Ferguson at age thirty-six was a remarkable soldier who had been in the king’s service since he was fifteen years old and had considerable combat experience in Europe, the West Indies, and with Clinton in America. Ferguson’s military style had won him the nickname ‘Bull Dog.’ Whether as an idiosyncrasy or an affectation, Ferguson customarily directed his forces in battle with shrill blasts on a silver whistle.

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Reputed to be the best marksman in the British Army, he once had had the Continental Army commander General George Washington himself in his sights. Wearing a ‘remarkably large cocked hat,’ Washington had been on a personal reconnaissance of the British position at Brandywine Creek when he was spotted by Ferguson. The Scotsman tried to capture rather than shoot his quarry, and the American commander took flight and escaped.

‘I could have lodged half a dozen balls in or about him before he was out of my reach,’ Ferguson later remarked, after learning the identity of the tall officer who had eluded him. ‘But it was not pleasant to fire at the back of an unoffending individual who was acquitting himself coolly of his duty, so I left him alone.’

Even in the era of muzzle-loading muskets, Ferguson actually might have ‘lodged half a dozen balls’ in Washington’s body: He was not only a crack shot, but had invented and was using a highly accurate breech-loading rifle which could get off many more shots per minute than the standard-issue British ‘Brown Bess’ smoothbore musket. Unfortunately for the British, Ferguson’s rifle was never manufactured in great numbers.

The British victory at Charleston had emboldened many southern Loyalists to take up arms. Backwoods Patriots were aroused to fury by the British invaders and by the activities of their Tory allies. In defense of their homes, fields, and sometimes even in the cause of independence, small bands of them–under the skilled leadership of men like Lt. Col. Francis Marion, the ‘Swamp Fox,’ and Brig. Gen. Thomas Sumter, the ‘Carolina Gamecock’–waged an effective guerrilla war.

Vicious guerrilla tactics and savagery on both sides made what was essentially a civil war particularly hate-filled and ferocious. Hessian soldiers on the British side further inflamed Patriot anger with flagrant plunder and theft, as they sought to enrich themselves from a foreign war in which they had little other interest, save staying alive.

Tarleton and Ferguson were special objects of patriotic hatred. Near Waxhaw, South Carolina, Tarleton’s cavalry had overtaken about four hundred retreating Virginia militiamen who had come to South Carolina too late to assist Benjamin Lincoln in defending Charleston. The Virginians’ commander, Colonel Abraham Buford, had sought to surrender, but Tarleton’s troopers refused and killed more than a hundred of them outright, maimed and wounded many more, and took only fifty-three prisoners. Less than two hundred of the militiamen escaped. Those who escaped were more than enough to spread far and wide the story of Tarleton’s massacre.

Ferguson was sent by the commanding general to the frontier outpost of Ninety-Six, so named because it was ninety-six miles from an important Indian town on the Keowee River, to rally local Tories to the cause. Ferguson was very successful at raising Tory volunteers because he was an effective leader with the knack of winning the affections of his forces. He soon had his new troops organized into thoroughly drilled and disciplined military units, especially effective with the bayonet. To his original force of about one hundred men–all Tories drawn from the King’s American Rangers, the New Jersey Volunteers, and the Loyal American Regiment–Ferguson was able to add a thousand Loyalist backwoodsmen. He was the only British regular in his entire force of about eleven hundred.

With this newly organized army, Ferguson terrorized large areas of South Carolina and north Georgia. Eventually, Ferguson penetrated as far north as Gilbert Town (now Rutherfordton) in North Carolina, a hamlet known as a gathering place for Patriots. There he learned from spies that what they wildly exaggerated as three thousand backwoodsmen were gathering to march against him from ‘over the mountain’–in what is now Tennessee.

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