Alice Bell Costner 1954

For the grandchildren, a little revisionist history:

With its 29 March 1976 cover the New Yorker poked fun at its own reputation for provinciality, but in the 20 & 27 December 2010 issue Caleb Crain perpetuated another debilitating provinciality, the American Revolution as recorded by New Englanders. In this story the war was won by English colonists with the help of a few New York Dutchmen, and the southernmost victory was at Trenton, New Jersey. Southerners, of course, know that the turning point of the war was the Battle at King’s Mountain, which was won by Scots with the help of a few Germans. Older Southerners who still “take umbrage” at outrages are taking just that from Crain’s blithe dismissal of pre-war casualties: “British troops did kill a few of Americans over the years, but even the so-called Boston Massacre . . . seems to have been a case not of malice but of soldiers panicking in the midst of a crowd throwing snowballs and sticks.”

In Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), Marjoleine Kars sums up the slaughter at the Battle of Alamance in May, 1771 in which the Regulators faced off against the British Governor William Tryon: “Estimates of the dead and wounded vary; possibly as many as 20 Regulators were killed in battle, along with about 9 militiamen. Altogether, more than 150 men were wounded, many seriously.” Afterwards, Tryon publicly hanged six of the Regulators outside Hillsborough. Alice Bell’s Regulator GGG Grandfather Argulus Hercules Henderson knew the cost of pre-Revolutionary dead, although he may not have been at the battle, and although he lived to see his son Ezekiel volunteer for two long terms in the Patriot army and come safely home. I can’t banish the Massachusetts-centered history of the Revolution with one set of posts on a blog, but this little series is for Argulus and Ezekiel, as well as Alice Bell’s crowd of ancestors and uncles at the all-important battle at King’s Mountain. (Her husband had folks there to, but not direct ancestors.)

From a family point of view, what’s interesting is that the battle at King’s Mountain was won, really, by the Overmountain Men who took umbrage at what the British threatened against their houses and women and came down from the SE corner of Tennessee then won the battle with the help of a few locals in a strongly Whig area. The Ewart clan were locals, so close to the site of battle that Robert Ewart’s sister, married to an Adams (a cousin, it seems), passed into family lore by riding an unruly stallion 12 miles through Whig farms the day after the battle to see if her husband and son (not to mention brother and nephews by blood and marriage) were alive. The day after the battle was a Sunday, and she arrived to find the men, all good Presbyterians, passing a jug around and (this is hard for me to repeat) playing cards. Nevertheless, she stayed to nurse the wounded.