Opening paragraphs..........................

      The fighting had been vicious in the Carolinas since the start of the war.  And it was the more vicious for pitting not American against Briton, nor even American against Hessian, but American against American.  John Adams would say that the American Revolution was in the "minds and hearts" of the American people before it produced the armed struggle between the United States and Britain; what Adams neglected to mention was the degree to which those minds and hearts were at odds, one American against another.  In every colony, and then every state, were thousands of men and women who wanted nothing to do with independence.  They valued the freedom and security they had enjoyed under British rule, and they resented the rebel Patriots for bringing on the war.  These Loyalists cast their lot with the mother country; the result was the shattering of trust among neighbors, the rending of families, and the murderous conflict like that convulsing the Carolina backcountry.

-H. W. Brands, Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in The American Revolution