The Baron DeKalb [pp. 141-202]

192 T1~e Baron DeKaib. 1July,
to find that Caswell's complaints of a want of provisions
for himself were fictitious; or to move up the country,
and gain the fertile banks of the Yadkin." These suspicions were in very bad taste, and were, we have no~doubt,
utterly unfounded. To one who knows the chara~ter of
that region of country, in the period referred to, there can
be little doubt that Caswell w~s quite as much straightened as DeKalb, and that the proper process, so long as
no enemy was nigh to threaten, was to occupy separate
cantonments, the better to procure supplies for both. It
was admitted that Caswell "employed his men in detachments, against small parties of disaffected inhabitants."
And what better service could he be engaged in? for if
these small bodies of the disaffected should be suffered to
unite, and join the British, the task of overcoming them
would be a thousandfold greater. Caswell, employing
himself in a most useful and necessary occupation, is
sneered at, as ambitious of signalizing himself Allow
the loyalists to emerge from the swamps into which he
has driven them, and what share of the grain and lean
beef of the country would be left to the continentals of
DeKalb? The complaint of Williams i~, tbat it was impossible for DeKalb "to expect much longer to find subsistence for his soldiers, in a country where marauding
parties of militia swept all before them." A common
sense view of the case, to say nothing of honesty and
charity, requires us to believe that Caswell spoke the
truth, and found it as difficult to feed his troops, as
DeKalb felt it in his own ca~se. But there is ~ clue
that we may trace in this discontent of the continental
officers, such as does not appear upon the records. The
force of DeKalb was unaccompanied by cavalry. It was
impossible, therefore, to draw supplies from any great
distance. The militia forces of the South, on the contrary, were rarely without a strong body of horse. The people all rode, and one of the blunders of Gates and other
strangers, who commanded in this region, was that of not
employing a larger force of the inhabitants in a manner
to which they were so well accustomed, and which, in a
plain country, and one so sparsely settled, was one, of all
others, likely to prove most efficient. The secret of Tarle~
ton's frequent successes was in his cavalry, the number of
men he could mount at a moment's warning, and the