The Swamp Fox

by John Oller

  Marion’s eagerness to take the field against the British made him a suitable match for the people of Williamsburg. Nearly all Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, they were fiercely independent and determined to live their lives unmolested by any external authority. They had held a public meeting at the old Williamsburg Presbyterian churchyard in the town of Kingstree and voted to take up arms. What they needed now was a leader.

  Around August 17 Marion arrived at Witherspoon’s Ferry on Lynches Creek in present-day Johnsonville, South Carolina, to assume command of the Williamsburg militia. He hardly looked the part of a dashing leader. Fifteen-year-old William Dobein James was there and later recorded his first impression of Francis Marion: “He was rather below the middle stature of men, lean and swarthy. His body was well set, but his knees and ankles were badly formed and he still limped upon one leg.” Besides his eagle beak of a nose, his appearance was otherwise uninviting—a jutting chin and a large, high forehead. Yet he had “a countenance remarkably steady,” young James noted, and possessed a wiry frame “capable of enduring fatigue and every privation necessary for a partisan.” By now Marion had discarded his Continental blue uniform for a coarse crimson jacket—the hue of the enemy, yet about the only color of cloth Carolinians could obtain after the fall of Charleston. But he still wore the leather helmet (more like a skull cap) that composed part of the Continental uniform of the 2nd South Carolina Regiment. The cap featured a silver crescent sewn in front and was inscribed with the word Liberty.

  Marion was a stranger to most of the approximately two hundred rank-and-file militiamen who had gathered at Witherspoon’s. Technically he had no legal authority over any of them. They were pure volunteers operating independently of the now-dissolved state government and not as part of any regulated militia. As a practical matter they were free to come and go as they wished and fight for whomever they chose. Moreover, Marion held no formal militia command; he was a Continental officer, and in a regiment that no longer existed at that. He had come to Witherspoon’s by invitation only, and if the men, after taking one look at him, had decided they were not going to follow him, that would have been their prerogative.

  But Major John James (William Dobein James’s father) vouched for Marion to the skeptics. A large, combative Irishman the same age as Marion, James had previously served with Marion under General Moultrie and had left Charleston during the recent British siege to help form a militia. An elder in the Presbyterian Church, James was strongly anti-British, and unlike many Whigs, he had refused to sign any oath of allegiance to the Crown after Charleston fell. His recommendation of Marion was seconded by the Horry brothers, Hugh and Peter, who, like Marion, were successful Lowcountry rice and indigo planters of French Huguenot descent. Close friends of Marion, Hugh and Peter Horry (pronounced oh-REE) would become two of his most trusted military confidantes.

  Soon there were others: Major James’s second cousin, Captain John James (“of the Lake”), and the major’s twenty-three-year-old son, John James Jr., who had surrendered at Charleston then broke his parole to take up the fight.a Another recruit, Marion’s cousin and best friend Captain Henry Mouzon, had a score to settle: Banastre Tarleton, a British cavalry officer, had recently burned his house to the ground, reportedly because of Mouzon’s French Huguenot heritage. When Mouzon greeted the militia at Witherspoon’s, he kissed Marion on both cheeks, per Huguenot tradition.

  Although some of the soldiers, like young William Dobein James, were in their teens, most of the officers were in their twenties and thirties and primed for combat. From the area between the Great and Little Pee Dee Rivers came militia colonel Hugh Giles, a surveyor whose intimate knowledge of the area made him an especially valuable asset. Anxious to join the fray, Giles had already been planning offensive operations against the Tories and was collecting cattle and grain to feed Gates’s army in anticipation of its arrival.

  The Berkeley County militia supplied Captain William McCottry, an expert marksman whose company would gain renown as McCottry’s Rifles. Several of the Witherspoons, whose Presbyterian family ran the ferry of the same name and were heralded for their courage and athleticism, reported for duty as well. John Ervin, a rabid and daring twenty-six-year-old patriot who had married a Witherspoon, answered the call and became one of the youngest colonels in the Revolution.

