Part 10

The man who first began it was Justice Gaston--a white-haired patriot who lived on a little stream called Fishing Creek, near Rocky Mount. He was eighty years of age, and might well have thought himself too old to care about war matters; but he was a brave man and a patriot, and the people who lived near him were in the habit of taking his advice and doing as he did.

When the news came that Tarleton had killed a band of patriots under Colonel Buford in cold blood Justice Gaston called his nine sons and many of his nephews around him. Joining hands, these young men promised each other that they never would take the British oath, and never would give up the cause, come what might.

Soon afterwards a British force came to the neighborhood, and all the people were ordered to meet at Rocky Mount to enrol their names and take the oath. One of the British officers went to see Justice Gaston, and tried to persuade him that it was folly to refuse. He knew that if Gaston advised the people to give up, there would be no trouble; but the white-haired patriot told him to his face that he would never take the oath himself or advise anybody else to do so.

As soon as the officer left the old man sent for his friends, and about thirty brave fellows met at his house that night, with their rifles in their hands. They knew there would be a strong force of British and Tories at Rocky Mount the next day, but, in spite of the odds against them, they made up their minds to attack the place, and when the time came they did so. Creeping through the woods, they suddenly came upon the crowd, and after a sharp fight sent the British flying helter-skelter in every direction. This stopped the work of enrolling the people as British subjects, and it did more than that. It showed the patriots through the whole country that they could still give the British a great deal of trouble, and after this affair many of the men who had thought of giving up rubbed up their rifles instead, and formed little bands of fighting men to keep the war going.

Another man who did much to stir up partisan warfare was the Rev. William Martin, an old and pious preacher in the Scotch-Irish settlements. These Scotch-Irish were very religious people, and their preacher was their leader in all things. One Sunday, after the news had come to the settlement that Buford's men had been killed by the British in cold blood, the eloquent old man went into his pulpit and preached about the duty of fighting. In the afternoon he preached again, and even when the service was over he went on in the open air, still preaching to the people how they should fight for their country, until all the men in the settlement were full of fighting spirit. The women told the men to go and do their duty, and that they would take care of the crops.

These little bands of patriots were too small to fight regular battles, or even to hold strong posts. They had to hide in the woods and swamps, and only came out when they saw a chance to strike a blow. Then the blow fell like lightning, and the men who dealt it quickly hid themselves again.

They had signs by which they told each other what they were going to do. A twig bent down, a few stones strung along a path, or any other of a hundred small signs, served to tell every patriot when and where to meet his friends. A man riding about, breaking a twig here and there, or making some other sign of the kind, could call together a large force at a chosen spot within a few hours. The men brought out in this way would fall suddenly upon some stray British force that was off its guard, and utterly destroy it. The British would at once send a strong body of troops to punish the daring patriots, but the redcoat leader would look in vain for anybody to punish. The patriots could scatter and hide as quickly as they could come together.

Finding that they could not destroy these patriot companies, the British and Tories took their revenge on women and children. They burned the houses of the patriots, carried off their crops, and killed their cattle, so as to starve their families; but the women were as brave us the men, and from first to last not one of them ever wished her husband or son to give up the fight.

If the patriots could not conquer the British, they at least kept them in a hornets' nest. If they could not drive them out of South Carolina, they could keep them there, which was nearly as good a thing to do, because every soldier that Cornwallis had to keep in the South would have been sent to some other part of the country to fight the Americans if the Carolinians had let the British alone.

In this way small bands of resolute men kept Cornwallis busy, and held the state for the American cause, until General Greene went south and took command. Greene was one of the greatest of the American generals, and after a long campaign he drove the British out of the state. But if it had not been for the partisans the South would have been lost long before he could be spared to go there; and if the partisans had not kept a British army busy there, it might have gone very hard with the Americans in the rest of the country.

When we rejoice in the freedom of our country we ought not to forget how much we owe the partisans, and especially such men as Justice Gaston and the Rev. William Martin, who first set the partisans at their work. It would have been much easier and pleasanter for them to remain quiet under British rule; and they had nothing to gain for themselves, but everything to lose, by the course they took. Gaston knew that his home would be burned for what he did, and the eloquent old Scotch preacher knew that he would be put into a prison-pen for preaching war sermons to his people; but they were not men to flinch. They cared more for their country than for themselves, and it was precisely that kind of men throughout the land, from New England to Georgia, who won liberty for us by seven years of hard fighting and terrible suffering.

THE CHARGE OF THE HOUNDS.

AN INCIDENT OF THE CREEK WAR.

