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Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 34. (ed. Reverend J. William Jones), chapter 1.29 (search)
of our Revolution, because it led to the French recognition and alliance, which proved so opportune at Yorktown. Southern historians, with pardonable native pride, advance the claim of King's Mountains to the distinction Creasy accords to Saratoga; and with much show of reason, because at King's Mountain, the militia of the backwoods frontier of Southwest Virginia and the adjacent country of Tennessee, North Carolina and Kentucky, to the number of 910, under such master spirits as Campbell, Shelby, Levier, Cleveland, McDowell and Williams, with their hunting rifles met and destroyed Cornwallis' advance guard under Colonel Ferguson, composed of 1,016 of the flower of the British army, equipped with muskets and bayonets. Less than two thousand were here engaged and the battle lasted only an hour, but that hour was largely fraught with the nation's fate, in that it dispelled at once and forever, the fatal illusion that our colonial militia could not successfully contend with British reg