  Twenty-year-old Thomas Waties had joined the Continental Army in 1775 out of the University of Pennsylvania, where he had headed a company formed by his fellow students. He was soon captured on a mission to England and, upon his release four years later, made his way to Paris, where he befriended Benjamin Franklin, who helped him get back to his native South Carolina. He joined Marion after the fall of Charleston and was made a captain. Then there were the Postell brothers, John and James, from the Georgetown area, who became known for taking on the most challenging assignments.

  These men would form the nucleus of Marion’s Brigade, a mixture of Huguenot plantation owners from the Santee region and Scotch-Irish small farmers of the Pee Dee. Major John James, who knew the character of his Scotch-Irish kinsmen, was astute in recommending Marion to lead them. Being a Huguenot and an outsider, Marion would arouse no jealousies on the part of the Scottish clan leaders, who had a habit of arguing with each other. Marion’s taciturn nature also helped secure the men’s respect; he was a doer, not a talker. Moreover, they would see him endure all they suffered, including sleeping unsheltered from the winter cold and rain and risking the malaria and yellow fever brought by swamp-dwelling mosquitoes each summer.

  And so, from the day he took command, his brigade became a sort of spiritual fraternity that would be compared to Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest and his merry men. Like the outlaw band of legend, Marion and his men would use guerrilla tactics to attack the ruling order from secret hideaways before melting back into the forest or swamp.b They knew the terrain as the British did not, had an excellent spy network, and were by far the superior horsemen. Marion’s highly mobile brigade would inflict losses on the enemy that were individually small but cumulatively a large drain on British resources and morale.

  Immediately upon taking command Marion dispatched Peter Horry and three or four companies of men to the lower Santee River, with orders to burn all the boats and canoes there to prevent anyone from crossing. Meanwhile Marion took the rest of his men west from Witherspoon’s to begin destroying boats along the upper Santee.

  On August 19, while camped along the river, Marion received the shattering news that on August 16, the day after Gates had sent him off to Williamsburg, Gates’s army had been routed by Cornwallis at Camden. During the battle almost twenty-five hundred Virginia and North Carolina militia, constituting the bulk of Gates’s force that day, threw down their weapons and fled at the first sight of the British lines charging them with fixed bayonets. Gates had foolishly placed his greenest militia recruits—who had never stared down the approach of cold, shining steel—on the American left to face the British right, which by tradition consisted of its most highly trained, professional soldiers. It hadn’t helped that Gates’s men were half-starved; during the trek to Camden some had been reduced to using their hair powder to thicken soup. They had also marched all night before the battle after a hurried dinner of lean beef, half-baked bread, mush, and molasses. The inedible concoction brought on such diarrhea that the men broke ranks during their march to relieve themselves and went into the oppressively hot August conflict exhausted and dehydrated.

  Among the casualties from the battle was Baron de Kalb, who was wounded eleven times and died three days later. There was one highly prominent survivor: Horatio Gates. Instead of falling on his sword, as honor might have suggested, Gates had exited the field in panic on a swift horse and galloped nearly two hundred miles in three days, barely pausing until he had reached safety in Hillsboro, North Carolina. Widely accused of cowardice, Gates saw his military career effectively come to an end.

  The Battle of Camden marked the second time in three months that the Conti
nental Army in the South was decimated. Then came more bad news: on August 18, two days after Gates’s trouncing at Camden, Thomas Sumter’s company of 800 partisans had been surprised and overwhelmed by Banastre Tarleton’s smaller force of 160 at Fishing Creek, four miles above Camden. Sumter himself was literally caught napping and half-clothed before barely escaping on an unsaddled horse. Like Gates, he fled across the North Carolina border, his men scattering to the four winds. Although Sumter’s and other partisan bands had won a series of skirmishes against the British and their Tory allies over the previous couple of months in the Carolina backcountry, the twin disasters at Camden and Fishing Creek largely dissipated those small gains.

