Colonel Ferguson, with a nucleus of 100 regulars, had collected a band of 1,200 native Tories, from the foot of the mountains, in South Carolina. His progress northward was “marked with blood, and lighted up with conflagration.” For this reason he was selected to operate against the western settlements of North Carolina.
The mountain men made one dashing and successful onslaught on his advancing divisions, and then retired to the mountain fastnesses, for consultation and organization. Ferguson pursued as far as Rutherfordton (then Gilbert town), whence he dispatched a messenger to the patriots with the threat that if they did not lay down their arms he would burn their houses, lay waste their country, and hang their leaders.
This cruel threat aroused the settlers adjacent to the mountains, on both sides, and north, into Virginia. More men were willing to go to the field than it was prudent to have leave the settlements. Their fame as “center shots,” with the rifle, was well known to the British regulars, who feared to meet them; but the chivalric Ferguson was stimulated by this fact to greater watchfulness and exertion.
Ramsey draws this picture of the Revolutionary forces.
“The sparse settlements of the frontier had never before seen assembled a concourse of people so immense, and so evidently agitated by great excitement. The large mass of the assembly were volunteer riflemen, clad in the homespun of their wives and sisters, and wearing the hunting shirt of the back-woods soldiery, and not a few of them the moccasins of their own manufacture. A few of the officers were better dressed, but all in citizen’s clothing. The mien of Campbell was stern, authoritative, and dignified. Shelby was stern, taciturn, and determined; Sevier, vivacious, ardent, impulsive, and energetic; McDowell, moving about with the ease and dignity of a colonial magistrate, inspiring veneration for his virtues, and an indignant sympathy for the wrongs of himself and co-exiles. All were completely wrapt in the absorbing subject of the Revolutionary struggle, then approaching its acme, and threatening the homes and families of the mountaineers themselves. Never did mountain recess contain within it a loftier or more enlarged patriotism—never a cooler or more determined courage.”
Carrying their shot-pouches, powder-horns and blankets, they started from the Watauga, over Yellow mountain, to the head of the Catawba. Ferguson broke up his camp at Gilbert town (Rutherfordton), on the approach of the patriots. This was the most westward point he reached, in the execution of his threat to lay waste the country. The tories of his command quailed on the approach of so large a body of riflemen, and many of them deserted the royal standard. Ferguson dispatched for reinforcement, and took his position on King’s mountain, from which he declared “God Almighty could not drive him.”
After being in the saddle thirty hours, in a dashing rain the patriots, on the afternoon of October 7, 1780, arrived at the foot of the mountain. This, one of the most historic spots in the South, is located on the North Carolina border in Cleveland county. The area of its summit is about 500 yards by seventy.
The mountaineers approached the summit in divisions so as to make the attack from opposite sides simultaneously. The center reached the enemy first, and a furious and bloody fight was commenced. The royalists drove the attacking division down the mountain side, but were compelled to retreat by an onslaught from the end and opposite side. The battle became general all around, Ferguson’s forces being huddled in the center. The mountain men aimed coolly, and shot fatally, giving away before a fierce charge at one point, and charging with equal fierceness from another. The British commander, at length, gave up the idea of further resistance, but, determined not to surrender, made a desperate attempt to break through the lines. He fell in the charge with a mortal shot. A white flag asked for terms of capitulation; 225 royalists and 30 patriots lay dead upon the field; 700 prisoners were taken in custody; 1,500 stand of arms captured, and a great many horses and other booty which had been taken from the settlers, restored to the rightful owners. More than all, the frontier was freed from the ravages of a merciless foe.
The captured arms and booty was shouldered upon the prisoners and taken to a point in Rutherford county, where a court martial was held. Thirty of the tories were sentenced to death for desertion and other crimes they had committed, but only nine were executed. One of these was Colonel Mills, a distinguished leader. The remaining prisoners and captured arms were turned over to General Gates, commander of the Continental army in the South.
John Sevier, one of the leading spirits in the King’s mountain affair, and commander of the transmontane militia, was a brilliant, daring, dashing character; the idol and leader of bold frontiersmen, who nicknamed him “Nollichucky Jack.” The whole of Tennessee then belonged to North Carolina, but the settlers on the Holston were so far removed from the seat of government that, practically, they were without government. Sevier and his friends conceived the idea of organizing a new state, which, being in the nature of a measure for self-protection, was unquestioned west of the mountains as a just and proper proceeding, but by the home government denounced as an insurrection. The new state was named Franklin, in honor of the Philadelphia philosopher and patriot. For four years there was civil contention, which, in one instance, resulted in contact of arms and bloodshed. After this the parent state adopted a radical policy for the restraint of her premature liberty-seeking child. “Nollichucky Jack,” the governor of the insurrectionary state, was arrested for “high treason against the state of North Carolina,” and taken to Morganton for trial.