Patrick Ferguson, a Scottish major commanding a force of American Loyalists, had spent the summer of 1780 patrolling the Carolina backcountry on Cornwallis's left flank. He was an inventive officer - he had designed a breech-loading rifle that the British army declined to adopt - and a hard one. When he heard that bands of frontier Patriots beyond the Blue Ridge had been raiding his outposts, Ferguson sent a paroled prisoner across the mountains with a message: lay down your arms, or he would march his army over the mountains, burn their settlements, and hang their leaders. The Watauga and Holston settlers received the threat at the end of September. They responded by raising every rifleman they could find and crossing the mountains in the other direction.

Roughly nine hundred mounted riflemen from what is now eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, and southwestern Virginia gathered at Sycamore Shoals on September 25. They were militia under their own elected colonels - John Sevier, Isaac Shelby, William Campbell, Charles McDowell, Benjamin Cleveland - with no Continental Army commander present. They wore hunting shirts. They carried long Pennsylvania rifles, accurate to twice the range of a British musket. They brought their own horses and their own provisions. For ten days they rode east through the mountains in cold autumn rain, picking up additional militia on the way. By the time they caught Ferguson, they numbered about a thousand. Ferguson, learning he was being chased, had retreated toward Cornwallis at Charlotte and made his stand on a narrow wooded ridge along the Carolina border, a place the locals called Kings Mountain.

Ferguson chose his ground badly. The ridge was steep but the slopes were thickly wooded, giving the climbing riflemen cover that Ferguson's musket-armed Loyalists, drawn up on the open summit, did not have. The Patriots arrived on the afternoon of October 7, 1780, dismounted, and surrounded the hill. They climbed from all sides, firing from behind trees, picking off officers, falling back when Ferguson's bayonet charges came down at them, then climbing again as soon as the bayonets returned to the top. Ferguson rode back and forth across the crest in a checkered hunting shirt, signaling with a silver whistle. Sharpshooters marked him. He was hit by eight bullets and killed instantly. With Ferguson dead, his second-in-command tried to surrender. Some Patriots accepted; others, shouting "Tarleton's quarter" - the Loyalist phrase from Waxhaws, where Tarleton had refused mercy - kept firing. Around 290 Loyalists were killed and 163 wounded; some 668 were taken prisoner. The Patriots lost 28 dead and 62 wounded.

Cornwallis, when he heard the news, abandoned his advance into North Carolina and retreated south. The Loyalist militia he had counted on to hold the Carolinas - the entire strategic premise of the British southern campaign - evaporated. Nine of the captured Loyalist officers were tried summarily and hanged a few days later at Bickerstaff's farm, an act of frontier reprisal the Patriot colonels could not fully control. Three months later at Cowpens, just 30 miles southwest of Kings Mountain, Daniel Morgan would destroy Banastre Tarleton's force. Three months after that came Guilford Courthouse, then Yorktown. The Battle of Kings Mountain itself is preserved today on a quiet wooded ridge straddling the Carolina border, where in 1930, on the sesquicentennial of the battle, President Herbert Hoover spoke to 75,000 people about what he called "a place of inspiring memories." A monument marks where he stood.