Joseph McJunkin was one of the men who had refused to surrender. He had risen from private to major in the militia regiment from the Union district of South Carolina. After the fall of Charleston, he and his friends hid gunpowder and ammunition in hollow logs and thickets. But in June 1780, they were badly beaten by a battalion of loyalist neighbors and fled across the Broad River. They were joined by men from the Spartan, Laurens, and Newberry districts. At the Presbyterian Meeting House on Bullocks Creek, they debated whether to accept British protection. McJunkin and a few other men rose and vowed they would fight on. Finally someone asked those who wanted to fight to throw up their hats and clap their hands. “Every hat went up and the air resounded with clapping and shouts of defiance,” McJunkin recalled. [Illustration: Short, disciplined to the life of a soldier, yet plain and gentle in manner, Francis Marion (the figure at left) was equally brilliant as an officer of regulars and a partisan leader of militia. To the British he was as elusive as a fox, marching his brigade at night, rarely sleeping twice in the same camp, and vanishing into the swamps when opposed by a larger force.] A few days later, these men met Thomas Sumter, a former colonel in the South Carolina Continentals. He had fled to western South Carolina after the British burned his plantation. The holdouts asked him his opinion of the situation. “Our interests are the same. With me it is liberty or death,” he said. They elected him their general and went to war. Elsewhere in South Carolina, other men coalesced around another former Continental officer, Francis Marion. Still others followed Elijah Clarke, who operated along the border between South Carolina and Georgia. These partisans, seldom numbering more than 500 men and often as few as 50, struck at British outposts and supply routes and attacked groups of loyalists whom the British were arming and trying to organize into militia regiments. The British and loyalists grew exasperated. After the battle of Camden, Lord Cornwallis declared that anyone who signed a British parole and then switched sides would be hanged without a trial if captured. If a man refused to serve in the loyalist militia, he would be imprisoned and his property confiscated. At a convention of loyalist militia regiments on August 23, 1780, the members resolved that these orders should be ruthlessly applied. They added one other recommendation. Anyone who refused to serve in the king’s militia should be drafted into the British regulars, where he would be forced to fight whether he liked it or not.