All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence

CHAPTER I "BLOODY EDGEFIELD" Edgefield . . . has had more dashing, brilliant, Romantic figures, statesmen, orators, soldiers, adventurers, daredevils, than any county of South Carolina, if not any rural county in America . . . They gave to their village and county a character that was South Carolinian, more intense, more fiery, than was found elsewhere. William Watts Bell, The State That Forgot IN EARLY NOVEMBER 1781, with the outcome of the American Revolution much in doubt, Captain James Butler of the South Carolina militia got word that a raiding party of Tory loyalists had seized a herd of cattle and a bevy of horses from his neighbors. His fellow settlers at Mount Willing, little more than a forest clearing in the backcountry wilderness, urged him to lead a force to pursue the marauders. Butler demurred. He had been released from eighteen months in a British jail in Charleston only weeks before. He had suffered enough, he said, and his farm needed tending. Butler had immigrated to the South Carolina backcountry in the early 1760s over the great wagon trail that led from Pennsylvania through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, then the most heavily traveled road in America. With him came his wife, two sisters, and a growing family, which now numbered eight children in all. The Butlers were of Scotch-Irish descent, part of a huge wave of 250,000 immigrants who arrived in Pennsylvania between 1715 and 1775 from the north of England, Scotland, and northern Ireland. They spoke English, not Gaelic, but had a lilting cadence in their voices, an accent preserved in the speech of the South today. These Scotch-Irish were a poor but proud people who had left their homelands after centuries of incessant warfare. In temperament, they were tough, blunt, touchy, hard-drinking, and pugnacious. The Butlers' new land in South Carolina was promising. It lay halfway between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean in what would become Edgefield County. There were great primeval forests of oak and hickory and endless stretches of longleaf pine. In the spring, the undergrowth was clothed in splashes of pink, white, and magenta by dogwood and azaleas. Swarms of wild turkeys, geese, ducks, and pigeons darkened the sky. Everywhere there was an abundance of small streams and rivers for water. Along their banks, stands of sugarcane grew in profusion, often reaching higher than a man's head. The red clay soil was rich, good for growing corn and grazing cattle and horses. Some of the settlers experimented with cotton, but until Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin across the nearby Savannah River in Georgia in 1793, separating the seeds from the fiber was too difficult to make it a profitable crop. Still, a few of this first generation in the backcountry, including the Butlers, had already acquired enough wealth to buy black slaves. But if the land was rich, life had proven vicious. Since 1760, spanning the whole time the Butlers had been in South Carolina, the area around them had been engaged in some of the cruelest fighting in American history. The conflict had started with a massacre in 1760 by Cherokee Indians that killed scores of settlers. In one attack, the seventy-six-year-old grandmother of John C. Calhoun, a future vice president of the United States and the greatest of all the Carolinians, was murdered in an ambush with twenty-two other people. By 1761, when the Cherokee were defeated, much of the backcountry was devastated. Homeless veterans formed outlaw gangs that abducted young women from their villages and tortured wealthy planters and merchants to make them reveal where they had hidden their valuables. Infuriated by this lawlessness, the more respectable settlers formed themselves into "Regulators" to break up the gangs. It was the first organized vigilante justice in America. The Regulators succeeded. But they were so brutal thatFox Butterfield is the author of 'All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence', published 2008 under ISBN 9780307280336 and ISBN 0307280330.