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Title: The Battle of Kings Mountain: Then and Now
Source:
4um
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Published: Apr 18, 2009
Author: Deasy
Post Date: 2009-04-18 13:40:42 by Deasy
Keywords: 1775, Lexington, Concord, April 19th
Views: 274
Comments: 20
Since April 19th, 1775, Americans have changed year by year until much of our national character has been lost. Two unmistakable traits have receded to the point that people who possess them today are considered odd or even dangerous. The first of these is a powerful independence of spirit. The second characteristic is a fierce drive to defend one's life, liberty, and property. Today's Americans seem content to leave the reigns of power in the hands of an ever-strengthening political oligarchy. This may have been inevitable, as modern comforts replaced the pressures of colonial era living. While this April 19th is a Patriot's day like any other, please take a moment to think back to a little known incident in the Revolutionary War that happened five years after the battle of Lexington and Concord, and many miles away from the coastal areas in the mountains of South Carolina. Instead of suppressing the Appalachian people, defeat was in store for the British at the battle of Kings Mountain on October 7th. About 900 frontier folk of Scots-Irish, British, French, and German descent resolved to decide the issue by force. At least half of them known as the overmountain men, a revolutionary militia formed by people from western Appalachia. They hailed from West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia. According to one regional genealogy, "They were a mixture of Celts, Britons, Normans, Romans, Anglo-Saxon, and the stone-age tribes of Ireland." They had seen despotism and their answer to it was to avoid it in the mountains, or if still pursued, to meet it with the sword and the rifle. A national parks map outlines their route to Kings Mountain well. From Sycamore Shoals (now Elizabethton, Tennesee) at Watauga River, they came from the northwest. They came southwest from North Carolina. And they came northeast from Cedar Spring near Spartanburg South Carolina. There are good accounts of the battle available, so there is little point in retelling the details here. The previously mentioned genealogy suggests that the British location had been revealed by the young daughter of a neutral local. Casualties on the patriot side were light with only 28 killed and 62 wounded. The Tory side saw 157 were killed and 163 wounded. The rest were either left on the battlefield or marched away. Some nine Tories were hanged as traitors for having switched sides. These wilderness dwellers had decided to fight the British in an organized manner. They joined forces under William Campbell, Frederick Hambright, and John Sevier to march through the Appalachians. The British, with a superior force of 1100 men, expected to defeat the mountain men without much of a fight. Ferguson had said "he was on King's Mountain, that he was King of that mountain and that God Almighty and all the Rebels of Hell could not drive him from it." Yet in little more than 65 minutes, the battle was over, and Ferguson himself was dead with eight rifle rounds in his body. What spurred the Appalachians to this feat, which Thomas Jefferson said was "the turn of the tide of success" in the war? The British, without realizing it, had brought the distant patriot war home to the mountain people. They had made it personal. The Appalachians would not have organized in any similar manner for the eastern generals like George Washington. One can safely say that they would never have served the federal American military or intelligence services of today. They were rugged individualists. They had farms and small businesses to tend. They had big, hungry families. Yet they volunteered for this duty at Kings Mountain with enthusiasm. Their units were small and autonomous. They coordinated willingly. The enemy had threatened their sacred personal property, their lives, and their honor. In those days, a mountain man's land and his cabin were the same as his life. Without these, he and his family could not survive. These were emigrants from calcified European homelands where government, church, and property were dictated and controlled without principles, without representation. For these mountain dwellers, the Reformation and the European Enlightenment had set them free from the chains of monarchy. A joyful self-determination was their way of life. Without the ability to choose their own destiny, they would be dead to the world. They met the British incursion, which they correctly understood as a threat to their way of life, with alpine resolve. They would live free or die, and some of them probably said so. Modern Americans can learn much from the way the Appalachians lived. They were a people who had little access to the the king's currencies. They seldom took out banking loans, instead borrowing from like minded neighbors and family. Far away from the empire's corporate reach, they claimed homestead for their farms, and built their own log cabins, where they raised their own families. And indeed the corporation itself had been created to benefit the British empire. The trading companies dealing in slaves and other commodities of the British empire were far away from their mountain territories. Their overmountain man's interest in the revolution had always been out of resentment toward the Crown for its refusal to secure protection from the Indian threat. In fact, the Crown had made bargains and treaties with Indians, and had restrained the hands of the colonists, even in their own self-defense. While the king was willing to deal with the Indians; the settlers were not. Bacon's rebellion in Virginia more than 100 years before had happened because the British had failed to defend the colonists. The overmountain men had given up hope on the Crown ever protecting them. They did it themselves, often coming under harassing Indian fire while clearing and tilling thier lands. We hear echoes of this today as the federal government refuses to deport illegal aliens and guard our borders, and when volunteers for such duty are treated as common gangsters or worse by government agencies. In the days of the Kings Mountain strife, these inland, wood-dwelling Americans avoided holding slaves, preferring to work on their own. When they banded together, they did so as equals. A man's word was his most valuable asset. Raw metals, weapons, farm implements, foodstuffs, livestock, seeds, and tobacco were as good as any coin of the crown or better. They exchanged items of value and services based on utility and the trader's individual reputation. There was no short-selling or hedge funds. No such thing as credit default swaps or derivatives existed for the typical