To the reader who, in the pursuit of the facts in our national history, shall confine himself only to those records which are to be found in the ordinary narrative, much that he reads will be found obscure, and a great deal absolutely untruthful. Our early historians gave themselves but little trouble in searching after details. A general outline was all that they desired, and, satisfied with this, they neither sought after the particular events which should give rise to the narrative, nor into the latent causes which gave birth to many of its actions. In the history of South Carolina, for example, (which was one brimming with details and teeming with incidents,) there is little to be found—as the history is at present written—which shall afford to the reader even a tolerably correct idea of the domestic character of the struggle. We know well enough that the people of the colony were of a singularly heterogeneous character; that the settlers of the lower country were chiefly Cavaliers and Huguenots, or French Protestants, and that the interior was divided into groups, or settlements, of Scotch, Irish, and German. But there is little in the record to show that, of these, the sentiment was mixed and various without degree; and that, with the exception of the parishes of the lower country, which belonged almost wholly, though with slight modifications, to the English church, it was scarcely possible to find any neighborhood, in which there was not something like a civil war. The interior and mountain settlements were most usually divided, and nearly equally, between their attachments to the crown and the colony. A Scotch settlement would make an almost uniform showing in behalf of the English authority—one, two, or three persons, at the utmost, being of the revolutionary party. An Irish settlement (wholly Protestant, be it remembered) would be as unanimous for the colonial movements; while the Germans were but too frequently for the monarchical side, that being represented by a prince of Hanover. The German settlements mostly lay in the Forks of Edisto, and along the Congarees. The business of the present narrative will be confined chiefly to this people. They had settled in rather large families in Carolina, and this only a short period before the Revolution. They had been sent out, in frequent instances, at the expense of the crown, and this contributed to secure their allegiance. They were ignorant of the nature of the struggle, and being wholly agricultural, could not well be taught the nature of grievances which fell chiefly upon commerce and the sea-board. Now, in Carolina, and perhaps throughout the whole south, the Revolution not only originated with the natives of the country, but with the educated portions of the natives. It was what may be termed the gentlemen of the colony—its wealth and aristocracy—with whom and which the movement began; and though it is not our purpose here to go into