The victory was won. In the last assault, Campbell had reached the crest
of the mountain, and the loyalists had given ground with decisive
indications of defeat. Ferguson, in the hopeless effort to rally his
soldiers, had flung himself into their van, but a bullet at this instant
reached his heart; he fell from his seat, and his white horse, which had
been conspicuous in the crowd of battle, bounded wildly through the
ranks of the Whigs, and made his way down the mountain side.

Campbell passed onward, driving the royalists before him. For a moment
the discomfited bands hoped to join their comrades in the rear, and, by
a united effort, to effect a retreat: but the parties led by Sevier and
Cleveland, cheered by the shouts of their victorious companions, urged
their attacks with new vigor, and won the hill in time to intercept the
fugitives. All hopes of escape being thus at an end, a white flag was
displayed in token of submission; and the remnant of Ferguson's late
proud and boastful army, now amounting to between eight and nine hundred
men, surrendered to the assailants.

It has scarcely ever happened that a battle has been fought, in which
the combatants met with keener individual exasperation than in this. The
mortal hatred which embittered the feelings of Whig and Tory along this
border, here vented itself in the eagerness of conflict, and gave the
impulse to every blow that was struck--rendering the fight, from
beginning to end, relentless, vindictive, and bloody. The remembrance of
the thousand cruelties practised by the royalists during the brief Tory
dominion to which my narrative has been confined, was fresh in the minds
of the stern and hardy men of the mountains, who had pursued their foe
with such fierce animosity to this his last stage. Every one had some
wrong to tell, and burned with an unquenchable rage of revenge. It was,
therefore, with a yell of triumph that they saw the symbol of submission
raised aloft by the enemy; and for a space, the forest rang with their
loud and reiterated huzzas.

Many brave men fell on either side. Upon the slopes of the mountain and
on its summit, the bodies of the dead and dying lay scattered amongst
the rocks, and the feeble groans of the wounded mingled with the fierce
tones of exultation from the living. The Whigs sustained a grievous loss
in Colonel Williams, who had been struck down in the moment of victory.
He was young, ardent, and brave; and his many soldier-