Disturbing History - The Tory War

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

In June of 1780, on a hill outside what's now Lincolnton, North Carolina, more than a thousand men killed each other in fog so thick you couldn't see fifty feet. There was no British army there. There was no Continental army there.Every man on that field was an American, and the only thing separating one side from the other was a scrap of white paper pinned to a hat or a green twig stuck in a hatband. When it was over, nobody could tell the dead apart, so they stopped trying and put them in a hole together.That mass grave is still up there, next to an elementary school, and nobody knows the names. This episode is about the half of the American Revolution we left off the monuments. In the Carolina backcountry between 1780 and 1782, the war wasn't a fight against a foreign occupier. It was neighbors hunting neighbors through their own counties, and the National Park Service, NCpedia, and the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources all use the same word for it without flinching. Civil war. Brian traces it back to where it actually starts, which isn't 1775 at all. It's 1771, when royal governor William Tryon crushed a farmers' revolt at Alamance and then hanged six men outside Hillsborough and made the townspeople stand there and watch.Four years later, the same eastern gentry who had ridden with Tryon came to the backcountry asking those farmers to take up arms for liberty. A lot of them declined, and some of them did considerably more than decline.From there the episode moves through the greased bridge at Moore's Creek, where Highland Scots who had already lost one war against King George's family charged across two soap-slicked logs into cannon fire, and eight hundred and fifty of them went into captivity. Through Ramsour's Mill, and the two-hundred-year-old story that Thomas Costner killed his own brother Peter on that hill and buried him under a pile of stones rather than let him go into the mass grave.Brian digs into a piece of research published this past March by a Costner descendant that takes the story apart, finds Thomas's own 1832 pension statement doesn't put him at the battle at all, and can't quite close the case either way. What survives the scrutiny is stranger than the legend: not whether it happened, but that for two centuries nobody who heard it ever said it couldn't have.Then Kings Mountain, the largest all-American fight of the entire war, where exactly one man on the field held a British commission, and where the shooting continued into groups of men who had already surrendered.The drumhead court held in a field a week later at the Biggerstaff plantation, where North Carolina magistrates convicted three dozen of their neighbors under North Carolina law and hanged nine of them from an oak tree, three at a time. Pyle's Hacking Match, where Henry Lee's green-coated Legion was mistaken for Tarleton's dragoons and let the mistake stand, and several hundred Loyalists were cut down at arm's length while shouting that they were the king's men — ninety-three dead against one American wounded and one horse killed.The House in the Horseshoe, where Temperance Alston walked out the front door carrying a white cloth in front of eighty armed men to keep them from killing her husband, and where you can still put your hand in the bullet holes today. David Fanning riding into the state capital under fog and kidnapping the governor and most of the General Assembly. And the Quakers of Cane Creek walking out onto the field at Lindley's Mill in the dark to collect the men who were still breathing, joined by Dr. John Pyle himself, seven months after his own command was slaughtered, treating the wounded on both sides.Yorktown didn't end it.In Randolph County, on a Sunday morning in March of 1782, five months after Cornwallis surrendered, Fanning and twenty-five men dragged a colonel's sister and young daughter off him and shot him in the head on the floor of his own house. The peace treaty was still a year away.Brian brings sixteen years of law enforcement experience to the sourcing here, and it shows in how carefully the episode separates what's documented from what's tradition, where the numbers genuinely disagree, and where the record simply runs out.This is the Revolution as the people who lived through it in Lincoln, Orange, Randolph, and Chatham counties actually experienced it — not a war against somebody else, but a war against each other, with no neutral ground left to stand on.Disturbing History is written, produced, and narrated by Brian King-Sharp for Paranormal World Productions. If the show means something to you, the best thing you can do is tell one person about it. Contact and full show archive at paranormalworldproductions.com.Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact. This is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner.

of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth.

If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed. There's a hill in Lincolnton, North Carolina, about 45 minutes from where I sit in my studio right now. And on top of that hill, there's a mass grave, and next to the mass grave, there's an elementary school. The men buried up there died on the

morning of June 20th, 1780. Nobody knows exactly how many of them are down in that ground, and nobody knows their names, because when the fighting stopped, there was no way to tell one side from the other. They weren't wearing uniforms. There were no uniforms to wear. The only thing separating a patriot from a loyalist that morning was a scrap of white paper pinned to a hat, or a green twig stuck in a hat band. And by the time the shooting was over, the hats had come off, and the paper had blown away, and the twigs had been trampled into the mud along with everything else. So they dug a hole and they put the bodies in it together. Rebels and Tories, men who had spent the previous hour trying to beat each other to death with the wrong end of a musket, because most of

them had run out of powder and about a quarter of them never had a working gun in the first place. That's the part I keep coming back to. Not the killing. The burial. Somebody had to decide what to do with all those bodies, and the decision they arrived at was to stop trying to sort them. Here's worse. There was no British army at Ramsores Mill. There was no continental army. Lord Cornwallis was 300 miles away in Charleston, resting his troops. George Washington was somewhere north of the Potomac. Not one professional soldier from either government was on that hill. Every man who died there was an American, killed by another American, in a fight over which America they were going to live in. And most of them lived within a day's ride of each other. We don't call that a revolution.

We have another word for that. I want to lay out the argument up front because it isn't mine and it isn't fringe, and it isn't some revisionist takes somebody cooked up last year to sell books. The National Park Service, which is about as institutional as American history gets, describes the Southern Campaign of the American Revolution as a bloody civil war in which neighbor fought neighbor. NCPedia, which is the reference project run out of the State Library of North Carolina, uses the phrase civil war flatly without hedging when describing Ramsores Mill. The North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources

refers to what happened in the Piedmont after 1781 as the Tory War and calls it a prolonged civil conflict in which Whig and Loyalist militias openly attacked each other and also attacked people who were trying to stay out of it entirely. Those aren't dramatic flourishes. That's the official state and federal language.

And once you accept that framing, a whole lot of things about the revolution that never quite made sense, start making sense. Because the version most of us got in school is a war between two countries. Red coats on one side, ragged farmers on the other, a foreign occupier, and a native population that rose up against it. That story is not false. It's just radically incomplete. And the part it leaves out is the part where Americans spent seven years hunting each other through their own counties. Historians have kicked around estimates for decades about how the colonial population split.

