On October 7, 1780, in the wilds of northwest South Carolina, some nine hundred colonial rebels from the colony’s backcountry, fighting for the cause of American independence, executed a coordinated attack on a superior force of pro-British Americans dug in atop a rocky peak called Kings Mountain. The outnumbered rebels, known as “Overmountain men,” charged up the height from several directions, braving withering fire from the entrenched loyalists and eventually overpowering them. It was a signal victory for the rugged revolutionaries.

The loyalists, numbering slightly more than 1,100, suffered horrendous losses: 157 killed, 163 seriously wounded, and nearly 700 taken prisoner (though many captives managed to escape as they were marched to what the rebels considered safer ground). Beyond such numbers was the “depression and fear,” as one British officer put it, spread among Southern loyalists by the rebel victory. Recruitment suffered, and General Charles Cornwallis, commander of British and Tory forces in the American South, now was forced to postpone his planned campaign to move his army north into Virginia, from where he planned to squeeze George Washington’s Continental Army from the south as Britain’s commanding North American general, Henry Clinton, squeezed it from the north.

Indeed, writes Alan Pell Crawford in This Fierce People, “Something seemingly impossible had occurred: an outnumbered gaggle of utterly untrained volunteers . . . had whipped a larger force of well-disciplined, well-supplied provincials and militiamen.” The war, he adds, “had entered a new phase.” 

Crawford, a resident scholar at the International Center for Jefferson Studies and author of four previous books of American history and biography, believes that the Revolutionary War’s southern campaigns have received insufficient attention from historians over the decades. In reality, he argues, those campaigns actually determined the war’s outcome. “In battles too few Americans have even heard of,” writes Crawford, “fought by armies commanded by largely unsung heroes, this book seeks to account for the American victory, the reasons for which would otherwise remain a mystery.”