During the latter half of the year, when danger from the Indians had temporarily ceased, Sevier and Shelby led down bands of mounted riflemen to assist the American forces in the Carolinas and Georgia.  They took an honorable share under Marion in some skirmishes against the British and Hessians but they did not render any special service, and Greene found he could place no reliance on them for the actual stubborn campaigns that broke the strength of the king’s armies.  They enlisted for very short periods, and when their time was up promptly returned to their mountains, for they were sure to get home-sick and uneasy about their families; and neither the officers nor the soldiers had any proper idea of the value of obedience.  Among their own hills and forests and for their own work, they were literally unequalled; and they were ready enough to swoop down from their strongholds, strike some definite blow, or do some single piece of valiant fighting in the low country, and then fall back as quickly as they had come.  But they were not particularly suited for a pitched battle in the open, and were quite unfitted to carry on a long campaign. [Footnote:  Shelby MSS.  Of course Shelby paints these skirmishes in very strong colors.  Haywood and Ramsey base their accounts purely on his papers.]; [Footnote:  Ramsey and his followers endeavor to prove that the mountain men did excellently in these 1781 campaigns; but the endeavor is futile.  They were good for some one definite stroke, but their shortcomings were manifest the instant a long campaign was attempted; and the comments of the South Carolina historians upon their willingness to leave at unfortunate moments are on the whole just.  They behaved somewhat as Stark and the victors at Bennington did when they left the American army before Saratoga; although their conduct was on the whole better than that of Stark’s men.  They were a brave, hardy, warlike band of irregulars, probably better fighters than any similar force on this continent or elsewhere; but occasional brilliant exceptions must not blind us to the general inefficiency of the Revolutionary militia, and their great inferiority to the Continentals of Washington, Greene, and Wayne.  See Appendix.]

In one respect the mountain men deserve great credit for their conduct in the Carolinas.  As a general thing they held aloof from the plundering.  The frightful character of the civil war between the whigs and tories, and the excesses of the British armies, had utterly demoralized the southern States; they were cast into a condition of anarchic disorder, and the conflicts between the patriots and loyalists degenerated into a bloody scramble for murder and plunder wherein the whigs behaved as badly as ever the tories had done. [Footnote:  In the Clay MSS. there is a letter from Jesse Benton (the father of the great Missouri Senator) to Col.  Thos.  Hart, of March 23d, 1783, which gives a glimpse of the way in which the tories were treated even after the British had been driven out; it also shows how soon maltreatment of royalists was turned into general misrule and rioting.  The letter runs, in part, as follows: