The camp surrounded

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 53 for his account.

On 23 December 1778 the British landed below Savannah, and by February all of Georgia was under their control. Colonel Boyd, a leading North Carolina Tory, set out to bring seven hundred Scottish Loyalists to join them. He plundered as he marched, which won the king few friends, and crossed the Savannah River into Georgia. At Kettle Creek the Loyalists made camp on a rocky hill in a bend of the creek, with cattle penned for the pot and their horses grazing. On Sunday, 14 February, Pickens and the Georgia colonels Dooly and Clarke came up on them. Rothbard says fewer than 300 South Carolina militia surrounded the camp on three sides and fell on it by surprise; in the other accounts the numbers are larger, and Pickens’s advance guard fired the first shots. The Tories broke. Boyd was killed and the rest fled across the creek. Seventy-five captives were tried for treason in South Carolina and all condemned, but seventy were pardoned and five leading Tories hanged, a lesson, Rothbard says, to the back country. Pickens, a dour young Presbyterian elder, became one of the finest guerrilla leaders of the war, and with Beaufort the same month the victory turned Georgia’s back country toward the patriots.