My earliest memories are connected with the first settlement of Middle
Georgia, where I was born. My grandparents on the mother's side, were
natives of North Carolina; and, I believe, of Anson county. My
grandfather, Colonel David Love, was an active partisan officer in the
service of the Continental Congress. He died before I was born; but my
grandmother lived until I was seventeen years of age. As her oldest
grandchild, I spent much of my time, in early boyhood, at her home
near the head of Shoulderbone Creek in the county of Green. She was a
little, fussy, Irish woman, a Presbyterian in religion, and a very
strict observer of all the duties imposed upon her sect, especially in
keeping holy the Sabbath day. All her children were grown up, married,
and, in the language of the time, "gone away." She was in truth a lone
woman, busying herself in household and farming affairs. With a few
negroes, and a miserably poor piece of land, she struggled in her
widowhood with fortune, and contrived, with North Carolina frugality
and industry, not only to make a decent living, but to lay up
something for a rainy day, as she phrases it. In her visits to her
fields and garden, I ran by her side and listened to stories of Tory
atrocities and Whig suffering in North Carolina during the Revolution.
The infamous Governor Dunmore, the cruel Colonel Tarleton, and the
murderous and thieving Bill Cunningham and Colonel Fannin, both
Tories, and the latter natives to the soil, were presented graphically
to me in their most hateful forms. In truth, before I had attained my
seventh year, I was familiar with the history of the partisan warfare
waged between Whig and Tory in North and South Carolina, from 1776 to
1782, from this good but garrulous old lady. I am not so certain she
was good: she had a temper of her own, and a will and a way of her
own; and was good-natured only when permitted this way without