He could not “quiet their minds.”

From The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan. Page 95.

“The Scotch Irish and English settlers presented the real danger. The former, traditionally considered as totally for rebellion, had among them a sizeable minority who favored the crown, especially those who had immigrated recently through the port of Charleston. At King’s Creek on the Enoree River in the upper reaches of the Dutch Fork, that large area between the Broad and Saluda Rivers, William Henry Drayton met in debate the two ablest supporters of the King, Robert Cunningham and Thomas Brown. Cunningham was a Scotch Irishman who had migrated south from Pennsylvania to the Saluda River valley. He was a man widely respected and of great influence among many of the Back Country settlers. He may have come down on the side of the Tories out of personal resentment. Cunningham, Moses Kirkland, and James Mayson were candidates for colonel of a Back Country regiment authorized by the Council of Safety. Mayson got the command, and years later the prominent Rebel militia commander, Andrew Pickens, who spoke seldom but never arrived at a judgment idly, said that this “so exasperated the others that they immediately took the other Side of the Question.” Pickens felt that Cunningham would have been the best choice, and if he “had been appointed Colonel at that time, we would not have had so violent an opposition to our cause in this Country.

Thomas Brown was a man of some means who had immigrated to Georgia from Yorkshire in 1774. On the same day that Drayton left Charleston for the Back Country, Brown had faced alone about 100 Sons of Liberty at a friend’s house near Augusta, about forty-five miles southeast of Ninety Six. He described what happened in a letter to his father of 10 November 1775. When he refused to declare for the cause the mob rushed him. Brown shot “their Ringleader,” Chesley Bostick, through the foot, and when they took his pistols he drew his sword and “kept them at bay for some time,” but a “cowardly miscreant” hit him in the back of the head with a rifle butt and fractured his skull The blow would leave Thomas Brown with headaches for life, and exposed him to immediate indignities that aroused the passions of Tories and gave him the nickname of was "Burntfoot” Brown to Rebels, who recalled it for many years after the Revolution. The Rebels ransacked his house. They tarred his legs and held his feet over burning wood. They used knives to cut off his hair and then scalped him. He lost two toes, and it was many months before he could walk normally. The Georgia Council of Safety thought the affair highly amusing: “The said Thomas Brown is now a little remarkable, wears his hair very short and a handkerchief around his head in order that his intellect . . . may not be affected.”

Thomas Brown, however, was made of stern stuff. His travail occurred on 2 August, yet on 15 August he was in South Carolina debating William Henry Drayton, who referred to him as Robert Cunningham’s “worthy companion of tar and feather memory.” Thomas Brown would lose all in the end and start life anew in the Bahamas, but before the war was over many a Rebel would pay dearly for Brown’s pain and humiliation. He and Robert Cunningham were intelligent leaders, and Brown was tough to boot. They had many followers, and also working for them was the desire of many others to be left alone by both parties, and the feeling that would live for a century or more after the Revolution that Charleston and the “gentlemen below” could not be trusted. At the debate at King’s Creek, Brown read to the crowd Sir John Dalrymple’s Address of the People of Great Britain to the Inhabitants of America. Dalrymple, a lawyer in Lord North’s cabinet, pointed out the great dangers of revolt: the power of the British military, the possibility of a slave revolt, the economic consequences. He argued that the differences between England and the colonies could be settled without difficulty. He also included a sentence that would have instant meaning to the settlers. “It is hard that the charge of our intending to enslave you should come oftenest from the mouths of those lawyers who in your southern provinces at least, have long made you slaves to themselves.” At meeting after meeting Drayton harangued the people, but he could not “quiet their minds.”