overmountain man and his family. Their wealth was in their livelihood,and they put stock in their sizable families. Farm land and forests were their bread and butter. Hunting was a required skill, and the British would find that men who could kill a moving animal at a good distance with a long rifle were fierce opponents on Kings Mountain. To protect themselves and their way of life, the overmountain men could kill at a moment's notice, without regret. When Cornwallis gave his edict, the men could have stayed on their farms and been silent. The war was at the edge of their domain. What drew them out, when no immediate danger, if they quiesced, was their quick understanding of the stakes at hand? Ferguson's edict put their independence and personal sovereignty at risk. They had fought for and kept the land they held, and without the Crown's assistance. Now the Crown was beginning to make demands on them they could not countenance. Can the old mountain ways work in our modern world? Today, strip mining and real estate speculation are destroying the habitats that once supported these frontiersmen and their families. Governments without allegiance to the past or the American people, and stateless corporations now own the land. These are controlling entities that would have been unacceptable to these men. The corporation was a financial structure developed by the British empire for the purposes of furthering the empire's interests. People have become dependent on corporate-supplied jobs, goods, and services. Yet small businesses are still a cornerstone of our economy. Americans are still capable of showing the same characteristics of their forebears. The day has come for us to live up to their examples. If change must come, what is in store for us? We can keep our technology. We can keep our religious choices. Intellectual independence was the foundation of the Enlightenment, and was understood as the original inspiration for the American rebels. Change must be positive. We can rebuild a nation where love of life and responsibility to future generations stand as priorities. This must begin by reviving a sense of our own sovereignty, both personal and national.. We need to reestablish a unique American identity. We need demarcation from the rest of world. We need our borders to be sound again, so that our language and culture will be free again to flourish and mature. We need our industries to be local. We need our own, home grown American economy, based on longstanding community values well known to the overmountain men and their families. The artificial moneymaking on the backs of the ordinary people must be ended, by force if necessary. In this past year of government-mandated bailouts for the oligarchy, we need to start making the battle for individual liberty personal, just as the overmountain men did in 1780. The situation with unchecked and unrepresentative governmental and corporate ownership of vast amounts of natural resources must be ended. American families, the real American people, must be given back the stewardship of the land and its resources. Central banking and corporate control over America's economic and political future must be met and crushed, just like Ferguson's troops were, to their surprise, on Kings Mountain. We need to end all foreign wars, bring home all of our troops, and return some of them to our own frontiers. We must end our work on behalf of the old British empire's original objectives. Home is where the hearth is, and our home is North America, within our own borders. Our future generations live here already. This land must be kept for our own children's future, not the entire planet's as the globalist oligarchy repeats over and over. Open immigration must end, and illegal aliens must be returned to their homes of origin. Proponents of these nation-destroying measures need to be discredited and their corporate media and government bully pulpits dismantled. Just as the Appalachians found in 1780, the struggle for freedom has come for us in our generation. It is right here, right now. With the Patriot Acts, the Military Commissions Act, and the remaining Bush security orders, a modern day Cornwallis and Ferguson have made their threats to the American people known. They have burned homes. They have killed children. They have tortured those who would resist them. Nothing sacred is safe from them. The first casualty has been the rule of law, with oligarchs making up rules and regulations as they go along, ignoring the Constitution and even teaching students in public schools of its contemporary inapplicability. From coast to coast, in the cities and in the wildernesses, the fight for American life, liberty, and property is with our own government and multinational corporations that got their starts using American labor and natural resources. The television's daily demands that the American people should pay tribute to global corporations via bailouts, foreign aid, and the constant hue and cry for ensured Mideast military "security" must be ended. These are not our problems, and these monopoly media outlets do not speak for any American's future. The globalist media trusts should be broken apart and dismantled. The new face of the old empire will not give up without a long series of battles only yet to be rejoined. The struggle is already being brought to us. It's time for us to realize that without a fight, we will have already lost our lives and liberty. The die is cast. The gauntlet has been thrown down. The empire's special guard is on Kings Mountain, waiting for us to bring them low.
In the fall of 1780, in response to the occasional attack on British interests on the western frontiers, Appalachian territories would come under the angry eye of the Tory forces operating in the southern regions. Acting on behalf of the famed British general Cornwallis, a major Patrick Ferguson demanded that patriots put down their arms or the Tories would "Lay waste to their country with fire and sword." In September, he was stationed at a base camp in the former Gilbert Town, North Carolina. This is now known as Rutherfordton, and is about 72 miles west of Charlotte. The die was cast. He had thrown down the gauntlet.
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#7. To: Deasy (#0)
Well done. I just hope we still have men like this. .
. We do; many animals have to be backed into a corner before flight is out of the question and only fight remains. Bright folks, though, catch on early and can see peaceful solutions; however, bright folks are now being put in jeopardy by dull folks who historically look to government for their happiness....This essay about the Overmountain Men poignantly,sadly, brings 1780 into 2009
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#9. To: PSUSA (#7)
I just hope we still have men like this.
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