British and tories. I regret to say that Bancroft is among
the offenders. Hildreth is an honorable exception. Most of the British
historians of the same events are even more rancorous and less
trustworthy than the American writers; and while fully admitting the
many indefensible outrages committed by the whigs, a long-continued and
impartial examination of accessible records has given me the belief that
in the districts where the civil war was most ferocious, much the
largest number of the criminal class joined the tories, and the misdeeds
of the latter were more numerous than those of the whigs. But the
frequency with which both whigs and tories hung men for changing sides,
shows that quite a number of the people shifted from one party to the
other; and so there must have been many men of exactly the same stamp in
both armies. Much of the nominal changing of sides, however, was due to
the needless and excessive severity of Cornwallis and his lieutenants.]

The Americans were discovered by their foes when only a quarter of a
mile away. They had formed their forces as they marched. The right
centre was composed of Campbell's troops; the left centre of Shelby's.
These two bodies separated slightly so as to come up opposite sides of
the narrow southwestern spur of the mountain. The right wing was led by
Sevier, with his own and McDowell's troops. On the extreme right Major
Winston, splitting off from the main body a few minutes before, had led
a portion of Cleavland's men by a roundabout route to take the mountain
in the rear, and cut off all retreat. He and his followers "rode like
fox-hunters," as was afterwards reported by one of their number who was
accustomed to following the buck and the gray fox with horn and hound.
They did not dismount until they reached the foot of the mountain,
galloping at full speed through the rock-strewn woods; and they struck
exactly the right place, closing up the only gap by which the enemy
could have retreated. The left wing was led by Cleavland. It contained
not only the bulk of his own Wilkes and Surrey men, but also the North
and South Carolinians who had joined the army at the Cowpens under the
command of Williams, Lacey, Hambright, Chronicle, and others.
[Footnote: Draper gives a good plan of the battle. He also gives some
pictures of the fighting, in which the backwoodsmen are depicted in full
Continental uniform, which probably not a man--certainly very few of
them--wore.] The dif