down their arms and surrendered themselves prisoners at discretion.

The loss of the British on that day was at least eleven hundred and four. Four hundred and fifty-six of them were either killed, or too severely wounded to leave the ground; the number of prisoners was six hundred and forty-eight. On the American side the regiment of Campbell suffered more than any other in the action; the total loss was twenty-eight killed and sixty wounded. Among those who fell was Colonel James Williams of Ninety-Six, a man of an exalted character, of a career brief but glorious. An ungenerous enemy revenged themselves for his virtues by nearly extirpating his family; they could not take away his right to be remembered by his country with honor and affection to the latest time.

Among the captives there were house-burners and assassins. Private soldiers who had witnessed the sorrows of children and women, robbed and wronged, shelterless, stripped of all clothes but those they wore, nestling about fires kindled on the ground and mourning for their fathers and husbands-executed nine or ten in retaliation for the frequent and barbarous use of the gallows at Camden, Ninety-Six, and Augusta; but Campbell at once intervened, and in general orders, by threatening the delinquents with certain and effectual punishment, secured protection to the prisoners.

Just below the forks of the Catawba the tidings of the defeat reached Tarleton; his party in all haste rejoined Cornwallis. The victory at King's Mountain, which in the spirit of the American soldiers was like the rising at Concord, in its effects like the successes at Bennington, changed the aspect of the war. The loyalists of North Carolina no longer dared rise. It fired the patriots of the two Carolinas with fresh zeal. It encouraged the fragments of the defeated and scattered American army to seek each other and organize themselves anew. It quickened the North Carolina legislature to earnest efforts. It inspirited Virginia to devote her resources to the country south of her border. The appearance on the frontiers of a numerous enemy from settlements beyond the mountains, whose very names had been unknown to the British, took Cornwallis by surprise, and their success was fatal to his intended expedi

tion. He had hoped to step with ease from one Carolina to the other, and from these to the conquest of Virginia; and he had now no choice but to retreat.

On the evening of the fourteenth his troops began their march back from Charlotte to the Catawba ford. The men of Mecklenburg and Rowan counties had disputed his advance; they now harassed his foraging parties, intercepted his despatches, and cut off his communications. Soldiers of the militia hung on his rear. Twenty wagons were captured, laden with stores and the knapsacks of the light infantry legion. Single men would ride within gunshot of the retreating army, discharge their rifles, and escape.

The Catawba ford was crossed with difficulty on account of a great fall of rain. For two days the royal forces remained in the Catawba settlement, Cornwallis suffering from fever, the army from want of forage and provisions. The command on the retreat fell to Rawdon. The soldiers had no tents. For several days it rained incessantly. Waters and deep mud choked the roads. At night the army bivouacked in the woods in unwholesome air; sometimes without meat; at others, without bread. Once for five days it lived upon Indian corn gathered from the fields, five ears being the day's allowance for two soldiers. But for the personal exertions of the militia, most of whom were mounted, it would not have been supported. After a march of fifteen days it encamped at Winnsborough, an intermediate station between Camden and Ninety-Six.

All the while Marion had been on the alert. Two hundred tories had been sent in September to surprise him; and with fifty-three men he first surprised a part of his pursuers, and then drove the main body to flight. At Black Mingo, on the twenty-eighth, he made a successful attack on a guard of sixty militia, and took prisoners those who were under its escort. The British were burning houses on Little Pedee, and he permitted his men of that district to return to protect their wives and families; but he would not suffer retaliation, and wrote with truth: "There is not one house burned by my orders or by any of my people. It is what I detest, to distress poor women and children.”

VOL. V.-26

"I most sincerely hope you will get at Mr. Marion," wrote Cornwallis on the fifth of November, as he despatched Tarleton in pursuit of him. This officer and his corps set fire to all the houses, and destroyed all the corn from Camden down to Nelson's ferry; he beat the widow of a general officer because she could not tell where Marion was encamped, burned her dwelling, laid waste everything about it, and did not leave her a change of raiment. The line of their march could be traced by groups of houseless women and children, once of ample fortune, sitting round fires in the open air.

