Volume I Part 19 (1/2)

16. Four hundred acres were gained at the price of $2.50 per 100 acres, by merely building a cabin and raising a crop of corn; and every settler with such a ”cabin right” had likewise a preemption right to 1,000 acres adjoining, for a cost that generally approached forty dollars a hundred.

17. In Mr. Phelan's scholarly ”History of Tennessee,” pp. 202-204, etc., there is an admirably clear account of the way in which Tennessee inst.i.tutions (like those of the rest of the Southwest) have been directly and without a break derived from English inst.i.tutions; whereas many of those of New England are rather pre-Normanic revivals, curiously paralleled in England as it was before the Conquest.

18. Boon's deposition, July 29, 1795.

19. Mann Butler, p. 31.

20. Henderson's Journal. The beauty of the elm impressed him very greatly. According to the list of names eighteen, not seventeen, members were elected; but apparently only seventeen took part in the proceedings.

21. Henderson's Journal.

22. ”Our game, the only support of life amongst many of us, and without which the country would be abandoned ere to-morrow.” Henderson's address.

23. Journal of the Proceedings of the House of Delegates or Representatives of the Colony of Transylvania.

24. Possibly in 1775, certainly in 1776; MS. autobiography of Rev. Wm.

Hickman. In Durrett's library.

25. ”Life of Rev. Charles Nerinckx,” by Rev. Camillus P. Maes, Cincinnati, 1880, p. 67.

26. Smyth, p. 330.

27. Gov. James T. Morehead's ”address” at Boonsborough, in 1840 (Frankfort, Ky., 1841).

28. _Do._, p. 51. Mrs. Boon, Mrs. Denton, Mrs. McGarry, Mrs. Hogan; all were from the North Carolina backwoods; their ancestry is shown by their names. They settled in Boonsborough and Harrodsburg.

29. Like Logan he was born in Pennsylvania, of Presbyterian Irish stock.

He had received a good education.

30. Morehead, p. 52.

31. Shelby's MS. autobiography, in Durrett's Library at Louisville.

32. These frontiersmen called a stream a ”run,” ”branch,” ”creek,” or ”fork,” but never a ”brook,” as in the northeast.

33. ”History of Lexington,” G. W. Ranck, Cincinnati, 1872, p. 19. The town was not permanently occupied till four years later.

CHAPTER XI.

IN THE CURRENT OF THE REVOLUTION--THE SOUTHERN BACKWOODSMEN OVERWHELM THE CHEROKEES, 1776.

The great western drift of our people began almost at the moment when they became Americans, and ceased to be merely British colonists. They crossed the great divide which sundered the springs of the seaboard rivers from the sources of the western waters about the time that American citizens first publicly acted as American freemen, knit together by common ties, and with interests no longer akin to those of the mother country. The movement which was to make the future nation a continental power was begun immediately after the hitherto separate colonies had taken the first step towards solidification. While the communities of the sea-coast were yet in a fever heat from the uprising against the stamp tax, the first explorers were toiling painfully to Kentucky, and the first settlers were building their palisaded hamlets on the banks of the Watauga. The year that saw the first Continental Congress saw also the short, grim tragedy of Lord Dunmore's war. The early battles of the Revolution were fought while Boon's comrades were laying the foundations of their commonwealth.

Hitherto the two chains of events had been only remotely connected; but in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, the struggle between the king and his rebellious subjects shook the whole land, and the men of the western border were drawn headlong into the full current of revolutionary warfare. From that moment our politics became national, and the fate of each portion of our country was thenceforth in some sort dependent upon the welfare of every other. Each section had its own work to do; the east won independence while the west began to conquer the continent. Yet the deeds of each were of vital consequence to the other.

Was.h.i.+ngton's Continentals gave the west its freedom; and took in return for themselves and their children a share of the land that had been conquered and held by the scanty bands of tall backwoodsmen.

The backwoodsmen, the men of the up-country, were, as a whole, ardent adherents of the patriot or American side. Yet there were among them many loyalists or tories; and these tories included in their ranks much the greatest portion of the vicious and the disorderly elements. This was the direct reverse of what obtained along portions of the seaboard, where large numbers of the peaceable, well-to-do people stood loyally by the king. In the up-country, however, the Presbyterian Irish, with their fellows of Calvinistic stock and faith, formed the back-bone of the moral and order-loving element; and the Presbyterian Irish[1] were almost to a man staunch and furious upholders of the Continental Congress. Naturally, the large bands of murderers, horse-thieves, and other wild outlaws, whom these grim friends of order hunted down with merciless severity, were glad to throw in their lot with any party that promised revenge upon their foes. But of course there were lawless characters on both sides; in certain localities where the crop of jealousies, always a rank backwoods growth, had been unusually large, and had therefore produced long-standing and bitter feuds,[2] the rival families espoused opposite sides from sheer vindictive hatred of one another. As a result, the struggle in the backwoods between tories and whigs, king's-men and congress-men,[3] did not merely turn upon the questions everywhere at stake between the American and British parties.

It was also in part a fight between the law-abiding and the lawless, and in part a slaking of savage personal animosities, wherein the borderers glutted their vengeance on one another. They exercised without restraint the right of private warfare, long abandoned in more civilized regions.

It was natural that such a contest should be waged with appalling ferocity.