The rough consensus is that somewhere around a fifth of white colonists remained actively loyal to the crown. Another substantial share were committed rebels, and a very large middle group tried to stay out of it and got dragged in anyway. Those proportions varied wildly by region. In the North Carolina backcountry, in certain counties, at certain moments, the loyalists weren't a minority at all. At Ramsor's Mill, they outnumbered the men who attacked them by better than two to one. So when I say civil war, I don't mean it as a rhetorical device. I mean that in Lincoln County and Orange County and Randolph County and Chatham County, for a period of roughly two years, the government could not protect anybody.

Both sides had armed men in the field, and the primary determinant of whether you lived or died was which of your neighbors got to your farm first. The story doesn't start in 1775. It starts four years earlier, and it starts with the colonial government hanging six, men outside Hillsborough. In the 1760s, the North Carolina backcountry had a problem that had nothing at all to do with tea or stamps or parliament. The problem was local. County officials, sheriffs, court clerks, registers of deeds were extracting fees that farmers considered outright theft. Taxes were collected in cash by men who had every

incentive to overcharge, in a region where cash was scarce and land was everything. And if you You couldn't pay. The sheriff took the land. The courts that were supposed to hear your complaint were staffed by the same men you were complaining about. The farmers who organized against this called themselves regulators because they intended to regulate their own local government since nobody else was going to. They petitioned.

They were ignored. They stopped paying. In 1770 they rioted at Hillsborough, wrecked the courthouse, beat officials in the street, and ran a judge out of town. The royal governor was William Tryan, and Tryan's response was the Johnston Riot Act, which gave him legal authority to call out the militia and put the thing down by force. On May 16th, 1771, roughly 2,000 regulators faced about 1,000 militia at Great Alamance Creek. The regulators had numbers.

They didn't have leadership, training, organization, or much ammunition. What they had was the belief that Tryan wouldn't dare fire on his own colonists. He dared. The fight lasted around two hours. The regulators broke and ran. The next day, a man named James Few was hanged without any conviction from any court. Then Tryan marched his army through regulator country, burned out the property of the leaders, and required the population to sign oaths of allegiance to the crown.

Within about six weeks, six thousand four hundred and nine men had signed. Then came the trials at Hillsborough. 12 men were convicted of treason. Try and pardoned six of them and hanged the other six in public on June 19th, 1771, and he made the townspeople stand there and watch it, with soldiers around the gallows and horsemen keeping the crowd back. Now hold that in your mind for four years, and then ask yourself a question that I think is the single most useful question

in this entire episode. When the revolution arrived in North Carolina and the Eastern gentry who had ridden with Tryon at Alis, Alamance started calling themselves patriots and asking the back country to join them in a war for liberty. What exactly do you think the back country said? Some of the men who had marched with Tryon against the regulators went on to become continental officers. Tryon's artillery at Alamance was commanded by Robert Howe, who later became a major general in the Continental Army.

So the men who had put down a farmer's revolt over corrupt local government now wanted those same farmers to take up arms in the name of resisting corrupt government. A lot of former regulators looked at that offer and declined. Some of them did more than decline. Historic sites in North Carolina note plainly that during the revolution, many regulators, including their leader James Hunter, stayed loyal to the king and fought as loyalists. Not every regulator became a Tory. Plenty of them became rebels. The historian's honest position is that the regulation fractured the backcountry along lines that that had nothing to do with London,

and that when the revolution came, those old fractures were still there, still raw, and they determined a great deal about who ended up shooting at whom, one detail that isn't ambiguous at all. Dr. John Pyle, who's going to become extremely important to this story, had fought against the colonial government during the war of the regulation. Ten years later, he raised several hundred men for the king. Think about what that means about his politics. He wasn't a monarchist.

He was a man who had already fought his own provincial government once, decided the new one was worse, and picked the side that would let him fight it again. The first real battle of the revolution in North Carolina happened on February 27, 1776, and it was Americans against Americans from the opening shot. The exiled royal governor, Josiah Martin, had been driven off the mainland

and was living on a British warship in the Cape Fear River, And from there he wrote to London, promising that if the king sent an army, thousands of loyal North Carolinians would rise to join it. In January, he issued a call to arms. The men who answered were mostly Highland Scots. There's a bitter irony sitting inside that. A great many of these Highlanders had come to North Carolina after Colloden, after the Jacobite rising against the Hanoverian crown was crushed,

and the Highlands were systematically dismantled. They had already lost one war against King George's family. Many had taken oaths of allegiance as a condition of being allowed to keep breathing. Now, a generation later, in a river valley 5,000 miles from home, they were marching under the royal standard against their neighbors, carrying broadswords. By mid-February, roughly 1,600 Highlanders and other loyalists had gathered at Cross Creek, which is Fayetteville today. Their commander was Brigadier General Donald MacDonald, who was elder.

and sick. They set out for the coast to link up with the British fleet that Martin had promised. The rebel militia got there first. Colonel Richard Caswell and Colonel Alexander Lillington positioned about a thousand men at a crossing over Widow Moors Creek. They dug earthworks on the far bank. They pulled up half the planking on the bridge. Then they took the two remaining stringers, the log beams that carried the deck, and they greased them with soap and bare fat. They dragged up two small cannon and sided them on the far end of the bridge. Then they put out their campfires on the near side, withdrew across the creek in the dark, and left the fires burning.

The Loyalist broke camp at one in the morning. MacDonald was too ill to lead, so command went to Lieutenant Colonel Donald McLeod. They marched several miles through swamp in the dark and reached the abandoned rebel camp before dawn, and found the fires still going and nobody there. Then they found the bridge. Accounts differ on exactly how many men made the charge, but the number usually given is somewhere between 50 and 80 picked men, going first with the main body behind them.