As for Marion, after having kept his movements secret and varied his encampment every night, his numbers increased; then selecting a strong post "within the dark morass," he defied an attack. But just at that moment new dangers impended from another quarter.

Sumter had rallied the patriots in the country above Camden, and in frequent skirmishes kept the field. Mounting his partisans, he intercepted British supplies of all sorts, and sent parties within fourteen miles of Winnsborough. Having ascertained the number and position of his troops, Cornwallis despatched a party under Major Wemyss against him. After a march of twenty-four miles with mounted infantry, Wemyss reached Fishdam on Broad river, the camp of General Sumter, and at the head of his corps charged the picket. The attack was repelled; he himself was wounded and taken prisoner. A memorandum was found upon him of houses burned by his command. He had hanged Adam Cusack, a Carolinian, who had neither given his parole, nor accepted protection, nor served in the patriot army; yet his captors would not harm a man who was their prisoner.

The position of the British in the upper country became precarious. Tarleton was suddenly recalled from the pursuit of Marion and ordered to take the nearest path against Sumter, who had passed the Broad river, formed a junction with Clark and Brennan, and threatened Ninety-Six. One regiment was sent forward to join him on his march; another followed for his support. Apprised of Tarleton's approach, Sumter posted himself strongly on the plantation of Blackstock. At five in the afternoon of the twentieth of November, Tarleton drew

near in advance of his light infantry; and with two hundred and fifty mounted men he made a precipitate attack on Sumter's superior force. The hillside in front of the Americans was steep; their rear was protected by the rapid river Tyger; their left was covered by a large barn of logs, between which the riflemen could fire with security. The sixty-third British regiment having lost its commanding officer, two lieutenants, and one third of its privates, Tarleton retreated, leaving his wounded to the mercy of the victor. The loss of Sumter was very small; but, being himself disabled by a severe wound, he crossed the Tyger, taking his wounded men with him.

By the lavish distribution of presents, the Indian agents obtained promises from the chiefs of twenty-five hundred Cherokees, and a numerous body of Creeks, to lay waste the settlements on the Watauga, Holston, Kentucky, and Nolichucky, and even to extend their ravages to the Cumberland and Green rivers, that the attention of the mountaineers might be diverted to their own immediate concerns. Cornwallis gave orders to the reinforcement of three thousand sent by Clinton into the Chesapeake to embark for Cape Fear river. So ended his first attempt to penetrate to Virginia. He was driven back by the spontaneous risings of the southern and south-western people; and the unwholesome exhalations of autumn swept men from every garrison in the low country faster than Great Britain could replace them.

CHAPTER XXVII.

THE RISE OF FREE COMMONWEALTHS.

1780.

It is older

FREEDOM is of all races and of all nationalities. than bondage, and ever rises from the enslavements of violence or custom or abuse of power; for the rights of man spring from eternal law, are kept alive by the persistent energy of constant nature, and by their own indestructibility prove their lineage as the children of omnipotence.

In an edict of the eighth of August 1779, Louis XVI. announced "his regret that many of his subjects were still without personal liberty and the prerogatives of property, attached to the glebe, and, so to say, confounded with it." To all serfs on the estates of the crown he therefore gave back their freedom. He had done away with torture, and he wished to efface every vestige of a rigorous feudalism; but he was restrained by his respect for the laws of property, which he held to be the groundwork of order and justice. While the delivering up of a runaway serf was in all cases forbidden, for emancipation outside of his own domains he did no more than give leave to other proprietors to follow his example, to which even the clergy declined to conform. But the words of the king spoken to all France deeply branded the wrong of keeping Frenchmen in bondage to Frenchmen.

In Overyssel, a province of the Netherlands, Baron van der Capellen tot den Pol, the friend of America, sorrowed over the survival of the ancient system of villeinage; and, in spite of the resistance and sworn hatred of almost all the nobles, he, in 1782, brought about its complete abolition.