George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 8

[283] Fear River was the place appointed for the meeting

Chap. LVIII.} 1776. Jan.

of the seven regiments from Ireland, he broke out into angry complaints, that no heed had been paid to his representations, his sufferings, and his efforts; that Virginia, ‘the first on the continent for riches, power, and extent,’ was neglected; and the preference given to ‘a poor, insignificant colony,’ where there were no pilots, nor a harbor that could admit half the fleet, and where the army, should it land, must wade for many miles through a sandy pine barren before it could reach the inhabited part of the country.

But Martin, who had good reason to expect the arrival of the armament in January or early in February, was infatuated with the hope, that multitudes, even in the county of Brunswick, would revolt ‘from their new-fangled government;’ and ‘his unwearied, persevering agent,’ Alexander Maclean, after a careful computation of the numbers that would flock to the king's standard from the interior, brought written assurances from the principal persons to whom he had been directed, that between two and three thousand men, of whom about half were well armed, would take the field at the governor's summons. Under this encouragement he was sent again into the back country, with a commission dated the tenth of January, authorizing Allan Macdonald of Kingsborough, and eight other Scots of Cumberland and Anson, and seventeen persons who resided in a belt of counties in middle Carolina and in Rowan, to raise and array all the king's loyal subjects, and to march with them in a body to Brunswick by the fifteenth of February. Donald Macdonald, then in his sixty