  For the Americans it was arguably the Revolution’s darkest hour. The cause of independence in South Carolina—and maybe the entire revolution—lay in ruins.

  For the second time Francis Marion had fortuitously missed being part of the destruction of the entire American southern army. But now he was alone. His was the only viable patriot fighting force left in South Carolina, the only organized resistance standing in the way of complete British subjugation of the colony. Instinctively Marion knew that if he told his newly formed brigade about Camden and Fishing Creek, the men might become so deflated that they would give up the fight before his campaign had even begun. So he kept the news to himself. But he also knew that unless the tide could somehow be turned quickly, the resistance effort might be over. He needed an opportunity to do something bold. He soon got one. South Carolina would shortly see the birth of a freedom fighter, one who would give new hope to the patriot cause.

  a Under a parole, a captured enemy is released on a promise not to take up arms again unless and until exchanged for another prisoner. Taken from the French parole (word, promise), the practice goes back centuries and allows the capturing party to avoid the burden of feeding and caring for prisoners while preventing them from retaking the field of battle. Paroles were treated seriously in the eighteenth century, and violations of parole terms could lead to execution if the parolee were recaptured. The practice went out of favor by the twentieth century, and current US military policy prohibits US soldiers who are prisoners of war from accepting parole.

  b Although Marion did not invent the guerrilla warfare style, references to which can be found in prebiblical writings, he was among the first Revolutionary War leaders to develop “irregular” fighting (currently referred to as “asymmetrical” warfare) into an art form. In later centuries revolutionaries, freedom fighters, and terrorists would use similar tactics: Cochise and the Apaches in the 1860s American West, Mao Tse-tung during the Chinese Civil War, the Viet Cong in Southeast Asia, the Afghan rebels against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and in the years following the September 11, 2001, attacks against America, the Taliban in Afghanistan and insurgents and counterinsurgents in Iraq.

  1

  A Most Uncivil War

  The South Carolina that Francis Marion set out to liberate from British control in August 1780 was the key theater of operations in the American Revolution at that point. It was also in turmoil—a society riven by war and rooted in lawlessness, fear, violence, and oppression.

  More battles, engagements, and skirmishes were fought in South Carolina during the Revolution than in any other colony. Conservative estimates place the number of combat actions in the state at more than two hundred, a third of all that took place in the entire war. No other colony had as many inches of its territory affected by battle; of the state’s forty-six present-day counties, forty-five ended up seeing Revolutionary War actions. Nearly 20 percent of all Americans who died in battle in the Revolution died in South Carolina in the last two years of the war.

  Ever since the shots were fired at Lexington and Concord in 1775, the South had been mostly untouched by the conflict, which was famously fought at places such as Bunker Hill, Fort Ticonderoga, Trenton, and Brandywine. But by 1779 the war in the North had reached a stalemate, with the British firmly in control of New York City under Sir Henry Clinton, and the Americans, led by George Washington, camped thirty miles away in Morristown, New Jersey, desperately hoping for help from a French navy anchored in the West Indies. The last significant engagement in the North had been in June 1778 at Monmouth Courthouse, where Washington and his most dependable officer, Nathanael Greene, battled Clinton and his lieutenant general, Charles Cornwallis, to a draw. But while the Americans remained hard-pressed, Britain had grown increasingly weary of war. Its coffers nearly bankrupt and its military stretched thin by an expanded conflict with France and Spain, Parliament agreed to finance one final effort to end the American rebellion.

  It came to be known as Britain’s “southern strategy.” Jointly agreed on by Clinton, King George, and Lord Germain, the British secretary of state for America, the plan was elegant in both logic and economy. The British would begin by occupying and pacifying Georgia, where revolutionary sentiment was the weakest among the thirteen colonies. They would then subdue South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia while gathering men to confront Washington in the North.

