<P> The British besieged Charleston in an arduous campaign . A crucial contribution was made by Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton, the English commander of a Loyalist unit called the British Legion . In a night attack on April 14, 1780, Tarleton took Monck's Corner, South Carolina, a strategic victory which helped seal off the Patriot garrison of Charleston from help or escape . Charleston's surrender to the British on May 12, 1780 was a disaster to the revolutionary cause . Over twenty - five hundred Continental regulars and huge supplies of Patriot weapons and ammunition were lost . Another leader of Loyalists, the Scotsman Patrick Ferguson, commanded a force called the American Volunteers, who formed part of the army which took Charleston . </P> <P> Now the civil war in the South widened . Banastre Tarleton's British Legion, sometimes called the Loyal Legion, was a force consisting mostly at first of Pennsylvanians . It was quickly augmented by volunteers from the South . At one point the Legion grew to nearly two thousand men . On May 29, 1780 Tarleton and his men defeated a Patriot force under Abraham Buford at Waxhaws, South Carolina . After Buford refused to surrender, the Legion charged . Tarleton's horse was shot from under him; he mounted another . Buford and eighty or ninety men escaped . Over three hundred Patriots were killed or wounded, an almost incredible percentage of those engaged . The story soon spread that the Loyalists had bayoneted many of the wounded and those trying to surrender . Patriots began to spreak bitterly of "Buford's Quarter," or "Tarleton's Quarter," meaning none . </P> <P> In the civil war in the South, both sides resorted to the burning of farms and homes, torture, and summary execution on a huge scale . </P> <P> In the Battle of Ramsour's Mill, North Carolina, on June 20, 1780, the combatants on both sides were untrained militia, few if any in uniform . The battle was fought between neighbors, close relations and personal friends . More than half the Patriots in the battle were killed or wounded, and Loyalist casualties were very high . After the battle, the Loyalists retreated and left the Patriots in possession of the field . A prominent historian called this "...the most desperate engagement of the war in terms of the proportion of casualties to men involved on each side". </P>

Who did the king hire to fight the colonists