The War in the Northwest 371 



strength of the king's armies. They enlisted for 

 very short periods, and when their time was up 

 promptly returned to their mountains, for they were 

 sure to get homesick and uneasy about their fami- 

 lies ; and neither the officers nor the soldiers had any 

 proper idea of the value of obedience. Among their 

 own hills and forests and for their own work, they 

 were literally unequaled; and they were ready 

 enough to swoop down from their strongholds, 

 strike some definite blow, or do some single piece of 

 valiant fighting in the low country, and then fall 

 back as quickly as they had come. But they were not 

 particularly suited for a pitched battle in the open, 

 and were quite unfitted to carry on a long campaign. 

 In one respect the mountain men deserve great 

 credit for their conduct in the Carolinas. As a gen- 

 eral thing they held aloof from the plundering. The 

 frightful character of the civil war between the 

 whigs and tories, and the excesses of the British 

 armies, had utterly demoralized the Southern States ; 

 they were cast into a condition of anarchic disorder 

 and the conflicts between the patriots and loyalists 

 degenerated into a bloody scramble for murder and 

 plunder wherein the whigs behaved as badly as ever 

 the tories had done. 12 Men were shot, houses 



12 In the Clay MSS. there is a letter from Jesse Benton 

 (the father of the great Missouri Senator) to Col. Thos. 

 Hart, of March 23d, 1783, which gives a glimpse of the way 

 in which the tories were treated even after the British had 

 been driven out; it also shows how soon maltreatment of 

 royalists was turned into general misrule and rioting. The 

 letter runs, in part, as follows: 



"I can not help mentioning to You an Evil which seems 



