Hitherto the two chains of events had been only remotely connected; but in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, the struggle between the king and his rebellious subjects shook the whole land, and the men of the western border were drawn headlong into the full current of revolutionary warfare.  From that moment our politics became national, and the fate of each portion of our country was thenceforth in some sort dependent upon the welfare of every other.  Each section had its own work to do; the east won independence while the west began to conquer the continent.  Yet the deeds of each were of vital consequence to the other.  Washington’s Continentals gave the west its freedom; and took in return for themselves and their children a share of the land that had been conquered and held by the scanty bands of tall backwoodsmen.

The backwoodsmen, the men of the up-country, were, as a whole, ardent adherents of the patriot or American side.  Yet there were among them many loyalists or tories; and these tories included in their ranks much the greatest portion of the vicious and the disorderly elements.  This was the direct reverse of what obtained along portions of the seaboard, where large numbers of the peaceable, well-to-do people stood loyally by the king.  In the up-country, however, the Presbyterian Irish, with their fellows of Calvinistic stock and faith, formed the back-bone of the moral and order-loving element; and the Presbyterian Irish[1] were almost to a man staunch and furious upholders of the Continental Congress.  Naturally, the large bands of murderers, horse-thieves, and other wild outlaws, whom these grim friends of order hunted down with merciless severity, were glad to throw in their lot with any party that promised revenge upon their foes.  But of course there were lawless characters on both sides; in certain localities where the crop of jealousies, always a rank backwoods growth, had been unusually large, and had therefore produced long-standing and bitter feuds,[2] the rival families espoused opposite sides from sheer vindictive hatred of one another.  As a result, the struggle in the backwoods between tories and whigs, king’s-men and congress-men,[3] did not merely turn upon the questions everywhere at stake between the American and British parties.  It was also in part a fight between the law-abiding and the lawless, and in part a slaking of savage personal animosities, wherein the borderers glutted their vengeance on one another.  They exercised without restraint the right of private warfare, long abandoned in more civilized regions.  It was natural that such a contest should be waged with appalling ferocity.