After the battle of King’s Mountain, the Americans from Virginia and from Washington and Sullivan counties, North Carolina, started home with the prisoners, arms, etc., captured in the battle. On the way, about October 12 to 14, a court martial was held at a point called Bickerstaff’s Old Field, in Rutherford county, North Carolina, and some thirty or more of the prisoners were sentenced to be hanged--some for desertion from the American army, others for horse-stealing, and still others for crimes and outrages perpetrated on the people who were supporting the “common cause of liberty.” None of those so sentenced were regular British soldiers; they were North Carolina tories, some of them from Washington and Sullivan counties. Among the latter were Thomas Barker and James Crawford, who were saved from the ignominious death to which they had been sentenced, and which was actually inflicted on nine or ten of the prisoners, by the intervention of their former friends and neighbors who were then present as soldiers in the commands of Sevier and Shelby. Barker and Crawford knew the men who had captured them, and knew that as a class they were both brave and just. Barker’s bearing, during and after the court martial proceedings, was cool and defiant; he said, with much deliberation, that he was not guilty of a single one of the offences charged against him, and that there were more than a hundred men there who knew him and knew his statement to be true; and he added that, if they stood by and permitted him to be hanged for crimes he was incapable of committing, then he was no judge of men. This speech infuriated some of the men from Washington and Sullivan counties and Virginia, and they made some demonstrations of instant violence upon the speaker, who stood with a scowl upon his face, and, holding up his open hands, said quietly: “I am unarmed; you can kill me, but you can’t scare me!” His speech, however, had quite a different effect upon those who knew him at home, those who knew his wife, and especially those who knew him to be a brave, truthful, honest man. Col. Charles Roberson, John McNabb, Charles Allison and John Allison,[G] who had participated in the battle of King’s Mountain, interposed with earnestness and emphasis against hanging Barker and Crawford, and they were supported in their opposition by Col. John Sevier and Col. Isaac Shelby, which of course settled it. Barker was brought back to Jonesboro and put in prison, where he had been kept for a little more than a year and ten months, when his noble wife appeared in court in person, and procured the order granting him a trial by jury, given above.