They had drums, they had pipes. They came on shouting for King George and Broadsords, and they tried to cross a bridge with no deck by straddling two greased logs over water that was reportedly around six feet deep. Men fell off, some of them drowned, weighed down by whatever they were carrying. The ones who made it across

got to within about 30 paces of the earthworks before the rebels fired. McLeod went down with what one account puts at 20 musket balls in him. Captain John Campbell went down beside him. The whole thing was over in a matter of minutes. The casualty figures vary by source. Contemporary newspaper accounts and later state summaries

put loyalists dead at around 30 on the spot, with perhaps 50 to 70 killed and wounded overall. and some drowned. NCpedia says about 70 Highlanders were killed or wounded. On the rebel side, exactly one man died, John Grady, four days after the battle, and then roughly 850 loyalists were taken prisoner, including General McDonald,

who was captured in his own tent. The rebels collected around 1,500 stand-of-arms, 150 swords, and 15,000-pound sterling, which was an enormous sum of coin to find in a backcountry. colony. Moores Creek Bridge gets called the Lexington and Concord of the South, and militarily, that's fair enough. It ended royal authority in North Carolina. It pushed the provincial Congress at Halifax toward independence months before Philadelphia got there. But look at what actually happened. A colonial governor asked one group of North Carolinians to fight another group of

North Carolinians, and they did it, and in the aftermath, 850 of the losers were rounded up, disarmed and in many cases had their property seized and their families left to figure it out. Those families didn't move away. They stayed. They lived in the same counties as the men who had done it to them. And think about the position that put them in. The officers were shipped north as prisoners of some consequence. Most of the rank and file were eventually released on conditions. The conditions were the point. Give up your weapons. Swear an oath to the new state. Go home. and remain there. So you have Highland Farming families along the Cape Fear

whose men have been disarmed and sworn twice now, once by King George's government after Kalloden, once by the new North Carolina government after Moores Creek. In both cases, by the people who had just beaten them. In both cases, the oath was a condition of being allowed to keep the farm. I'd suggest that a man in that position develops a particular relationship with the concept of a loyalty oath. Four years later, when a British army finally did arrive in the South, those families were still there, and they still remembered, and the men who came recruiting for the King in 1780 and 1781 knew exactly which doors to knock on.

Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Between 1776 and 1780, the war largely left North Carolina alone. What didn't leave was the machinery the new state government built to deal with people who weren't in the United States. enthusiastic about the new state government. There were test oaths. If you wouldn't swear allegiance to the state, you lost the ability to sue in court, to buy or sell land, to hold office, in some cases to leave your own county. There were confiscation acts passed and expanded repeatedly from 1776 through 1782 that allowed the property of loyalists to be seized and sold. I want to sit with the confiscation piece for a second because it's the quiet engine of

underneath everything else that follows. If your neighbor's farm can be legally taken and sold because of his politics, then his politics are now worth money to you. If a man dies fighting for the king, his estate can be confiscated. We actually know that happened to at least one man in this story, because researchers have found the archival record

of the confiscation and sale of Peter Costner's estate after he was killed at Ramsor's Mill. That's the incentive structure this war ran on in the back country. Ideology got you into it. Land and grudges kept you in it, and it ran in both directions, which is the part people usually skip. Loyalist raiders burned Whig farms and took Whig cattle and horses. Whig committees seized Tory land through the courts. One side had the law and one side didn't. But the effect on the ground was similar enough that by 1781 there were entire counties where the distinction between a militia company and an armed gang settling scores had

become extremely hard to locate. On May 12th, 1780, Charleston fell. Lincoln surrendered the largest American army lost in the entire war. British control of Georgia and South Carolina was essentially complete, and Cornwallis had better than 8,000 men and a clear road north. Cornwallis was content to spend the summer resting and resupplying in Charleston. Two of his American officers were not content to wait. Lieutenant Colonel John Moore and Major Nicholas Welch were North Carolinians, and they went home ahead of the Army to raise the countryside. Around June 13th, they started gathering men at Jacob Ramsores Farm and Mill near Clark's Creek in Lincoln County.

Word went out to everybody who had stayed loyal, and everybody who had lost something in 1776, and everybody who had signed an oath they resented, and by June 20th, there were somewhere around 1,300 men camped on that hill. A lot of them were German. The Piedmont had a large population of settlers from the Rhineland-Palatinate, families who had come through Pennsylvania a generation earlier looking for farmland. Some of them held conservative sympathies and real ties to the crown,

and it did not escape their notice that the king they were being asked to overthrow was the grandson of a German prince. Others had married into English and Scots-Irish families, and gone the other way entirely. The Costner's were one of those families. Hans Adam and Anna Maria Kastner had come from Germany to Pennsylvania in the 1740s, and then south into the Carolina Piedmont. All three of their sons joined militia during the Revolution.

Two of them went with the rebels. One of them, Peter, went with the king. Roughly a quarter of the men on that hill had no firearm at all. 16 miles northeast at Mountain Creek, Colonel Francis Locke and Major Robert Wilson had gathered about 400 militia from Roe Mecklenburg, Iredel, Burke, and several other counties. They'd been sent by General Griffith Rutherford, who was camp near Charlotte and was still miles away with the main body. Locke marched before dawn on the 20th.

He met a local patriot named Adam Reep, who knew the ground and knew exactly where the loyalist camp was and how it was laid out, because he lived there. That's the whole war in one sentence, really. The intelligence was just a neighbor telling you where the other neighbors were sleeping. There was heavy fog that morning. Visibility was reduced to something on the order of 50 feet. The Patriot horsemen came up the east side of the hill first and hit the camp before it was properly awake. The loyalists were confused for a few minutes, and then Moore and Welch got them organized, and they pushed the attack back. And after that, it stopped being a battle in any organized sense and became something else.

Neither side had uniforms. Both sides spoke the same English or the same German. The identification system was a piece of white paper in the Patriot hats and a green pine twig in the loyalist hats and in fog at close range in gunsmoke. That system failed almost immediately. Men ran out of ammunition and kept fighting with the weapons in their hands, which meant swinging muskets like clubs. Men who never had a musket fought with their fists. One affidavit in the Pension Files records Captain John Dickie, shouting at his company to shoot straight and keep fighting, that he could see some of them beginning to tumble.

