# The Tory War

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005/the-tory-war
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005/the-tory-war.md
Podcast: [Disturbing History](https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005)
Published: 2026-08-12T17:25:03+00:00
Episode link: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/the-tory-war--73853624
Audio file: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/73853624/dh_tory_final.mp3
Processing state: not_requested
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/disturbing-history-7341005/episodes/the-tory-war
Duration seconds: 3889

## Resource

In June of 1780, on a hill outside what's now Lincolnton, North Carolina, more than a thousand men killed each other in fog so thick you couldn't see fifty feet. There was no British army there. There was no Continental army there. Every man on that field was an American, and the only thing separating one side from the other was a scrap of white paper pinned to a hat or a green twig stuck in a hatband. When it was over, nobody could tell the dead apart, so they stopped trying and put them in a hole together. That mass grave is still up there, next to an elementary school, and nobody knows the names. This episode is about the half of the American Revolution we left off the monuments. In the Carolina backcountry between 1780 and 1782, the war wasn't a fight against a foreign occupier. It was neighbors hunting neighbors through their own counties, and the National Park Service, NCpedia, and the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources all use the same word for it without flinching. Civil war. Brian traces it back to where it actually starts, which isn't 1775 at all. It's 1771, when royal governor William Tryon crushed a farmers' revolt at Alamance and then hanged six men outside Hillsborough and made the townspeople stand there and watch. Four years later, the same eastern gentry who had ridden with Tryon came to the backcountry asking those farmers to take up arms for liberty. A lot of them declined, and some of them did considerably more than decline. From there the episode moves through the greased bridge at Moore's Creek, where Highland Scots who had already lost one war against King George's family charged across two soap-slicked logs into cannon fire, and eight hundred and fifty of them went into captivity. Through Ramsour's Mill, and the two-hund…

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## Transcript

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