ill and caution of an
experienced scout, he succeeded in his object. The guns once in his
possession, he aroused the Tories by commanding their surrender. They
were seven in number, unarmed, and knew nothing of the force of the
assailant. His own more timid followers drew near in sufficient time
to assist in securing the prisoners. There was another Witherspoon with
Marion, John, a brother of Gavin, and like him distinguished for great
coolness, strength, and courage. Both of the brothers delighted in such
adventures, and were always ready to engage in them,--the rashness
of the attempt giving a sort of relish to the danger, which always
sweetened it to the taste of our partisans.

The return of the various scouting parties which Marion sent out, soon
set his little brigade in motion. The intelligence which they brought
was well calculated to sting his soldiers, as well as himself, into
immediate activity. The medicine which the British had administered to
the country they abandoned, had not been suffered to lose any of its
bitterness. As had been feared, the Tories had laid waste the farms
and plantations. The region through which Major Wemyss had passed, for
seventy miles in length and fifteen in breadth, displayed one broad face
of desolation. It had been swept by sword and fire. Havoc had exercised
its most ingenious powers of destruction. On most of the plantations the
houses were given to the flames, the inhabitants plundered of all their
possessions, and the stock, especially the sheep, wantonly shot or
bayoneted. Wemyss seems to have been particularly hostile to looms and
sheep, simply because they supplied the inhabitants with clothing. He
seldom suffered the furniture to be withdrawn from a dwelling which he
had doomed to be destroyed: Presbyterian churches he burnt religiously,
as so many "sedition-shops". It was fortunate for the wretched country,
thus ravaged, that the corn was not generally housed; it was only in
part destroyed. Had the Tories played the same game in the cornfields
of the patriots, that Grant's men had done in those of the Cherokees,
as recorded in an early page of this volume,* the devastation would have
been complete. They had not limited their proceedings to these minor
crimes. They had added human butchery and hanging to those other
offences for which vengeance was in store. The wife and children of one
Adam Cusack, threw themselves across the path of Wemyss to obtain the
pardon of the