troublesome than war, because most of it is done while your back is turned, and the enemy isn’t always easy to spot.

  The upshot of it was that some of the people in the backwater counties wanted to get away from North Carolina’s governance and some of them didn’t. So that political distinction—of whether or not to stay w
ith North Carolina—did what the British and the Indians before them could not effect: it made us turn against one another.

  Suddenly instead of battling a faceless enemy, I was in contention with some of my neighbors, most notably with the brother of one of my most trusted officers. Major Jonathan Tipton had been my second in command at King’s Mountain, placed even above my brothers in the ranks of the militia, and now his older brother John was my sworn enemy. His excuse was that he did not want the western counties to separate from North Carolina, but I suspect that he did not want to be a citizen in a state of which I was governor.

  It came to battles between his supporters and mine. Finally he came up with a reason to call for my arrest. When North Carolina changed governors, the new one opposed the creation of Franklin, and my political enemies—Tipton chief among them—accused me of all sorts of crimes and finally arrested me for treason.

  I went off to jail over the mountain in Morganton, knowing that the penalty from treason was hanging. But if I had enemies back in the western counties, I had friends in Burke County, those who had fought at my side at King’s Mountain, and when my deliverers came to fetch me, my old comrades from the war let me go.

  I spent the days of my Morganton captivity visiting with Charles and Joseph McDowell of Quaker Meadows. I take care not to make enemies needlessly, and this habit probably saved my life this time. Charles McDowell bore us no ill will for sending him off to Hillsborough and choosing another commander in his stead. We are all still friends and allies. Charles has married that brave young widow he so admired, Grace Bowman, and they are raising a new family of McDowells. They tell me that Frederick Hambright, that staunch German-born soldier who took command of Chronicle’s militia, has enlarged his landholdings so that he now owns the acres of King’s Mountain where the battle took place. I’ll bet he got it cheap. McDowell says that the hastily buried bodies were soon dug up by the wolves and stray dogs in the area, and that the field is now strewn with human bones and still haunted by the wolves, so that the local people dare not go near it.

  That arrogant little Scotsman Patrick Ferguson is still lying beneath a cairn of stones there on the battlefield, and if his ghost walks abroad, I reckon it must do it in his native Highlands, for he is as gone from here as the Union Jack, and good riddance to both. We have a nation to build, and we’ll do it ourselves.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  When I studied American history at a North Carolina high school, the chapters on the American Revolution covered the war from Concord Bridge to Valley Forge, and, with the exception of the British surrender at Yorktown, the history book did not mention any events that took place farther south. Yet King’s Mountain, a battle fought on the North Carolina/South Carolina border, was hailed by Thomas Jefferson, and by other scholars since then, as the turning point of the American Revolution.

  In October 1780, in response to a belligerent letter from a British officer, a volunteer force composed of the militias of several states marched to King’s Mountain, and accomplished in an hour what George Washington’s Continental Army couldn’t seem to do up north: they won.

  These thousand men, who came from the mountains of North Carolina, South Carolina, north Georgia, southwest Virginia, and the territories that would later become Tennessee and Kentucky, were not soldiers in the Continental Army. They had no uniforms, no food, no horses, and no weapons supplied to them. No one ever paid them for their military service, nor did they expect to be paid. After the battle, the makeshift army dissolved, and its soldiers went home to their farms.

  The 1780 victory of the Overmountain Men has long been a source of pride to the people of Appalachia, and I decided to tell the story for a wider audience. In addition to its importance in the course of the Revolutionary War, King’s Mountain is a veritable “Who’s Who” of the frontier South. The roster of the Overmountain Men included: the first governor of Tennessee; the first governor of Kentucky; the brother-in-law of Virginia governor Patrick Henry; Davy Crockett’s father; Robert E. Lee’s father; and the grandfather of North Carolina’s Civil War governor, Zebulon Vance.

  In researching this book I received help and encouragement from a number of people, many of whom are descendants of a soldier in that battle, as I am. My seven-time great-grandmother Keziah Robertson was married to Robert Sevier, who died from a wound incurred in the battle. A year later, Keziah married Maj. Jonathan Tipton, who had been second-in-command to John Sevier at King’s Mountain, and I am descended from them.

  I decided to write this book two years ago, when I spoke at the convention of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Washington. The enthusiasm and encouragement of the Virginia DAR convinced me that King’s Mountain was a story that needed to be more widely known.

