Charlotte in 1780 was small enough to draw on a napkin. Two roads met at the town center, and the Mecklenburg County Court House dominated the intersection. The southern side of the courthouse was lined with pillars connected by a stone wall about three and a half feet high - low enough to vault, tall enough to crouch behind. The wall enclosed the local market, where farmers sold produce and gossip. Davie saw a market wall and read it as a defensive position. He stationed militia behind it, posted cavalry on the east and west sides of the courthouse, and hid twenty men behind a house on the southern road, where the British would come from. The Patriots had no intention of stopping Cornwallis's army. They wanted to bloody his nose.

George Hanger - later the 4th Baron Coleraine, then an aggressive young cavalry officer in Tarleton's British Legion - led the advance into town. He moved fast, he moved boldly, and he moved without his infantry. When the twenty men behind the southern house opened fire, Hanger kept his cavalry charging until heavy fire from the militia behind the stone wall caught him. He was wounded. His men hesitated. Cornwallis, hearing the firing, rode forward and shouted at the Legion to charge again: "Legion, remember you have everything to lose, but nothing to gain." Hanger, when the dust settled, called the encounter "a trifling insignificant skirmish." The casualty estimates depend on whose history you read, but no version of the count is small enough to make his dismissal convincing.

Davie's small force withdrew north toward Salisbury, but Charlotte itself did not stop fighting. Patriot militia harassed the British presence so persistently after the battle that Cornwallis is said to have called the area "a hornet's nest of rebellion" - a phrase Charlotte adopted and has not let go of. The minor-league hockey team is the Charlotte Checkers. The earlier basketball team was the Hornets, then the Bobcats, then the Hornets again. The metaphor stuck because it was accurate. Cornwallis could occupy Charlotte; he could not pacify it. His communication lines were never secure. The countryside was, to use the military euphemism, "unfriendly."

Eleven days after Charlotte, on October 7, 1780, the British left flank under Major Patrick Ferguson was destroyed at the Battle of Kings Mountain - over-mountain men hunting Loyalists into a hilltop kill zone. The Carolina campaign that Cornwallis thought he was winning was actually unraveling. He withdrew from Charlotte to Winnsboro, South Carolina in November, and by the following autumn he was trapped at Yorktown. The skirmish at Trade and Tryon did not change the course of the Revolution by itself. It changed something subtler: it told Cornwallis that the country ahead was going to fight him for every mile. He had been right about Camden. He had been wrong about North Carolina.

Where Davie's militia crouched behind a stone market wall, the Bank of America Corporate Center now rises sixty stories above Trade and Tryon Streets. The intersection is still the geographic center of Charlotte, still the busiest crossroads in Mecklenburg County, still the place tourists ask directions from. There is no courthouse, no stone wall, and no obvious sign of a battle - just office workers crossing in the crosswalks and light rail trains hissing past. But the city named itself for a queen, kept the British king's mother-in-law's name even after independence, and adopted as its mascot the buzz of insects defending a colony. Charlotte does layered identity well.