Liberty!

Gunshots and the shouts of hundreds of men battered the slope just ahead as one of the fiercest battles of the American Revolution broke out. Every man there that day knew that the Carolina backcountry had burned and bled since May when the British landed on the coast. Unrelenting civil war had scourged the South with partisan plundering, bushwhacking, and brutal massacres—neighbor against rancorous neighbor, and fathers against sons. For the first time since Lexington and Concord, people living in the nearby Piedmont and over-mountain settlements had to make a hard choice. The men who charged through these woods were determined to defend their homes. They had taken up arms against the King and his officers, and now they would spill blood for a new country. At 3 p.m. on October 7th, 1780, Patriot fighters here wore their everyday frontier clothes, not military uniforms. Some Whigs put scraps of white paper in their hats, the only way to distinguish a friend from a Tory foe. Militiamen answered the call to duty armed with an assortment of weapons from their farms and hunting camps—long rifles, hunting knives, muskets, and tomahawks.

Smyrna, South Carolina · United States