  I began by consulting all the written records I could find about King’s Mountain, as well as the many nonfiction books that have been written on the subject. If you are ever tempted to think that “nonfiction” means “gospel truth,” read three accounts of the same historic event and note all the discrepancies between one book and another. (For example, most books stated that William Campbell was the brother-in-law of Patrick Henry, but one book claimed that Campbell was Henry’s son-in-law.) I sorted out the conflicting accounts with more research and more reading, but when I could not absolutely verify a disputed fact, I tended to believe the original source from which many of the subsequent books are derived: King’s Mountain and Its Heroes by Lyman C. Draper (Cincinnati: Peter G. Thomason, 1881).

  The Battle of King’s Mountain Eyewitness Accounts by Robert M. Dunkerly (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2007) provided valuable insight into the minds of the soldiers themselves. For the general reader, who wants a clear and engaging account of the battle, I recommend King’s Mountain by Hank Messick (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1976).

  My thanks to the many people who enriched the book with their advice and expertise. The parks at Sycamore Shoals in Tennessee and the King’s Mountain National Battlefield Park have excellent exhibits, helpful to anyone trying to understand the particulars of the battle. My husband, David, and I walked the battlefield, figuring out which militia attacked from which position, so that I could visualize the terrain in the context of the battle.

  Blair Keller, a Revolutionary War reenactor in Virginia showed me how to load and fire a flintlock. Leigh Anne Hunter, director of Abingdon Muster Grounds, gave me a tour of the site and provided information on William Campbell’s southwest Virginia militiamen, who began their journey there. Librarian Mary Gavlik took me on an expedition near Jonesborough, Tennessee, in search of John Sevier’s house, Plum Grove, now only a lone chimney in the weeds. She also took me to the grave of Mary Patton, the woman who made the black powder for the troops of Sevier and Shelby. My distant cousin Alan Howell took me to Elizabethton, Tennessee, to show me the place on the creek where the Pattons’ powder mill once stood. Research librarian Robin Caldwell searched historical and genealogical records for the story of Grace Bowman. Bill Carson, at the Orchard in Altapass—where the Overmountain Men camped—is a descendant of Robert Young, the man credited with shooting Major Ferguson, and I am grateful for his advice and encouragement. North Carolina historian Michael C. Hardy helped me to trace the first days of the 1780 journey—from the first night’s encampment at the shelving rock to the trek over Roan Mountain on Bright’s Trace, and along the road that is now U.S. 19 to Spruce Pine, where the militias of Shelby, Sevier, and Campbell left the mountains for the river valleys of the Carolina piedmont. Musician Richard Cunningham traced the eighteenth-century song “Barnie O’Linn,” the all-clear signal from the scouts to the militias.

  Dr. Randy Joyner of Wilkes County, North Carolina, showed me the spot by the Yadkin River where Benjamin Cleveland’s house, Roundabout, was once located. The house itself disappeared long ago. We also traced the route taken by the Wilkes County militia, who joined up with the Overmountain Men in Morganton: they traveled down the same river road, where some eighty years l
ater, Thomas Dula—Tom Dooley—lived.

  Finally, I thank all those descendants of the Overmountain Men who shared their family stories, their genealogical records, and their enthusiasm with me. This is a story that needed to be told.

  Also by Sharyn McCrumb

  THE BALLAD NOVELS

  If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O

  The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter

  She Walks These Hills

  The Rosewood Casket

  The Ballad of Frankie Silver

  The Songcatcher

  Ghost Riders

  The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

  The Ballad of Tom Dooley

  THE NASCAR NOVELS

  St. Dale

  Once Around the Track

  Faster Pastor (with Adam Edwards)

  EARLY WORKS

  ELIZABETH MACPHERSON NOVELS

  Sick of Shadows

  Lovely in Her Bones

  Highland Laddie Gone

  Paying the Piper

  The Windsor Knot

  Missing Susan

  MacPherson’s Lament

  If I’d Killed Him When I Met Him

  The PMS Outlaws

  THE JAY OMEGA NOVELS

  Bimbos of the Death Sun

  Zombies of the Gene Pool

  SHORT STORY COLLECTION

  Foggy Mountain Breakdown

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Sharyn McCrumb is the New York Times bestselling author of The Ballad of Tom Dooley and other acclaimed Ballad novels. Her books have been named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. She lives and writes in the Virginia Blue Ridge, less than a hundred miles from where her family—kinsmen of the Seviers—settled in 1790.