The conquest of the back country of the Carolinas was always doing and to be done. The scattered settlements and lonely plantations were, indeed, full of men who cared little for the quarrel with the mother country and held to their old allegiance as of course, giving to the King’s troops ready aid and welcome; and there were men there, as everywhere, who loved pillage and all lawless adventure, upon whom the stronger army could always count to go in its ranks upon an errand of subjugation; but there were also men who took their spirit and their principles from the new days that had come since the passage of the Stamp Act, and, though they were driven from their homes and left to shift for themselves for mere subsistence when the King’s forces were afield, they came back again when the King’s men were gone, and played the part, albeit without Indian allies, that the ousted Tories played in the forest country of New York. The English commanders at Savannah and Charleston had hit at last, nevertheless, upon effective means of holding, not their seaports merely, but the country itself. The forces they sent into the interior were made up, for the most part, of men recruited in America, and were under the command of officers fitted by school and temperament for their irregular duty of keeping a whole country-side in fearful discipline of submission. Many a formidable band of “Whigs” took the field against them, but were without a base of supplies, moved among men who spied upon them, and were no match in the long run for Tarleton and Ferguson,—Tarleton with his reckless, sudden onset and savage thoroughness of conquest, and Ferguson with his subtile gifts at once of mastery and of quiet judgment that made him capable of succeeding either as a soldier who compelled or as a gentleman who won men to go his way and do his will. South Carolina seemed once and again to lie almost quiet under these men. [Illustration: LORD CORNWALLIS] [Illustration: WILLIAM WASHINGTON] [Illustration: BANASTRE TARLETON] [Illustration: FRANCIS MARION]