tyrant Tryon's tax-gatherers
and law-court robbers be no more than half truth, there was need for any
honest gentleman to oppose them.

What that opposition came to in '71 is now a tale twice told. Taken in
arms against the governor's authority, and with an estate well worth
receiving, my father had little justice and less mercy accorded him.
With many others he was outlawed; his estates were declared forfeit; and
a few days later he, with Benjamin Merrill and four more captivated at
the Alamance, was given some farce of a trial and hanged.

When the news of this came to me you may well suppose that I had no
heart to continue in the service of the king who could sanction and
reward such villainies as these of the butcher William Tryon. So I threw
up my lieutenant's commission in the Blues, took ship for the Continent,
and, after wearing some half-dozen different uniforms in Germany, was
lucky enough to come at length to serviceable blows under my old
field-marshal on the Turkish frontier.

To you of a younger generation, born in the day of swift mail-coaches
and well-kept post-roads, the slowness with which our laggard news
traveled in that elder time must needs seem past belief. It was early in
the year '79 before I began to hear more than vague camp-fire tales of
the struggle going on between the colonies and the mother country; and
from that to setting foot once more upon the soil of my native Carolina
was still another year.

What I found upon landing at New Berne and saw while riding a jog-trot
thence to the Catawba was a province rent and torn by partizan warfare.
Though I came not once upon the partizans themselves in all that long
faring, there were trampled fields and pillaged houses enough to serve
as mile-stones; and in my native Mecklenburg a mine full charged, with
slow-match well alight for its firing.

Charleston had fallen, and Colonel Tarleton's outposts were already
widespread on the upper waters of the Broad and the Catawba. Thus it was
that the first sight which greeted my eyes when I rode into
Queensborough was the familiar trappings of my old service, and I was
made to know that in spite of Mr. Jefferson's boldly written Declaration
of Independence, and that earlier casting of the king's yoke by the
patriotic Mecklenburgers themselves, my boyhood home was for the moment
by sword-right a part of his Majesty's province of North Carolina.

You are not to suppose that these things moved me greatl