Dickie is the man who refused Locke's order to fall back and reform, cursed his colonel out loud, despite being a Presbyterian elder, and led his company to higher ground instead, where the marksmanship of Captain John Hardin's rifleman finally broke the loyalist position. The Patriots made a song about him afterward. Averse of it survives, and it isn't kind to Colonel Locke. The fighting lasted somewhere between war, and two hours. Then the Loyalist line came apart, and the survivors went down the west side of the

hill toward the mill and kept going. When the fog and the smoke lifted, the field held more than 70 dead and around 200 wounded, split about evenly between the two sides. Other reconstructions put total killed between 50 and 70 with about 100 wounded per side. The honest answer is that nobody counted properly, and the reason nobody counted properly is the same reason the grave exists. There's a detail in the aftermath that has been repeated for 200 years, and I can't verify it to my satisfaction, but I'll give it to you with that caveat attached, because it tells you something about how people understood the day, even if it isn't literally true. Several accounts note that a number of the Patriot dead were found with head wounds,

and the inference drawn was that loyalist riflemen had used the white paper in their hats as an aiming point. Moore got away with what was left. He reached Camden with about 30 men, and then the families came. The best contemporary account we have of that comes from Joseph Graham, who arrived shortly after the fighting ended and later wrote it up. Graham recorded that in this battle neighbors, near relations and personal friends fought each other, and that as the smoke blew off from time to time, they could recognize one another. He wrote that in the evening and on the next day, the relations and friends of the dead and wounded came in. And what happened then was a scene truly afflicting to the feelings of humanity.

That's a man from 1780 choosing his words carefully. I don't think I can improve on it, so I won't try. Now I want to tell you about the story everybody tells about Ramsor's Mill, and then I want to tell you why I think the story is more interesting once you stop being sure it's true. The story is that two brothers, Thomas and Peter Costner, met on that field on opposite sides. Peter was the loyalist.

Thomas was the patriot, and Thomas killed him. And then afterward, rather than let his brother go into the mass grave with the unidentified dead, Thomas found the body, carried it to the edge of the field, and buried it himself under a pile of stones.

You'll find that in popular histories. You'll find it in local newspaper coverage. It's in the Wikipedia entry for the battle, stated as fact. It gets cited, constantly as the perfect illustration of what the revolution was in the Carolina Piedmont. In March of this year, the Journal of the American Revolution published a piece by Justin Stacey, who is a descendant of that family, going after the story with the tools you'd actually want

somebody to use. Here's what he found. Peter Costner really existed. He really was a loyalist. His older brother Jacob had signed the Tryon Resolves, which was the local association formed to oppose the British after Lexington and Concord, and Peter had stood as bondsman for Jacob when Jacob became sheriff of Trian County, so we know these were men with real civic standing, who then went opposite directions. Multiple early sources give Peter's date of death as June 20th, 1780, which is the day of the battle. Archival records show the confiscation and sale of his estate afterward, which was standard punitive treatment for a Tory who died as an enemy combatant.

So Peter almost certainly did die at Ramsor's Mill. Then there's Thomas. On November 2nd, 1832, Thomas Costner appeared at the Lincoln County Courthouse in Lincoln, an old man who wasn't entirely sure whether he was 85 or 86, and gave a sworn statement in support of his Revolutionary War pension application. That statement is the only verifiable first-person account of his service that exists. In it, he describes being drafted in 1776, for the Cherokee expedition under Captain Hardin, three months of service.

Then he describes being drafted again in a year he can't recall, placed under Captain William Moore, March to Wilmington, involved in a little skirmish he can't place, three and a half months of service. That's it. That's the whole military record he claimed under oath. He doesn't mention Ramsor's Mill. He doesn't mention King's Mountain, which some secondary sources also put him at. He doesn't account for his whereabouts on June 20th, 1780 at all.

His witnesses didn't put him at either battle either. A man applying for a pension has every financial incentive to list every day of service he can substantiate. Thomas Costner listed six and a half months across a war that lasted eight years, with a five-year gap in the middle covering exactly the period when the fiercest fighting in his own county took place. So there are two readings available. The first reading is that the whole thing is that the whole thing, folklore. A local story got picked up somewhere around the turn of the 20th century by a well-meaning historian or genealogist, printed alongside verified events, and then everybody copied everybody.

Stacey notes that most of the older secondary accounts of the battle date from about 1900 to 1930, by which point the memory had passed through several generations. If Thomas Costner did kill his brother on that hill, he then had 52 years to think about it before he walked into that courthouse. His brother Peter is the only sibling not buried in the family cemetery, where Thomas himself was laid three years later, alongside his parents and everyone else. If you were the reason your brother wasn't in that churchyard, that's a specific thing to carry. And declining to put it in a sworn public document in front of the county justices is a fairly human choice. The evidence doesn't settle it. Stacey's own conclusion is that it's frustratingly inconclusive, and I think

that's right. Here's what I keep landing on though. For two centuries, people in that part of North Carolina have told a story about one brother killing another at Ramsor's Mill and then burying him with his own hands. Maybe it happened and maybe it didn't. What I can't get past is that nobody who heard it ever said that it couldn't have happened there. They didn't say it because they knew what that battlefield was. Joseph Graham told us what it was from 20 feet away in 1780. Neighbors, near relations and personal friends. The Costner story survived not because it was documented, but because it was believable.

And it was believable because everybody in Lincoln County knew somebody it could have been. There are four burial markers on that battlefield today. The main one is the mass grave at the top of the hill, near what is now in elementary school. Nobody knows where Peter Costner's pile of stones is. 16 weeks later, on October 7th, 1780, Roughly 2,000 men fought for about an hour on a wooded ridge just south of the North Carolina line,

and one of them was British. Major Patrick Ferguson of the 71st Regiment of Foot was the only man on the field who held a commission in the regular British Army. Every other man there, on both sides, was American. The battle has been described as the largest all-American fight of the entire war, and that description holds up. Ferguson had come north in early September to recruit loyalists and screened Cornwallis's flank. He had, by the usual estimate, something like a thousand men under him, and they were North Carolinians and South Carolinians and a contingent of loyalist provincials

from the northern colonies. Across the mountains in what's now Tennessee and southwest Virginia, there was a population of settlers, mostly Scots-Irish, who had been fighting Cherokee on their own frontier for years and had no particular interest in coming down out of the mountains to fight anybody else. Ferguson fixed that. On September 10th, he released a patriot prisoner named Samuel Phillips and sent him over the mountains with a message for Isaac Shelby. The message was that if Shelby and the rest didn't stop opposing British arms

and come in under his protection, Ferguson would march his army over the mountains, hang their leaders, and lay their country waste with fire and sword. I've read a lot of ill-advised communications in my life. That one belongs in a category of its own. The message went around the over-mountain settlements fast, and the men who read it did not require any further political education. Roughly 1800 gathered at the Cowpins in South Carolina on October 6th. About 900 of them, the ones with the best horses rode on ahead through the night.

