By the summer of 1780, the Patriot cause in the South appeared finished. In May, British forces captured the only significant American army in the region at Charleston, South Carolina, and swiftly occupied four key seats of government: Camden, Cheraw, Georgetown, and Ninety Six. Sir Henry Clinton, believing South Carolina fully pacified, then made a catastrophic miscalculation. He abrogated the terms of surrender that had allowed paroled Patriots to remain neutral. Under his proclamation of June 3, 1780, every man in the colony was compelled to swear an oath of loyalty to the king or be treated as a rebel and enemy. Clinton departed for New York, leaving Lord Cornwallis in command. The proclamation, intended to consolidate British control, had the opposite effect. Men who had been willing to sit out the war now had to choose a side. Many chose the one that allowed them to keep their rifles.

Lieutenant-Colonel George Turnbull, commanding the British outpost at Rocky Mount on the upper Catawba River, dispatched Captain Christian Huck into the backcountry in early July with orders to find rebel leaders and persuade residents to swear allegiance. Huck was a poor choice for persuasion. A Pennsylvania Loyalist whose property had been confiscated by Patriots after the British evacuated Philadelphia, he carried deep personal bitterness. He particularly despised the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who dominated the region. His troops burned the home and library of Reverend John Simpson, a Patriot leader and Presbyterian minister. They destroyed William Hill's ironworks. At compulsory public meetings, Huck unleashed blasphemous tirades that spread through the settlements like wildfire. His detachment -- about 35 British Legion dragoons, 20 New York Volunteers, and 60 Loyalist militia -- moved through the New Acquisition District leaving outrage in their wake.

On July 11, 1780, Huck raided the home of partisan leader Captain John McClure on Fishing Creek. He captured McClure's brother and brother-in-law with newly made bullets and sentenced them to hang at sunrise. That evening, his detachment arrived at the plantation of Colonel William Bratton, another Patriot militia leader who was not home. One of Huck's soldiers pressed a reaping hook to the throat of Bratton's wife, Martha, demanding to know her husband's whereabouts. She refused to talk. Huck's second-in-command intervened and disciplined the soldier, but the damage was done. Their six-year-old son, William Jr., would remember the scene more than fifty years later -- a boy "clinging to his mothers dress and transfixed with horror and fright." Huck arrested three elderly neighbors, including Bratton's older brother Robert, and promised them execution alongside the McClure prisoners. He then moved a quarter mile southeast to the plantation of James Williamson, where his 115 men made camp. Five prisoners were locked in a corncrib to await the morning.

Intelligence came from two sources: John McClure's younger sister Mary, and a Bratton family slave named Watt. Both carried word of Huck's location to the Patriot militia gathering in the countryside. About 150 arrived near Williamson's plantation that night, led by experienced militia officers. After reconnaissance and discussion, they agreed to attack from three directions simultaneously. Huck's security was astonishingly lax. Shortly after sunrise on July 12, at least two Patriot groups struck at once. Many Loyalists were still asleep. The partisans rested their rifles on a split-rail fence and, as one account put it, "took unerring and deadly aim" at men stumbling from their tents. Huck mounted a horse to rally his troops and was shot in the head by John Carroll, who had loaded two balls in his rifle. Tarleton later reported that only 24 of Huck's men escaped. Patriot losses were one killed and one wounded. The five prisoners were freed from the corncrib unharmed.

The numbers at Williamson's plantation were small -- 250 Patriots against roughly 115 Loyalists -- but the significance was enormous. South Carolina historian Walter Edgar has called Huck's Defeat "a major turning point in the American Revolution in South Carolina." For the first time, frontier militia had defeated soldiers of the feared British Legion. The entire backcountry, Edgar wrote, "seemed to take heart." Volunteers streamed in to join the partisan militia brigade of Brigadier General Thomas Sumter. Huck's Defeat was the first of more than thirty-five important engagements in South Carolina in late 1780 and early 1781, all but five of which were Patriot victories. This chain of backcountry successes -- fueled by local knowledge, personal grievance, and the kind of cold-eyed marksmanship that comes from a lifetime of hunting in the Carolina woods -- proved essential to the major American victories at King's Mountain and Cowpens. The historical record, as historian Michael Scoggins has noted, is almost entirely one-sided, written by the victors. But on that July morning, the victors were farmers with rifles, and they changed the course of a revolution.