They were strong, mostly gaunt men in doeskins, perhaps a thousand of them, with knives at their belts and long huntsmen’s rifles across their saddle horns. They rode from beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains–the western edge of civilization in eighteenth-century North America–from the valleys of such fabled rivers as the Watauga, the Holston, and the Nolichucky; from backwater farms and fields unknown to most Americans; from far beyond the authority of King George III, whose subjects they were in name only.

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They valued home, family, and neighbor more than a newborn nation that existed scarcely more in fact than in their hearts. They were ready and some were eager to fight, less for the abstraction of national freedom than for their property and the physical safety of wives and children. Above all, because they had had to learn on a savage frontier to stand up for themselves, they were bound in risk, hardship, and endurance by hatred of a tangible and mounting threat.

By the autumn of 1780, the primary theater of the American Revolutionary War was in the South, colonists and British having fought each other to a standoff in New England and the mid-Atlantic. General George Washington’s Continental Army had regained control of Boston and Philadelphia and remained, ragged and undermanned, in camps scattered around New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Sir Henry Clinton’s Redcoats continued to occupy New York City.

In 1778, recognizing stalemate but calling on British command of the seas, Clinton had dispatched three thousand troops to invade Georgia. The colony was subdued with relative ease, and in 1779 British forces moved into South Carolina. Thus encouraged, and with high hopes for rallying a host of southern colonists to King George (Tory sentiment was stronger in the South than elsewhere) Clinton himself embarked from New York in early 1780, with thirteen thousand additional troops.

His idea was to move north from his Georgia-South Carolina base, subduing the southern colonies one by one. His first target was the major port of Charleston, South Carolina. After a forty-day siege, American General Benjamin Lincoln was forced to surrender the city on May 12, 1780. Still confident of a general Tory uprising, Clinton dispersed his forces throughout upcountry South Carolina, then a roadless wilderness. The British occupied numerous strong points but unwisely engaged in plunder and terror, thus damping whatever Tory ardor there might have been.

Clinton re-embarked for New York and the pleasures of an American city sophisticated for that era, leaving General Lord Charles Cornwallis, an able and experienced veteran of European wars, in command in the South. In response, following the fall of Charleston, the Continental Congress scraped together a makeshift army of untrained volunteers and militiamen from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. This force went south under the command of General Horatio Gates, whose New England army at Saratoga had thwarted General John Burgoyne’s British invasion from Canada.

However, General Gates, the ‘Hero of Saratoga,’ proved in the South to be greatly overrated. His crude army of three thousand men was routed by Cornwallis near Camden, South Carolina on August 16, 1780. Gates himself was prominent among the panicked Patriots who fled the battlefield–many not stopping until they reached North Carolina.

With the crushing defeat of the last sizable American force in the South, Cornwallis apparently had an open path for the invasion of North Carolina, Virginia, and the colonies beyond. In September 1780, he moved north in three formidable columns: himself commanding the main force in the center, Colonel Banastre Tarleton leading the British Legion cavalry and light infantry on the right (eastern) flank, and Major Patrick Ferguson, an energetic but vain Scotsman, at the head of a Tory force on the left (western) flank.

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