  The linchpin of the strategy was the belief, encouraged by American loyalist exiles in London, that the South, never as fervent for independence as New England to begin with, was teeming with loyalists who would rise up in arms against the rebels once the British army arrived to support them. Parliament saw a way to save money and British lives by having loyal colonial subjects do much of the fighting themselves, a plan to “Americanize” the war similar in concept to the Vietnamization policy adopted by the US government in Southeast Asia almost two hundred years later. At the very least, Britain figured, by conquering the South it would retain several valuable colonies even if it had to let the northern ones go.

  And the British plan was working. Savannah fell easily in December 1778, allowing the British to quickly establish control over Georgia. Savannah, in turn, provided Clinton with a base for moving north by land on Charleston, which he had failed to capture in a brief, bungled land-and-sea operation in 1776. In the nearly four years since, Charleston had grown complacent, a place of balls, concerts, theater, taverns, and a general libertine spirit. But after the city’s capitulation on May 12 the mood turned somber and defeatist. Much of the citizenry nearly tripped over themselves trying to prove their allegiance to Mother England. Two hundred Charlestonians signed a congratulatory address to Clinton and a British vice admiral, thanking them for restoring South Carolina’s political connection to Great Britain. Merchants who had been ardent patriots abruptly shifted their loyalties to the Crown to position themselves for profitable wartime trade. The ringleaders of the rebellion were arrested and shipped off to St. Augustine, Florida. With Governor John Rutledge’s flight in exile to North Carolina and later to Philadelphia, civil government in South Carolina ceased to exist. As one loyalist military officer observed, “The conquest of the Province was complete.”

  Believing the war in South Carolina to be at an end, thousands of its citizens swore oaths of allegiance to King George so as to secure protection as loyal subjects. Some voluntarily trekked to Charleston from fifty miles away to sign their pledges. Able-bodied men rushed to join the British forces, the better to ingratiate themselves with their conquerors. Patriot militia who did not wish to take up arms for the Crown nonetheless returned to their farms and plantations under a pledge of neutrality, agreeing to sit out the war quietly at home per the terms of their parole. Even prominent revolutionary statesmen, such as Henry Middleton, former president of the Continental Congress; Charles Pinckney, the first president of the South Carolina Senate; and Daniel Huger, a top member of Governor Rutledge’s council, took British protection. The state seemed resigned to submission.

  By June 4, a few weeks after Charleston’s surrender, Clinton was able to report to Lord Germain that “there are few men in South Carolina who are not either our prisoners, or in arms with us.” Confident that South Carolina had been pacified and that North Carolina was the next domino to fall, Clinton sailed back to N
ew York to keep check on Washington, leaving the forty-two-year-old Cornwallis in charge of operations in the South.

  Just before leaving Charleston, though, Clinton had issued a proclamation that exacerbated the division between South Carolina loyalists and patriots. Clinton had previously stipulated that so long as any civilian Whigs agreed to a parole, the British would grant them a full pardon and leave them in peace in their homes and property for the duration of the war. But almost immediately Clinton developed second thoughts, in part because vengeful Tories protested that the terms were too generous to their longtime antagonists. In part, too, Clinton concluded that the British needed more of a stick than a carrot approach to securing the citizenry’s fidelity.

  Accordingly, on June 3, 1780, Clinton announced that the prior paroles were null and void and that those previously on parole would be restored to their rights and duties as citizens of the Crown and were expected to actively assist the British government. Parolees had to sign an oath of allegiance by June 20 or be deemed still in rebellion and treated as enemies of the king. This edict, Clinton reasoned, would smoke out rebel agitators and prevent them from causing trouble while under the protection of parole.

  But the proclamation ended up backfiring. Did the requirement to “actively assist” the British mean patriots actually had to take up arms with the British against their neighbors and fellow countrymen? That was the question the people of Williamsburg asked themselves. They sent a popular local representative and militia officer, Major John James, to Georgetown on the coast to seek clarification from the Royal Navy captain there. After opining that the rebels previously paroled were lucky they were not all hanged, the British captain told Major James that Clinton’s new decree did indeed require those signing the oath to fight for the loyalist cause if called upon to do so.