It rained. The wet leaves muffled the approach, and the first the loyalists on the ridge knew about any of it was rebel gunfire from about half a mile out. Ferguson had chosen the high ground, which sounds correct, but wasn't. The ridge is narrow and wooded and the slopes give cover. The Patriot columns went around both sides and surrounded it and came up through the trees, and the loyalists on top were silhouetted against the sky, and the men shooting at them were riflemen who had spent their adult lives hunting.

Ferguson's men answered with bayonet charges which pushed the attackers downhill repeatedly and never held because as soon as the charge stopped the rifleman came right back up stay tuned for more disturbing history we'll be back after these messages after about an hour

Ferguson tried to break out on horseback and was shot off his horse by multiple marksmen one foot hung in the stirrup and he was dragged he died in the trees Captain Abraham DePyster surrendered a few minutes later. And that's where it turned into something that doesn't fit the story we tell about King's Mountain. The loyalists began throwing down their arms, and the over-mountain men kept shooting into groups of men who had already surrendered, and they did it shouting Tarleton's quarter.

That phrase has a specific origin. Five months earlier at the Waxhaws, Benastra Tarleton's command had cut down Americans under Colonel Abraham Buford after they'd surrendered. Or at least, that's how the story traveled, and it traveled everywhere. The North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources describes what happened at King's Mountain afterward, without softening it. Undisciplined militia emptied their musket barrels into huddled prisoners, and the carnage continued until the officers could restore discipline, and by the time they did, dozens of prisoners had been murdered. DePaster sent out a white flag, and the Patriots kept firing. Several accounts state that the man carrying that flag was shot down, along with a number of the men surrendering

behind him. DePaster sent out a second flag, and that time a handful of officers, Campbell and Sevier among them, ran forward into their own men's line of fire and physically ordered a ceasefire. The officers did restore discipline, but they didn't stop it before it happened, and the pattern set at the wax haws in May had now been answered by the other side in October, and everybody in the Carolinas was going to be doing that arithmetic for the next two years. years. The whole engagement lasted about 65 minutes. The commonly cited numbers put loyalist losses at 290 killed, 163 wounded, and roughly 668 captured. Patriot losses are consistently given as around 28 or 29 killed and roughly 60 wounded. So the total number of Americans killed on that ridge is

somewhere between about 185 and 320. And the range exists because nobody on the winning side had any interest in producing a careful count of dead Tories. And because loyalists dead were buried in shallow graves in a hurry, and loyalist wounded were, by more than one account, simply left on the ground where they fell. Roughly 700 men were taken prisoner. The Patriots buried their dead fast and shallow, because they had almost no digging equipment, and they had almost no digging equipment, and they expected Tarleton to come looking for them. And then they started marching west with the prisoners on foot. Men died on that march from wounds and exhaustion and exposure. Prisoners escaped, and here's the detail from the aftermath that stops me every time I read it. Multiple accounts

note that in some cases the guards let them go, because the guards knew them. Because the man you were marching at gunpoint was a cousin, or a neighbor, or somebody you'd worked alongside before the war. Yesterday you were prepared to kill him for being a Tory. Today you're looking around to see if anybody's watching before you tell him to run. That is not the behavior of soldiers in a war against a foreign power. That's what happens when the war is being fought inside a community that has to keep existing afterward. On Friday, October 13th, 1780, the column stopped at a farm in what's now Rutherford County belonging to Aaron Biggerstaff. Some records spell it Bickerstaff.

Bigger Staff was a loyalist captain who had fought at Ramsar's Mill in June and been mortally wounded at King's Mountain in October. His brother was a patriot who was in British custody at the time. So the family had a man on each side, and the army that had just killed one of them was now camped on the family's land, eating the family's food, because food. On Saturday the 14th, two officers came to Colonel William Campbell and complained that a number of the prisoners weren't soldiers at all, that they were robbers, house burners, parole breakers, and assassins. There was a law for this. North Carolina statute allowed two magistrates to summon a jury, and there were magistrates present in that army,

because these were community leaders as much as they were officers. So they held court, in a field, beside a military camp. On a Saturday, the charges included treason, desertion from patriot militia, and inciting Cherokee attacks. Some of the men who testified against the accused had previously served alongside them and changed sides at some point in the preceding four years. 36 prisoners were convicted, or 32, depending on which account you're reading. All of them were sentenced to death.

They found an oak tree. They hanged them three at a time. Nine men died. Ambrose Mills, Robert Wilson, James Chitwood, Arthur Grimes, Thomas Lafferty, Walter Gilkey, John McFal, John Bibby, and Augustin Hobbs. Then it stopped, and nobody is entirely sure why. One account credits Isaac Shelby with deciding the point had been made. Another credits John Severe with catching up and putting an end to it. Another says it was one of the bigger staff women who came out and pleaded for the rest, and one persistent version says they simply ran out of rope. A very large share of the specifics we have about the

bigger staff hangings, including the quotations, come from Draper's book, published 101 years after the fact, and based heavily on collected oral tradition. Modern accounts trust him, and he was a serious collector, but you should know that the chain is long. What isn't in doubt is that it happened. There's a state marker there. Nine men were hanged from that tree on October 14th, 1780. The next day the army moved on, and by most accounts, the bodies were left hand. hanging. Aaron Biggerstaff's widow and her farm hands cut them down and buried them in the field. These men weren't killed in a fight. They were captured, held for a week, marched 60 miles, tried under North Carolina law by North Carolina magistrates, convicted, sentenced and executed

by other North Carolinians. A functioning legal system was operating in a field outside a farmhouse, and it had decided that a portion of the local population forfeited the right to live. Most of the prisoners who weren't hanged eventually got away anyway. One account says all but 130 of them slipped off through the woods on the march. The clearest evidence that this was a civil war rather than a conventional one comes from the people who refused to pick a side at all. North Carolina had two substantial pacifist populations. The Moravians had settled Wachovia in the Piedmont, at Bethabara and Bethania,

and later Salem, and they kept meticulous written records that still survive. The Quakers were concentrated in the Piedmont as well, around Cain Creek and Snow Camp and New Garden. Neither group would fight. That position had cost them steadily since 1775. They were fined for refusing militia service and taxed at punitive rates and treated as Tories by the Whigs, because refusing to swear an oath to the state was functionally indistinguishable from disloyalty in the eyes of a committee of safety. And they were treated as rebel sympathizers by loyalist. raiders because they were sitting on good farms full of food and horses, and both armies helped themselves. After Benjamin Cleveland and the Wilkes and Surrey militia left Beth Abara on

November 1st, 1780, three weeks after the bigger staff hangings, the Moravian record keeper wrote a line in the community diary noting that the town was more quiet that evening. That single line is the entire entry on the subject. These were men fresh from hanging nine people, quartered in a pacifist settlement and the recorded reaction is one dry sentence about the noise level. That restraint tells me more than any atrocity account could, because it's the sound of people who had learned exactly how much they were allowed to say. The pattern held everywhere. If you tried to stay out of the American Revolution in the North Carolina back country,

after 1780, you didn't get to stay out of it. You got visited by both sides, repeatedly, and each visit cost you livestock or grain or horses or a son who got dragged off, and there was no authority you could appeal to, because the authority was the one doing it half the time. That's the mark of a civil war. Neutrality stops being available. Four months later, in February of 1781, the war produced the single ugliest hour of the whole thing in North Carolina.

