“We explored our uncultivated wilderness, bordering on many nations of savages, and surrounded by mountains almost inaccessible to any but these savages. But even to these remote regions the hand of power hath pursued us, to strip us of that liberty and property with which God, nature and the rights of humanity have vested us. We are willing to contribute all in our power, if applied to constitutionally, but cannot think of submitting our liberty or property to a venal British Parliament or a corrupt ministry. We are deliberately and resolutely determined never to surrender any of our inestimable privileges to any power upon earth, but at the expense of our lives. These are our real though unpolished sentiments of liberty and loyalty, and in them we are resolved to live and die.” The War of the American Revolution began at Lexington and Concord April 19, 1775 (on the anniversary of which day, eighty-six years afterwards, was the fight at Baltimore). In describing the swift travel of the war message from Massachusetts throughout the Colonies, the historian Bancroft represents it as overleaping bays and rivers and the Dismal Swamp, passing through pines and palmettoes, and transcending hills and mountains. “The Blue Ridge took up the voice and made it heard from one end to the other of the valley of Virginia.” And westward still: “The Alleghanies, as they listened, opened their barriers that the ‘loud call’ might pass through to the hardy riflemen on the Holston, the Watauga and the French Broad,” who, for some years after the beginning of the war, knew that it was going on, but the scenes of its battles were far removed from their secluded homes. The echoes of their wooded hills were now and then awakened by the notes of the “spirit-stirring drum and ear-piercing fife,” but never by any martial sounds from conflicts with arms in the American Revolution. Georgia, in 1779, was brought into subjection to the King. About a hundred patriots, led by Col. Clarke, had fled to the mountaineers for refuge, and obtained helpers in their conflict with the British, in order to renew which, they returned home. Refugee Whigs had also come from east of the Alleghanies to the Washington District, into which North Carolina in 1777 organized the Watauga and adjacent settlements. The accounts given by all these of the persecutions and cruelties inflicted by the British and Tories, had moved the frontier men to friendly sympathy with the sufferers, and to slumbering wrath against the oppressors, and they only needed opportunity to actively join their brethren in the struggle of the Colonies for independence. The summer of 1780 had opened, and that opportunity was soon offered.