This August term, 1782, was one long talked of and remembered for more reasons than one. It was the term at which a judge--“the Honl. Spruce McCay Esqr.”--presided for the first time; the term at which three horse-thieves had been tried and sentenced to be executed; the term at which tories had been tried and sentenced to imprisonment, and their property confiscated; the term at which some offenders were sentenced to be, and were, whipped at the public whipping-post.[H] Few, very few women would have gone in person before such a court, to demand that a tory be granted a trial by jury; but Mrs. Antoinette Barker, wife of Thomas Barker, walked into court, with two (possibly three) small children with her. Their appearance was sufficient to excite sympathy: their faces were pale and haggard, and their clothing, although neat, was patched and worn. Mrs. Barker was a woman of fine appearance, with a beautiful face and a symmetrical figure, and more than a match for the court in intelligence; but, depicted in every line of her countenance, were the traces of mental anguish and physical suffering. She did not, however, weep, go into hysterics, faint, fall down and be carried out, but she stood up in the presence of that court, in all the magnificence of superior womanhood, and, with the vehement eloquence of despair, pleaded the cause of her husband. All that she said will never be known; some things that she said were handed down from generation to generation. She “used the Declaration of Independence on the court”; she denied that her husband was a traitor; she reminded the justices that he had stated his views to them openly and boldly, that he had never taken the oath of allegiance to the continental cause, and that he had told them plainly that, if forced to a choice, he would go into the British army; that he was her husband, and a kind and good one, and the father of her little, innocent, helpless children; that they had taken all of his property and left his family paupers; that he was then in prison, and had been for nearly two years, in consequence of which his health was altogether gone; that she and her little ones were without a protector, and that her neighbors and former friends had almost wholly forsaken her. Her face, no doubt, was flushed with the hot blood of agony welling up from her heart; possibly her voice grew weak and broke under the stress of her emotion--but this noble woman won her cause. Her application for the trial of her husband by a jury was granted, and the court immediately adjourned. The record shows it, and the adjourning order is signed by Andrew Greer, James Stewart, Charles Roberson, Charles Allison, Thomas Houghton and John McNabb, four of whom at least had participated in the capture of Thomas Barker at King’s Mountain, and had afterward been present at his trial by court martial.