The setup is the race to the Dan. Nathaniel Green had refused to fight Cornwallis and had run instead north across North Carolina, wearing the British Army out on bad roads and swollen rivers and had gotten across the Dan River into Virginia. Cornwallis, exhausted and out of supply, fell back to Hillsborough and raised the royal standard and called on North Carolina's loyalists to come in and join him.

Dr. John Pyle answered. Pyle was from Chatham County. He was a physician, and he had fought against the colonial government during the regulation. He had also been captured earlier in the war and had taken an oath of loyalty to the provincial Congress, which he had now obviously set aside. He raised somewhere between three and 400 men,

all mounted, and sent word to Cornwallis, asking for an escort to bring them in safely. Cornwallis sent Benastra Tarleton with cavalry and some infantry to collect them. Meanwhile, Green had sent Henry Lee back across the Dan with his Legion, supported by two Maryland Continental Companies, and Lee had joined up with Andrew Pickens, and several hundred militia.

Lee and Pickens were hunting Tarleton. The whole thing turned on the coats. Lee's Legion wore short green jackets and plumbed leather helmets, and Tarleton's British Legion wore green as well. Two mounted units, both in green, operating within a few miles of each other on the same roads. The exact date is contested. But most modern summaries say February 24th.

The Journal of the American Revolution has used February 20, Participant letters put it somewhere between the 23rd and 25th. That kind of uncertainty is normal for backcountry actions where nobody was keeping a careful calendar. Late in the day, Lee's advance encountered two of Pyle's men on the road. Those men looked at the green coats and the helmets and concluded they were talking to Tarleton's dragoons. Lee understood immediately what had just been handed to him. He let them keep believing it. He learned from them exactly where Piles collared.

column was. He sent Pickens and the militia riflemen off to the flank, out of sight, because militia and hunting shirts would have given the game away in a second. And then he rode up the road towards several hundred loyalists at the head of a mounted column, in full salute, playing the part of a British cavalry commander. Pyle had drawn his men up along the roadside to let the column pass. They were mounted, in ranks, weapons shouldered, waiting to be reviewed by their escort. The two columns began to pass each other. Lee wrote up to pile and exchanged the ordinary courtesies of two officers meeting and took his hand. And somewhere down the line, somebody fired.

The accounts differ on who fired and why. The version most commonly reconstructed from Lee's own report and Joseph Graham's account holds that Lee had actually intended to avoid a fight, to get past them and keep hunting Tarleton, and that the deception was opportunistic rather than premeditated murder. Other accounts are less charitable. The killing that followed isn't in dispute. Lee dropped Pyle's hand and drew his sword,

and his troopers turned in the saddle and started cutting down men who were still holding their weapons at the shoulder. It went on for about ten minutes. The loyalists couldn't process what was happening to them. They were being killed at arm's length by men in the uniform of their own allies, and the conclusion many of them reached was that this was a horrible mistake, that the British had somehow confused them for rebels. Accounts say some loyalists were shouting that these were the king's men, that they were killing their own.

As Patriot troopers wheeled to face new opponents, they'd call out asking whose man they were, and men would answer that they were the king's men. And that answer got them cut down. At least 93 loyalists were killed. Wounded figures run to 250 in some accounts. Others were carried off by friends and never counted at all. On the American side, one man wounded. One horse killed.

Pyle himself was badly wounded, and according to local tradition, he crawled into a nearby pond and hid there in the water until he could be pulled out. That's tradition rather than documentation, but it's persisted for 240 years, and it's the reason a pond in Alamance County

is still called Pyle's Pond. One wounded loyalist, lying on the ground, still hadn't understood what had happened to him. He was addressing Henry Lee as Tarleton, because that was the only explanation available to him that made any sense. The Colonel Tarleton's men had somehow slaughtered their own allies by mistake. Lee eventually informed him in language that was reportedly not

diplomatic that he was not Tarleton. That was the moment the man learned what had actually happened to him and to everyone around him. The engagement is known by several names. Pyle's defeat, the Battle of Haw River, Piles Massacre. The one it got called at the time, and the one that stuck locally, was Piles Hacking Match. Lee was a professional soldier executing a legitimate deception against an armed enemy force that was actively marching to reinforce Cornwallis, and in the strict terms of 18th century warfare, you can construct a defense of the initial attack. You cannot construct a defense of killing the men who were trying to surrender, or of six prisoners murdered that evening. What matters more than the ethics is what the whole scene reveals about the nature of the

conflict. This atrocity was only possible because the two sides were indistinguishable. Same country, same language, same road, same green coats. The deception worked because there was nothing about Henry Lee that looked foreign to John Pyle. Three weeks later on March 15, 1781, Green and Cornwallis finally fought at Guilford Courthouse. Cornwallis held the field and lost about a quarter of his army doing it, and then he marched away toward the coast and eventually to Virginia and eventually to Yorktown. Both armies were now gone from the Piedmont, and that's when it got worse. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. With the Continental's gone and the British regulars gone, there was no longer any authority

in Central North Carolina, capable of restraining anybody. What was left was local militia on both sides, personal grievances that were now four or five years old, and a countryside full of men who knew exactly which farms belonged to which families. Into that vacuum rode David Fanning. Fanning was 26 years old in 1781. He was born in Amelia County, Virginia. He'd lived in both Carolinas. He had, at various points, served in both loyalist and wig militia, and by his own account he had been captured by Patriot forces 14 times, escaping or being pardoned every single time. In 1779, he'd taken a conditional pardon from the governor of South Carolina. In February of 1781, he organized loyalists in Chatham County and set up a fortified base at Cox's Mill

on the Deep River in Randolph County. And from there, he ran what was effectively an insurgency. He fought something like 36 engagements. In July, Major James Craig, the British commander holding Wilmington, commissioned him as colonel of the loyal militia of Randolph and Chatham counties. He was, by any honest military assessment, extraordinarily good at this. The 19th century North Carolina historian Samuel Ash called him one of the boldest men, most fertile in expedience and quick in execution that ever lived in North Carolina, and Ash was no admirer of the loyalist cause.

