“A very marked conservatism pervades all classes of North Carolinians. Attachment to old forms and institutions seems to be deeply implanted in them, as a part of their religion. They almost equal the conservatism of Sydney Smith’s man, who refused to look at the new moon, so great was his regard for the old. . . . North Carolina was, I believe, the last state in the Union to abolish property representation and suffrage in her legislature. The name of the lower branch, house of commons, was only changed in 1868. John Doe and Richard Roe died a violent death and departed our courts at the hands of the carpet-bag invasion the same year. This horde, also, with the most extraordinary perversion of its possible uses, unanimously deposed the whipping-post as a relic of barbarism, to which our people had clung as the great conservator of their goods and chattels.” The present generation of Highlanders may be proud of the revolutionary record of their ancestors, though there were among them numerous tories, the proportion being one King George man to four revolutionists. Representatives from the west are found among the signers of the Mecklenburg declaration of independence in 1775, and by subsequent conduct they proved their enthusiasm in the cause of liberty. Their chief peril was to be apprehended from tory brigands and the Cherokees, incited to blood and cruelty by British agents. The danger was greatest in the summer of 1780, after Lord Cornwallis had made his victorious raid through the South. The liberty men were disheartened, and not a few went over to the tory militia, of which Colonel Patrick Moore appeared as the commander in North Carolina. He published both inducements and threats, as a means of increasing his forces, and was meeting with a degree of success dangerous to the patriot cause, when three companies of old Indian-fighters, under command of Colonels Shelby, McDowell, and Sevier, attacked him, with successful results. This was a small event in itself, but it encouraged the liberty party, and showed the British commander that there was a force in the scattered settlements of the mountain foot-hills which he had reason to fear. Colonel Ferguson, with a nucleus of 100 regulars, had collected a band of 1,200 native Tories, from the foot of the mountains, in South Carolina. His progress northward was “marked with blood, and lighted up with conflagration.” For this reason he was selected to operate against the western settlements of North Carolina. The mountain men made one dashing and successful onslaught on his advancing divisions, and then retired to the mountain fastnesses, for consultation and organization. Ferguson pursued as far as Rutherfordton (then Gilbert town), whence he dispatched a messenger to the patriots with the threat that if they did not lay down their arms he would burn their houses, lay waste their country, and hang their leaders.