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Updated: June 14, 2025
"I saw," said Jackson, "more than five hundred Britons emerging from the heaps of their dead comrades, all over the plain, rising up, and still more distinctly visible as the field became clearer, coming forward and surrendering to our soldiers." Here was revenge, indeed, for the sufferings of little Andy in the Waxhaws, for the sabre cut on his head, for his brothers, for his mother.
The world is a storybook to a lad of nine, and the thought of Charlestown filled me with a delight unspeakable. Perchance he would leave me in Charlestown. At nightfall we came into a settlement called the Waxhaws. And there being no tavern there, and the mare being very jaded and the roads heavy, we cast about for a place to sleep.
Tarleton's troopers, known as the British Tory Legion, needed no introduction to Virginians. They had slaughtered without quarter unarmed Virginians under Colonel Abraham Buford in May 1780 at the Waxhaws, south of Charlotte, North Carolina. From then on he was known as "Bloody Tarleton". Congress elected Horatio Gates to replace Lincoln in the southern command.
Then I remembered a slim, wild, sandy-haired boy digging his toes in the red mud long ago at the Waxhaws Settlement. And I recalled with a smile my own fierce struggle at the schoolhouse with the same boy, and how his slobbering had been my salvation. I turned and went in after him with the landlord, who was rubbing his hands with glee.
General Jackson was a boy at the Waxhaws and dug his toes in the red mud. He was a man at Jonesboro, and tradition says that he fought with a fence-rail. Sevier was captured as narrated. Monsieur Gratiot, Monsieur Vigo, and Father Gibault lost the money which they gave to Clark and their country.
In 1780, shortly after Gates' defeat, he joined Captain William Alexander's company, and Colonel Thomas Polk's regiment, under General Davie, marched to the Waxhaws, and was in the engagement fought there against the Tories. He again served under Captain William Alexander, as one of the guard over wagons sent to Fayetteville to procure salt for the army.
To Phillips it fell to carry the momentous news to his own Tennessee country and thence down the Mississippi to New Orleans. That the task was undertaken with all due energy is sufficiently attested in a letter written by a Baptist clergyman at Lexington, North Carolina, to a friend, who happened to have been one of Jackson's old teachers at the Waxhaws.
Jackson," said I, "doubtless you do not remember a homeless boy named David whom you took to your uncle's house in the Waxhaws " "I do," he exclaimed, "as I live I do. Why, we slept together." "And you stumped your toe getting into bed and swore," said I. At that he laughed so heartily that the landlord came running across the room. "And we fought together at the Old Fields School.
That officer, by making a movement of near one hundred miles in two days, overtook Buford, in a line of march, at the Waxhaws, and demanded a surrender on the terms which had been granted to the garrison of Charleston. This was refused.
But for those who would rather understand than judge him it surely cannot seem a small thing that he started out in life with such a heritage of bitter memories, such a schooling in hatred, as few children were ever cursed with. Passion and revenge are wrong, of course, but the sandy-haired, pockmarked lad of the Waxhaws had better excuse than most boys for failing to learn that lesson.
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