He was also a man who murdered people. people in their homes. The clearest surviving physical evidence of what this war did is a house that's still standing in Moore County, on a hill above a horseshoe bend in the deep river. Philip Austin built it around 1772, and it was one of the first big houses in the North Carolina backcountry. By 1777, he owned nearly 7,000 acres and had lobbied his way into a colonel's commission in the Whig militia.

He wasn't an admirable man by anyone's account. He was later indicted for murder twice, removed as Justice of the Peace, suspended from the legislature, and eventually fled the state after an indictment for killing a political rival. That's the sort of man who ended up commanding militia in this war, often enough that it shaped how the war got fought. In the summer of 1781, Austin and his men had been hunting fanning and had caught up with some of his people and killed one of his officers, a man named Kenneth Black.

The date is either July 29th or August 5th, 1781. Early that morning, Fanning came back with roughly 80 men and caught Austin, and about 25 Patriots camped at the house. Austin got his people inside and barricaded the doors and windows. Fanning put his men along a split rail fence outside and started shooting into the building. It went on for something like three to four hours. There were children in that house. Temperance Austin, Phillips' wife. put her children in the chimney, standing them on a table so the brickwork was between them and the

outside walls. Neither side could break the other. Then Fanning's men found a small wagon in Austin's barn, and Fanning ordered it filled with hay and set on fire, with the intention of rolling it against the house. At that point the front door opened, and Temperance Austin walked out, in the open, in front of 80 armed men who had been shooting into her home for hours, carrying a white cloth. She negotiated the surrender herself while her husband stayed inside. Fanning accepted. He paroled Alston and let him go back into his own house. Historians have chewed on the question of why Austin didn't do the negotiating himself,

and the most likely answer is the practical one. The Patriots inside had good reason to think that if they surrendered to Fanning's men on Fanning's terms, they'd be killed, given what everyone in that county knew about how surrenders had been going. A woman walking out with a white flag changed the arithmetic in a way that a colonel walking out could not. Fanning claimed in his own narrative that he killed four of the rebels and lost two of his own men. The house is still there. It's a state historic site now. The staff there count more than 30 bullet holes in the walls.

You can see the chimney sill where the children were. Most of this war survives only as words on paper, written down decades later by people who weren't there. The house in the horseshoe is a building with holes in it, put there by Americans shooting at Americans, and it has been standing in Moore County for 250 years with those holes in it. What Fanning did six weeks later was on a different scale entirely. On September 1st, he had beaten a larger Patriot force at Bettis's Bridge, and loyalists across the Piedmont were rallying to him in serious numbers. He got approval from Major Craig at Wilmington for an operator,

and he rendezvoused with Colonel Hector McNeill of Bladen County and Colonel Archibald McDougald of Cumberland County. Accounts of the combined force range from about 700 to 1,200 men. He then let Word get around that he was going to attack General John Butler's militia camp on the Deep River. Instead, at dawn on September 12th, 1781 under heavy fog, David Fanning rode into Hillsborough. Hillsborough was the capital of the state of North Carolina.

There was a brief skirmish, and then the town was his. He took over 200 prisoners. Among them were most of the members of the General Assembly, several continental officers, and Governor Thomas Burke. The sitting governor of North Carolina was captured in his own capital by irregular loyalist militia commanded by a 26-year-old who had been pardoned by two different colonial governments. His men found the town's liquor stores and opened them,

which tells you something about the level of discipline he was actually working, working with, and by around noon a long and reportedly unruly column, left Hillsborough on the Cape Fear Road, headed for Wilmington, with the government of North Carolina walking in the middle of it. Word reached Brigadier General John Butler that evening. Butler lived nearby. He knew the road they'd have to take, and he knew where it crossed Kane Creek, at the Ford by Thomas Lindley's Mill. He got there in the dark and put his men, at most 500 of them, on a plateau above Stafford's branch overlooking the road. On the morning of September 13th, the Loyalist Vanguard came down toward the crossing, and a volley tore into them, and Hector McNeil was killed instantly.

What followed was by casualty rate, the bloodiest thing that happened in North Carolina during the entire war. The Loyalist rallied, worked around the Patriot position, and attacked from front and rear. Butler's men held that plateau for hours. Both sides agreed afterward that the battle ended because everyone ran out of ammunition. The Patriots lost roughly 25 dead, 90 wounded, 10 captured. Loyalist losses were similar. Total killed and wounded ran to somewhere between 200 and 250 out of maybe 1,200 engaged. For the numbers involved, that's a higher casualty rate than Guilford Courthouse. Late in the fight, a musket ball shattered Fanning's left arm. He lost enough blood that his own men expected him to die, and he had to be left hidden in the woods

while the column moved on under McDougald. He didn't die. He recovered and kept fighting. McDougal got the prisoners to Wilmington. Governor Burke arrived there on September 24th and was eventually shipped to Sullivan's Island off Charleston. When the shooting stopped, the ground around Linley's mill was covered with dead and wounded men from both sides, and the armies were gone. What happened next is that the Quakers of that community came out and took care of them. Southern Alamance County had a substantial Quaker population. Snow Camp is right there. These were people whose entire religious position was refusal to participate in war,

who had spent six years being pressured, fined and harassed by both sides for declining to fight, and who now walked out onto a field between two mills to collect men who were still breathing. And one more person came. Dr. John Pyle lived about three miles south of the mill. Seven months earlier, his own command had been destroyed at Pyle's hacking match. 93 of his men killed around him, and he had crawled into a pond to survive it. He came to Lindley's mill and treated the wounded on both sides. Local accounts say it earned him back some measure of respect from his patriot neighbors.

