The handshake on the road

The story, from several sources

This account blends Rothbard’s chapter with the other sources listed below and has not yet been separated into Rothbard’s own account and the fuller story. Read Rothbard’s chapter 60 for his account.

After Greene’s army crossed the Dan, Cornwallis fell back to Hillsborough and on 20 February invited every loyal subject in North Carolina to join him. Dr. John Pyle, a country physician, answered by gathering 400 mounted recruits to ride to the British camp. Greene sent Henry Lee’s Legion and Andrew Pickens’s militia back across the river to find them. Lee’s dragoons wore short green jackets and plumed helmets, exactly like Tarleton’s, and when Pyle’s men met them on the road they cheered the reinforcements they had been told to expect. Lee sent his compliments and asked Pyle to draw his men up beside the road to let his tired troops pass. Then he rode up smiling and shook Pyle’s hand, with Pickens’s militia waiting in the trees. A few minutes later the Tories were broken, and most were killed or wounded. Not one American was hurt. Rothbard calls it a massacre and says it dried up Tory recruiting in the state. Cornwallis, who had marched into North Carolina to rally the king’s friends, found at Hillsborough that they had learned what a recruit’s muster could cost. Greene wrote that the blow had a very happy effect on the disaffected, and Pickens that it had knocked up Toryism altogether in that part of the country. As local legend has it, Pyle himself crawled into a pond and hid there until he was found.