326 The Winning of the West 



the backbone of the moral and order-loving ele- 

 ment; arid the Presbyterian Irish 1 were almost to 

 a man stanch and furious upholders of the Con- 

 tinental Congress. Naturally, the large bands of 

 murderers, horse-thieves, and other wild outlaws, 

 whom these grim friends of order hunted down with 

 merciless severity, were glad to throw in their lot 

 with any party that promised revenge upon their 

 foes. But of course there were lawless characters 

 on both sides; in certain localities where the crop 

 of jealousies, always a rank backwoods growth, had 

 been unusually large, and had therefore produced 

 long-standing and bitter feuds, 2 the rival families 

 espoused opposite sides from sheer vindictive hatred 

 of one another. As a result, the struggle in the 

 backwoods between tories and whigs, king's-men 

 and congress-men, 3 did not merely turn upon the 

 questions everywhere at stake between the Ameri- 

 can and British parties. It was also in part a fight 

 between the law-abiding and the lawless, and in 

 part a slaking of savage personal animosities, 

 wherein the borderers glutted their vengeance on 

 one another. They exercised without restraint the 

 right of private warfare, long abandoned in more 



1 Mr. Phelan, in his "History of Tennessee," deserves 

 especial praise for having so clearly understood the part 

 played by the Scotch-Irish. 



2 The Campbell MSS. contain allusions to various such 

 feuds, and accounts of the jealousies existing not only be- 

 tween families, but between prominent members of the same 

 family. 



3 See Milfort, Smyth, etc., as well as the native writers. 