In the middle of the worst of it, a man whose own people had been slaughtered by these men's army walked over to their wounded and started working on them. Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown on October 19th, 1781. We're taught that this is the end. The Red Coat stack arms, the band plays, and the revolution is essentially concluded pending paperwork. But in Central North Carolina, nothing ended. The British evacuated Wilmington in November of 1781,

which cut fanning off from his supply of powder and arms. In January of 1782, he opened negotiations with General Butler for a pardon he was never going to receive. Over the next five months, several truces were arranged and several truces were violated, by both sides. And the violence in the central counties got worse than it had been while the armies were present. On Sunday, March 10, 1782, Colonel Andrew Balfour was at home in Randolph County. Balfour was a Scottish immigrant who'd become one of the county's first justices of the peace and an elected member of the House of Commons and he had been an early and forceful supporter of the American cause. He was home on leave. His wife and two of his children were still

in Connecticut. His sister Margaret and his daughter Tibby were with him. Fanning came with about 25 men. The account of what happened comes from several sources that agree with each other, which is more than we usually get. Fanning's own narrative admits he came upon Balfour on the plantation, that Balfour tried to escape, that they fired on him and wounded him, and Fanning wrote it up as putting an end to his committing any more ill deeds. The fuller version comes from Margaret Balfour, in a letter she wrote to her widowed sister-in-law that September. Balfour was shot in the arm first and ran back into the house.

Margaret and Tibby held on to him. Fanning's men came in after him. Margaret wrote that about 25 armed men came to the house intending to kill her brother, that she and Tibby tried to prevent it, and it was all in vain, that the men cut and bruised them both badly and dragged them away from him, and that Fanning shot a bullet into his head. Governor Burke, writing shortly afterward, described Balfour as murdered in the most inhuman manner by Fanning and his party, and stated that Balfour's sister and daughter and several other women

were wounded and abused. A year later, a Randolph County man named Frederick Smith was prosecuted for participating in the murder and hanged for it. Fanning was never punished for anything. Fanning spent that Sunday and the days around it working through a list, and the strategic logic was straightforward. He was systematically killing the men capable of organizing resistance to him in that county. Fanning's men were still fighting as late as May of 1782. A combined force of British regulars and Tories out of Charleston

took Beaufort, North Carolina, on April 5, 1782. and held it briefly. That's nearly six months after Yorktown. The peace treaty wasn't signed until 1783. David Fanning married Sarah Carr in late April of 1782 and got himself and his wife out of North Carolina to a truce area in South Carolina, then to Charleston, then to St. Augustine in Florida, where they stayed until 1784. When North Carolina passed its act of pardon and oblivion in May of 1783, wiping the slate for former loyalists who had survived and stayed. The legislature specifically exempted three men by name from its terms. David Fanning was one of the three.

He went to New Brunswick, acquired land and two mills, and was elected to the Provincial Assembly in 1791, where he served for a decade. In 1801, he was convicted of raping a 15-year-old girl named Sarah London and sentenced to death. He successfully appealed to the provincial governor and received a pardon on the condition that he leave the province. He moved to Nova Scotia, became a shipbuilder, and died at Digby in 1825 at 70 years old, in his bed.

He also wrote his memoirs, which is why we have so much detail about his raids from his own hand. He was proud of them. Thomas Burke, the governor Fanning kidnapped, was held on Sullivan's Island and then paroled to James Island. and after an attempt on his life and what he considered a violation of the terms of his confinement, he escaped and went home and resumed being governor. A great many North Carolinians believed he had broken his parole and dishonored himself,

and the controversy followed him for the rest of his life, which wasn't long. Alexander Martin replaced him in April of 1782. Burke died in December of 1783 at around 36 years old. Philip Austin, who surrendered the house in the horseshoe, was in a single. indicted for murder, fled jail, and left the state. Dr. John Pyle survived the war, which given the 93-1 ratio at the hacking match is remarkable, and lived out his life in the same country where his neighbors had killed his men. The loyalists who couldn't stay, or wouldn't, left.

Tens of thousands of American loyalists went to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, the Bahamas, Britain, Florida. They were not deported by a foreign power. They were driven out by their neighbors, and their land was sold under acts passed by their own state legislature. The ones who stayed had to live in the same counties as the men who had burned their barns and killed their brothers, and the men who had burned their barns had to live next to them. That's the part the act of pardon and oblivion couldn't legislate. You can pass a law saying the past is settled. You cannot pass a law that makes a man forget who was standing in his yard on a Sunday morning in March.

Ramsoor's Mill is in Lincoln now. The hill where 1,300 loyalists camped and 400 patriots came up through the fog is inside the town. Part of the battlefield is adjacent to the Lincoln High School football field. At the top of the hill, near where the Tory camp was, there's a mass grave. It's beside an elementary school. There's no complete list of who's in it. There couldn't be, because the whole problem on that morning was that nobody could tell who anybody was. And by the time the families arrived that evening and the next day,

some of the dead had already been claimed and carried home. And some hadn't. And the ones nobody claimed went into the ground together. Rebels and Tories in the same whole. Fathers and sons and brothers and neighbors. Germans and Scots, Irish and English. Men who had signed Trion's oath in 1771. And men who had signed the Tryon Resolves in 1775.

All of them mixed up permanently because the only thing that had distinguished them was a piece of paper and a green twig. For decades now, local people have held a ceremony there. And somewhere off to the side of that field, according to a story that may be true and may not be, there's a pile of stones that a man put over his brother. Nobody has ever found it. When we teach the revolution, we teach it as a war fought against somebody else. That framing is comfortable and it's partly true, and it produced a country. But in Lincoln County, and Orange County and Randolph County and Chatham County between 1780 and 1782. That framing describes almost nothing that actually happened.

What happened was that Americans identified other Americans as enemies, organized militia to hunt them, tried them in fields, hanged them from trees, shot them on their own porches in front of their children, seized their property under color of law, and buried the unidentifiable remainder in a common grave on a hill. in the Carolina back country for two years. That was the story of the American founding rather than the exception to it. The National Park Service says the same thing happened at Oresconi in New York in 1777,

where former friends and family members and neighbors fought each other savagely in a ravine. South Carolina's back country was arguably worse than North Carolinas, so this wasn't a local aberration in one county with a grudge problem. The American Revolution had a civil war. inside it. We just kept the half of the story that was easier to put on a monument. The other half is buried on a hill in Lincoln, next to an elementary school, and nobody knows their names.