And I was exceptionally lucky in this discovery, for the cautious hero of the story is a first cousin of mine, a few times removed. Martin Dellinger (the usual spelling) was a German immigrant who had come down the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania. Our modern Cousin David Dellinger, of the Chicago Seven, bragged about his heroic Massachusetts Revolutionary ancestry. On rare visits South in boyhood he found his elderly North Carolina relatives to be kind but uninteresting farmers. His Southern ancestor Martin had behaved strategically in 1759 by hiding in his field of rye and the Central North Carolina patriots had responded with extraordinary sympathy toward their Massachusetts fellows when news came down from April 1775. Two Dellingers heroically signed the Tryon County "Association” in August 1775--which could have been their death warrants. According to Christian Arney's pension application, Captain John Dellinger (uncle and brother-in-law of my Revolutionary Costners) led his company "through Burke County to the Turkey Cove in pursuit of Indians." The modern David was brave too--see John Carroll Lynch’s portrayal of him in the 2020 The Trial of the Chicago 7. Brave, but like most New Englander historians, barely aware that the South had played any role in the Revolution before Yorktown. The North never evinced any empathy or sympathy for their Southern fellows the way the South responded to news from Lexington.
The conflict did not stop in the end of the French and Indian War, 1763. The Colonial Records for Gaston County of March 1771 shows the pay-roll for an expedition against the Cherokees led by Frederick Hambright (hero of King's Mountain and ancestor of many of my kinfolks), along with my uncle John Hoyle and his brother Andrew, my grandfather Peter Costner and his Patriot brother Uncle Jacob Costner, who were Hoyle's brothers-in-law. Details of this raid on the Cherokees have not been located. The expedition may not have been the only one in these years. This early, the band was forming, men who signed the "Association" in 1775 and fought along with the Over-Mountain men at King's Mountain on 7 October 1780. They were locals, neighbors already intermarrying and usually fighting together.
In February 1776, soon after the Revolution started, North Carolina Patriot militias (many from the northwest corner of the state) gathered to oppose the Scottish Highlanders at Cross Creek (later named Fayetteville, for the great Frenchman). These Highlanders were recent arrivals from Scotland, but some of the wealthiest among them, absentee landlords, came directly from London. Some of the oldest were refugees from Culloden, now loyal to George III. Most of the Patriot militia men had been born in the colonies, mainly in Pennsylvania or North Carolina, sons or grandsons of Scottish immigrants from Ireland, where they and their own ancestors had been exiled by James I and kept there by later rulers as an expendable buffer against the Catholic natives. In North Carolina even these Scots from Ireland called the new Cross Creek immigrants “Scotch,” not identifying with them. The Patriot Scots had begun to think of themselves as Irish, they or their ancestors having come from Ireland, most often. Two centuries later a part Choctaw great aunt misled me by saying that her father, John Rogers, was "a full-blooded Irishman." His paternal ancestors were Scottish but his mother (he may not have known) was German, descended from the Pennsylvania Dutch. Families forget. All I say about kinsmen in this chapter is among what I discovered in the last 2 decades.
When the militiamen hurried east early in 1776, my cousins from the northwestern North Carolina mountains marveled at the ground under their feet, for they had never walked on sand. Their victory at Moore’s Creek Bridge at Cross Creek was so decisive that the surviving loyal eastern Highlanders went docile for a long time along with other loyalists in that region. There had been a time, recently, when many of the older eastern colonists had been enraged against the corruption of British officials in the colony. In 1771 one signer of a “Regulator” petition was my Scottish Grandfather Argulus Henderson, whose land has been absorbed by Camp Lejeune. After brutally crushing the rebellion, the British governor had required many petitioners to take oaths to support the king. Oaths were taken solemnly then in contrast the way many politicians take oaths of office today. Respect for their oaths, which were not casual or politic but profoundly religious, kept many older settlers quiescent early in the war, especially after Moore’s Creek Bridge.
The western Patriot Scots shook the sand from their boots and went back to their homes up against southwestern Virginia and what became eastern Tennessee. The older ones or their parents had bought land second-hand at reasonable prices from an aristocratic recipient of the King’s bounty and were still grateful. They were not focused on the long-standing complaints against King George that had roused eastern North Carolinians in 1771. They were not tea drinkers and cared little about any tax on the tea leaves. They rarely had to pay for stamps on legal documents, even if that meant they became careless about strict legalities. Did Presbyterians need to search out an Anglican minister and pay him to marry you? Show me an Anglican in Surry County! The North Carolina militia, you might have thought, having tasted triumph at Cross Creek, could have gone to the defense of New York or New Jersey during the next years. That did not happen. Tory manned and British led actions continued in South Carolina, but North Carolina Patriots were not engaged in another significant battle against the British and Loyalists in 1776, or in 1777, or in 1778, or in 1779. You almost could say that they were opportunists.
During the years before the war the North Carolinians had pushed the Cherokees back toward and at points over the Blue Ridge Mountains. In March 1775 Richard Henderson and Daniel Boone privately negotiated the extra-legal Treaty of Sycamore Shoals which opened much of western Virginia (that is, Kentucky) and North Carolina (that is, Tennessee) to white settlement. This treaty violated a Royal Proclamation as well as edicts of colony authorities, but there was no way for the proper authorities to interfere. Cherokees, especially, resented being pushed back from the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the previous interim boundary. So rather than worrying about tax on tea or stamps for documents, western Carolinians (North and South) were concerned about the Indians who might, every few months, make forays into land they had just been pushed out of and might scalp a few pioneering families as they had done in 1759, in Cousin Martin’s time, and still did
It was easy, and had been very easy since the French and Indian War, to stir up the western counties against the Cherokees, and recently against representatives of the British, who were not protecting the colony and not regularly negotiating strenuously for more Cherokee land. In South Carolina the colonial government in Charleston as late as 1773 routinely granted parcels
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