This Fierce People: The Untold Story of America's Revolutionary War in the South by Alan Pell Crawford

Author:Alan Pell Crawford [Crawford, Alan Pell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, Revolutions & Wars of Independence, United States, Revolutionary Period (1775-1800), State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV)
ISBN: 9780593318508
Google: nVvaEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0593318501
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2024-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

Lee and his men marched away from this scene of horrors before dawn the next day, in time reaching what had been Tarleton’s camp, “which he had just abandoned leaving lively rail fires.” Hall’s mood improved along the way, and his gloom lifted, when he had discovered “lying upon the ground something like the appearance of a man.” Upon inspection, this figure “proved to be a youth about sixteen who had come to view the British through curiosity.” Afraid that he might give information to Lee’s troops, the men under Tarleton’s command “had run him through with a bayonet and left him for dead.” Although he was still able to speak, his wounds were fatal, and the sight “of this unoffending boy butchered…released me of my distressful feelings for the slaughter of the Tories.” From that moment on, Hall “desired nothing so much as the opportunity of participating in their destruction.”

Some of the survivors managed to make it to the safety of Tarleton’s camp, but, still confused by what had just happened, they “complained to Tarleton of the cruelty of [his] dragoons.” Learning what he could about the incident, Tarleton decried the “inhuman barbarity” of Lee’s men, and Cornwallis reported to Lord George Germain that the loyalists had been “most inhumanely butchered, when begging for quarter, without making the least resistance.” The impact on the loyalists in the area was immediate. Nathanael Greene told Virginia governor Jefferson that the episode “has had a very happy effect on those disaffected Persons, of which there are too many in this Country.” Greene wrote to Pickens that “the defeat of the Tories was so happily timed, & in all probability will be productive of such happy consequences that I cannot help congratulating you on your success.”

There is no evidence from Greene’s letters that he believed Lee’s men had committed atrocities or—if he believed that they had—that he was much troubled by it. What became known as Pyle’s Massacre and Pyle’s Hacking Match quickly entered the vocabulary of the Revolution, along with “Remember Buford!” What Tarleton had supposedly done at the Waxhaws would justify the slaughter of loyalists later, and on and on, as the violence escalated. The war in the South, much more so than in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey, was now a civil war and, as might be expected, increasingly unrestrained by conventions of warfare observed in the main by older commanders like Washington and Cornwallis, trained in the traditions of European warfare.

Tarleton and Lee were both in their mid-twenties at this point in the war, with independent commands, detached from the main armies, making decisions on the fly, in response to immediate—and potentially fatal—developments, often in hostile territory. Killings for retaliation and revenge were now accepted in ways they would not have been in European wars.

“Light Horse Harry” has been made the villain of Pyle’s Massacre, but that might be no more justified than it had been to vilify Tarleton for what took place at the Waxhaws. “Some

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