No British Soldiers

The thing people miss about Kings Mountain is who wasn't there. No British regulars. No Continental Army. Just Americans — some fighting for independence, some for the Crown, some because their neighbors were fighting and neutrality had stopped being an option.

Ferguson's Loyalist militia were men from the same backcountry communities as the men who killed them. The civil war running through every county in the Carolina backcountry had been accumulating grievances — burned farms, murdered families, stolen livestock — for two years before October 7, 1780.

When white flags went up and some Overmountain Men kept firing, shouting "Tarleton's Quarter," they were continuing a war that had been fought without rules since before formal armies arrived. The officers eventually stopped it. Three men were hanged at Bickerstaff's a week later after something resembling a trial.

The formal military history stops at the result: 280 Loyalists killed, 700 captured, Ferguson dead, Cornwallis retreating. The human history doesn't stop there.