The Rhetoric of Revenge: Atrocity and Identity in the Revolutionary Carolinas
Journal of Backcountry Studies The Rhetoric of Revenge: Atrocity and Identity in the Revolutionary Carolinas BY BEN RUBIN Thomas Young remembered exactly where he was on Saturday, October 14, 1780. Years later, he would mark it down in his memoirs as the day he finally saw a band of infamous criminals brought to justice. “A few days after the battle [of King’s Mountain],” he began, “a court martial was held to try some of the Tories who were known to be of the most outrageous and blood-thirsty character. About twenty were found guilty, but ten received a pardon or respite.”1 As it happened, on that same day, the 14, of October, Anthony Allaire witnessed a mass murder. He calmly noted it in his diary: Saturday, 14th. Twelve field officers were chosen to try the militia prisoners-particularly those who had the most influence in the country. They condemned thirty-in the evening they began to execute Lieut.-Col Mills, Capt. Wilson, Capt. Chitwood, and six others, who unfortunately fell a sacrifice to their infamous mock jury. Mills, Wilson and Chitwood died like Romans.2 The incidents these two men observed were one in the same. Allaire’s account was hastily scribbled in the heat of the moment, probably that very day or the day after, while Young’s was a recollection penned in old age, sixty-three years after the fact. Yet not a single one of the facts in the two short narratives differ. Nine men were put on trial, convicted and put to death. But the nature of the incident and the way each of the two young witnesses internalized it into his interpretation of the drama he was living through could not have differed more.
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