Colonel Sevier and Major Winston led the right wing, and Colonels Cleveland and Williams the left wing. The plan was to surround the mountain and attack from four sides at once. They were repulsed three times by the charges of the English, but being rallied by their officers they immediately renewed the attack. Within one hour and five minutes after the battle began they had taken the mountain, killed two hundred and twenty of the British forces, including Colonel Ferguson, wounded one hundred and eighty others, and had taken between six and seven hundred prisoners. Of their forces only twenty-eight were killed and sixty wounded. Among the prisoners taken thirty or more were North Carolina Tories, and some of them had gone out from the Watauga settlement. Some of the Tories were executed, but others were spared on the ground that they were led to take up arms against the Colonists through honest motives. In this battle the English forces numbered about 1,100, and those of the Colonists about 900.

These mountain men were untrained soldiers; they had marched 200 miles over rough roads and for a part of the time through the rain; they had been in the saddle for practically thirty-six hours when the battle began; they were outnumbered and they made the attack against a position which was regarded by the brave Ferguson as especially strong against any possible attack. Surely they gained a most remarkable victory and won for themselves a big place in American history.

EFFECT OF THE BATTLE OF KING'S MOUNTAIN

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this great victory at King's Mountain. Lord Cornwallis had boasted that Georgia and South Carolina were subdued, and that North Carolina was but the stepping block to the conquest of Virginia. He had now passed Charlotte and was advancing to Salisbury. The whole South was in gloom on account of the victorious march of the British through Georgia and South Carolina, and it seemed that nothing could prevent the subjugation of North Carolina and Virginia by Cornwallis. But when Cornwallis heard the news of Ferguson's defeat, he was completely demoralized; he abandoned his march northward, and ordered an immediate retreat. He marched all night in the utmost confusion, and moved his army to the rear about one hundred miles.

The battle of King's Mountain was conceded to be the turning point in the American Revolution. "No battle during the war," says Lessing, "was more obstinately contested than this; it completely crushed the spirits of the royalists, and weakened beyond recovery the royal power in the Carolinas." "The victory at King's Mountain," says Bancroft, the historian, "changed the aspects of the war. The royalists of North Carolina no longer dared to rise. It fired the patriots in the two Carolinas with fresh zeal. It encouraged the fragments of the defeated and scattered American army to seek each other and organize themselves anew." "That mem

orable victory," says Thomas Jefferson, "was the joyful enunciation of that turn in the tide of success that terminated the Revolutionary War with the seal of our independence."

This whole nation owes much to East Tennessee for the part played by the Watauga settlers in gaining independence. The patriots who followed Sevier and Shelby were no ordinary men. In patriotism, courage, self-sacrifice, intelligence, and bold individual initiative, the Watauga people deserve to stand among the first citizens of America of this period.

CHAPTER IV

THE STATE OF FRANKLIN

After the battle of King's Mountain the Watauga people hastened back to their homes. They had heard before they left that the Indians were preparing to make an attack on their settlement; hence it was not safe for them to remain longer from their families. They now took up the difficult work of developing this wild section and opening it up to civilization. In this work they struggled against all kinds of hardships and dangers, but nothing could turn them back or thwart them in their purpose to make Tennessee a fit place for a man to rear his family.

In 1784, the legislature of North Carolina ceded to the United States government all of the territory now in the State of Tennessee. Congress was given two years in which to accept it. The transfer of the Tennessee territory to the United States government was made without the consent of the Watauga people, and without even consulting them. As a result they became very indignant. They felt that after the sacrifices they had made in the Revolution, and the services they had rendered to the cause of independence they deserved some consideration and certainly better treatment than they had received. They had no adequate military

organization to meet the many dangers that threatened them. They had been cut off from North Carolina, and had not been accepted by the United States government. While in theory they were to continue as citizens of North Carolina until they should be accepted by the national government, in fact the people regarded themselves as without any real government. Hence in the interest of selfprotection they began at once to organize a government as they had done on the Watauga a few years before.

Nearly every man in their communities belonged to a military company. So the first step in the formation of the new government was for each military company to elect two representatives. The representatives thus elected met in convention and called a general convention in which delegates should be elected by the people in the different counties. This convention assembled in Jonesboro in August, 1784. John Sevier was elected president and Landon Carter secretary of the convention. It was decided to hold another convention later which should be composed of five delegates from each county for the purpose of selecting a name for the new state and adopting a constitution. When the news of this action reached North Carolina, that state withdrew the act by which they had ceded Tennessee to the Federal government, and appointed an assistant judge, and an attorney general for the Superior Court of Jonesboro. It was believed that this would stop the movement for a