For months after Brandywine, Ferguson managed to fend off surgeons who wanted to amputate his shattered right arm. But the arm was useless thereafter, so he laboriously taught himself to wield sword, pistol and pen with his left hand. While he was out of action, his sharpshooters scattered into other units, but rejoined him after he recovered. Early in October 1778, General Henry Clinton, who had replaced General Howe, dispatched the Scottish captain on a commando raid against one of the hideouts from which American privateers were harassing and capturing British ships.

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With 400 men aboard eight or 10 vessels, Ferguson sailed from New York to strike at Little Egg Harbor, on the New Jersey coast just above modern Atlantic City. They destroyed 10 vessels, wrecked warehouses and shipyards, and burned the homes of known patriots. Days later, Ferguson heard from deserters that Pulaski’s Legion, sent by Washington to catch him, was camped 11 miles away. In the deep of night, he took 250 troops in rowboats to surprise the Americans. They bayoneted and killed 50, capturing only five, before Pulaski arrived with his dragoons and drove the attackers away. The Americans would complain that their men were massacred. “It being a night attack, little quarter could of course be given,” Ferguson reported; only two of his own troops were killed, three wounded and one missing.

The nature of the war was rapidly changing. Chivalry and ferocity were in serious contention on both sides, and within Patrick Ferguson.

After a series of successful missions along the coast and up the Hudson Valley, in late 1779 Ferguson was at last promoted to major, in the 71st Highlanders. Then, when General Clinton mounted an all-out offensive to crush resistance in the rebellious South, he temporarily boosted Ferguson to lieutenant colonel, leading an independent force of 500 rangers. Skirmishing ahead of the army between Savannah and Charleston, he accidentally collided with a friendly force and in the darkness, a British bayonet sliced through his good left arm. Undaunted, for three weeks he rode with his reins in his teeth.

Charleston fell to the British in May 1780 after three months of siege operations, during which Ferguson’s Rangers struck inland to cut off American lines of supply. From Charleston, General Charles Cornwallis intended to subdue the backcountry and then sweep north through the Carolinas and Virginia. The British strategists believed that the backcountry was full of loyalists, and Cornwallis sent Ferguson and the arrogant, merciless cavalryman Banastre Tarleton into the hills to recruit them. This brought on a series of bloody clashes, American Tories vs. American patriots, often family against family. “It was a civil war,” wrote the historian Christopher Ward, “and it was marked by bitterness, violence, and malevolence such as only civil wars can engender.”

Ferguson tried first to make friends, to convince these rustics that he came “not to make war on women and children, but to relieve their distresses.” That summer, he succeeded in collecting and drilling several thousand loyalists. But when soft words did not work, he resorted to the sword, even the hangman’s noose. As word of his men’s plundering spread, local and state militia leaders raised regiments of vengeful partisans, including “over-mountain men” from beyond the Blue Ridge, skilled at shooting squirrels and fighting Indians.

Ferguson was operating out of touch, beyond Cornwallis’ western flank, while the main British army marched north. His reputation spread among the backwoodsmen as they gathered in the mountains. Though slim and scholarly in appearance, in combat he was inspirational. He wore over his uniform a bold black-and-white plaid duster to be seen by his troops, and signaled them with a silver whistle to be heard in the chaos of battle.

But Ferguson’s zealotry carried him into a mistake that made sure there would be no mercy if he ever fell into patriot hands. As the backwoodsmen gathered in the hills, he sent a prisoner with a message to their commander. He told them to “desist from their opposition to the British arms,” or else “he would march his army over the mountains, hang their leaders, and lay their country waste with fire and sword.” This arrogance further infuriated the patriots, who vowed to hunt him down.

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