Note 3 — I

Page 8. A letter from General Sir Jeffrey Amherst dated Albany, August 13, 1761, gives a particularized account of these destructive measures. “The country would have been impenetrable had it been well defended. Fifteen towns and all the plantations have been burned; above 1400 acres of corn, beans, and pease, etc., destroyed; about 5000 people, men, women, and children, driven into the woods and mountains, where having nothing to subsist upon they must either starve or sue for peace.”

The fury of these measures after resistance had ceased is partly to be explained as retaliation for the Cherokees’ breach of faith during the preceding year, in the massacre of the garrison of Fort Loudon after its capitulation, while on the march to Fort Prince George under the safe conduct and escort of the principal chiefs. All the officers, including the commandant, the unfortunate Captain Paul Demeré, fell in this indiscriminate slaughter except one, Captain John Stuart, who escaped and was afterward rewarded by a crown office for his courage and constancy in the siege. He was of the family of Stuart of Kincardine, Strathspey, Scotland, married into a South Carolina family, and previous to the American Revolution lived in Charlestown, where was born his son, who became an officer in the British army, General Sir John Stuart, Count of Maida, winning the signal victory of Maida over the French general Reynier, in Calabria in 1806. The garrison of Fort Loudon has a special interest as the first military force of civilization giving battle on the soil which is now Tennessee, its earliest sacrifice in the cause of human progress.