A terrible bit of news was carried from mouth to mouth through the region that is now Alabama at the beginning of September, 1813. The country was at that time in the midst of the second war with Great Britain, and for a long time British agents had been trying to persuade the Creeks--a powerful nation of half-civilized but very warlike Indians who lived in Alabama--to join in the war and destroy the white settlements in the Southwest.

For some time the Creeks hesitated, and it was uncertain what they would do. But during the summer of 1813 they broke out in hostility, and on the 30th of August their great leader, Weatherford, or the Red Eagle, as they called him, stormed Fort Mims, the strongest fort in the Southwest. He took the fort by surprise, with a thousand warriors behind him, and, after five hours of terrible fighting, destroyed it, killing about five hundred men, women, and children.

This was the news that startled the settlers in the region where the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers come together. It was certain, after such a massacre as that, that the Indians meant to destroy the settlements, and kill all the white people without mercy.

In order to protect themselves and their families the settlers built rude forts by setting pieces of timber endwise in the ground, and the people hurried to these places for safety. Leaving their homes to be burned, their crops to be destroyed, and their cattle to be killed or carried off by the Indians, the settlers hastily got together what food they could, and took their families into the nearest forts.

One of the smallest of these stockade forts was called Sinquefield. It stood in what is now Clarke County, Alabama, and, as that region was very thinly settled, there were not enough men to make a strong force for the defence of the fort. But the brave farmers and hunters thought they could hold the place, and so they took their families thither as quickly as they could.

Two families, numbering seventeen persons, found it was not easy to go to Sinquefield on the 2d of September, and so, as they were pretty sure that there were no Indians in their neighborhood as yet, they made up their minds to stay one more night at a house a few miles from the fort. That night they were attacked, and all but five of them were killed. Those who got away carried the news of what had happened to the fort, and a party was sent out to bring in the bodies.

The next day all the people in Fort Sinquefield went out to bury their dead friends in a valley at some little distance from the fort, and, strange as it seems, they took no arms with them. Believing that there were no Indians near the place, they left the gates of the fortress open, and went out in a body without their guns.

As a matter of fact there was a large body of Indians not only very near them, but actually looking at them all the time. The celebrated Prophet Francis was in command, and in his sly way he had crept as near the fort as possible to look for a good chance to attack it. Making his men lie down and crawl like snakes, he had reached a point only a few hundred yards from the stockade without alarming the people, and now, while they stood around the graves of their friends without arms to defend themselves with, a host of their savage enemies lay looking at them from the grass and bushes on the hill.

As soon as he saw that the right moment had come, Francis sprang up with a savage war-cry, and at the head of his warriors made a dash at the gates. He had seen that the men outside were unarmed, and his plan was to get to the gates before they could reach them, and thus get all the people of the place at his mercy in an open field and without arms to fight with.

The fort people were quick to see what his purpose was, and the men hurried forward with all their might, hoping to reach the fort before the savages could get there. By running at the top of their speed they did this, and closed the gates in time to keep the Indians out. But, to their horror, they then saw that their wives and children were shut out too. Unable to run so fast as the men had done, the women and children had fallen behind, and now the Indians were between them and the gates!

Seeing that he had missed his chance of getting possession of the fort, Francis turned upon the women and children with savage delight in the thought of butchering these helpless creatures in the sight of their husbands, fathers, and brothers.

It was a moment of terror. There were not half enough white men in the fort to master so large a force of Indians, and if there had been it was easy to see that by the time they could get their rifles and go to the rescue it would be too late.

At that moment the hero of this bit of history came upon the scene. This was a young man named Isaac Haden. He was a notable huntsman, who kept a famous pack of hounds--fierce brutes, thoroughly trained to run down and seize any live thing that their master chose to chase. This young man had been out in search of stray cattle, and just at the moment when matters were at their worst he rode up to the fort, followed by his sixty dogs.

Isaac Haden had a cool head and a very daring spirit. He was in the habit of taking in a situation at a glance, deciding quickly what was to be done, and then doing it at any risk that might be necessary. As soon as he saw how the women and children were placed, he cried out to his dogs, and, at the head of the bellowing pack, charged upon the flank of the Indians. The dogs did their work with a spirit equal to their master's. For each to seize a red warrior and drag him to earth was the work of a moment, and the whole body of savages was soon in confusion. For a time they had all they could do to defend themselves against the unlooked-for assault of the fierce animals, and before they could beat off the dogs the men of the fort came out and joined in the attack, so that the women and children had time to make their way inside the gates, only one of them, a Mrs. Phillips, having been killed.

The men, of course, had to follow the women closely, as they were much too weak in numbers to risk a battle outside. If they had done so the Indians would have overcome them quickly, and then the fort and everybody in it would have been at their mercy, so the settlers hurried into the fort as soon as the women were safe.