The Battle of Blackstock's Farm, an encounter of the American Revolutionary War, took place in what today is Union County, South Carolina, a few miles from Cross Anchor, on November 20, 1780. Background After the defeat of Major Patrick Ferguson and the destruction or capture of his entire military force of 900 men at the Battle of Kings Mountain the previous month, the sparsely settled Carolina Backcountry had come increasingly under the control of the Patriots. Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis, British commander in the Southern theater, ordered his subordinate Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton to abandon his chase of the guerrilla commander Brigadier General Francis Marion and instead disrupt the activities of Patriot militia Brigadier General Thomas Sumter, thereby returning confidence to Backcountry Tories. Meanwhile, Sumter had been gathering partisan volunteers and now had a thousand men under his command. Preliminaries On November 18, Tarleton's British Legion dragoons and the mounted infantry of the 63d Regiment were bathing and watering their horses on the Broad River when some of Sumter's raiders fired at them from the opposite bank. The British brought up a 3-pounder "grasshopper" field gun and easily scattered the partisans. But Tarleton "did not submit easily to insults." Putting his men across the river in flat boats that night, he pressed Sumter hard the next day. Fortunately for Sumter, a deserter from the 63d Regiment revealed Tarleton's plans and location. Although Sumter now had a thousand Backcountry militiamen, Tarleton had more than five hundred regulars under his command, including three hundred British regulars. And Tarleton had never yet been defeated. Sumter and his colonels decided the best course was to find a strong defensive position and wait for Tarleton to attack them. Colonel Thomas Brandon, who knew the area, suggested the nearby farm of William Blackstock, a homestead on the hills above the Tyger River. The land had been cleared, providing fields of fire and room for maneuver, and the outbuildings—solid log structures—were not chinked and thus provided "narrow but convenient openings for men firing from behind cover." Battle Sumter placed Colonel Henry Hampton and his South Carolina riflemen in the farm outbuildings. Some units he stationed behind stout fences and others he screened in the surrounding woods. Tarleton came up late in the fall afternoon and chose to make a frontal attack against a numerically superior force, not waiting for his infantry and artillery to catch up. At