This obelisk is the monument located at Kings Mountain. We have looked at a couple of the plaques at the base before and even talked about the battle some in a previous post. This monument is located at the top of the “mountain” and it is quite a sight to see. The battle and people who it memorialize though is an interesting story in and off itself.

At the time of the revolution that Southern colonies were a society that was fractured along many different lines. The planter class in the tidewater regions did not think much of the people in the interior, which led to political issues well before the first shots were fired.  The families in the back country tended to be more recent immigrants, many Scots, Scots-Irish and some German groups.  All of these groups tended to be clan based, family based and a lot of the times they did not necessary like their neighbors.

When the war broke out, the back country erupted into a true civil war as many of these clans took the chance to settle old scores with rivals and the opportunity to increase their own standing. For the most part, patriot or loyalist was more an issue of being on the side opposite your “enemy” so that whatever you dis to them could be justified as “for the cause”.  Some families simply jumped back and forth with their support depending on which army was closest and what they had to gain by it.

By the time that British troops had taken Charleston and started moving into the interior, there had been somewhat of a lull in the fighting as both sides found themselves fighting the Cherokee, Once that fight was done whoever they turned back to killing each other.

Kings Mountain stand out in the line of bloody conflict for one main reason, it was fought by the two sides with no regular troops. Every man engaged was militia and American, with the exception of Patrick Ferguson, the British commander. That fact made the battle unique. The victory also served as the pivot point for the war. From that point on, especially in the South, the number of loyalists willing to fight dwindled robbing the British army a source of badly needed manpower.

Bloody and terrible Kings Mountain stand above many other battles in the South. Interesting enough, of the men that survived the fight about fourscore and seven years later their descendants would be involved in another war, this time mostly fighting on the same side this time around.