A British general spent most of a winter camped out in a small South Carolina town, completely unaware that two men living right down the street were plotting to kill him.
That general was Lord Cornwallis.
The town was Winnsboro, where he retreated after his defeat at Kings Mountain and headquartered from the fall of 1780 into January 1781.
And the men who plotted against him weren't spies or soldiers from some other unit. They were Colonel John Winn and his son Minor, members of the very family whose land the town sat on.
The Winns were Virginia transplants, brothers who settled what became Winnsboro before the Revolution even started. Richard Winn rose to general and reportedly fought in more battles than any other Whig in South Carolina. His brother John became a colonel.
When Cornwallis occupied their own town and made it his winter camp, John and his son Minor decided they weren't going to just sit and watch.
They planned an ambush, right there in the town their own family had founded, with the goal of killing Cornwallis outright.
The details of what went wrong haven't survived, at least not in any record I could find. What is documented is what happened next. Both men were captured, tried, and sentenced to hang.
That's when General Richard Winn stepped in. He sent word to Cornwallis that if his brother and nephew died, so would the first hundred men in his own custody.
A local Tory neighbor named John Phillips, who apparently made a habit of looking out for people in this exact kind of trouble, pleaded on their behalf as well. Between the threat and the plea, Cornwallis backed down. He pardoned John and Minor Winn and let them go.
Local legend says that Fairfield county itself got its name from Cornwallis, supposedly riding through and exclaiming “What fair fields!” at the countryside.
True or not, there's a real irony in it. The land he admired belonged to the very family that had plotted to kill him.