The Swamp Fox

by John Oller

  With Savannah now firmly in British hands, Clinton was cleared to come south for his long-awaited renewed effort to capture Charleston. Lincoln brought his army back to the city, leaving Marion at a plantation in Sheldon, South Carolina (near Beaufort). He was to watch the movements of Prévost and prevent him from pillaging on the Carolina side of the Savannah River. Marion’s small force was involved in some minor skirmishing with raiding parties of African Americans; despite protests from white Georgians, including loyalists, Prévost had kept armed blacks in the field, finding them useful for plundering supplies across the South Carolina border.

  It was a cold winter in Sheldon, and Marion’s men, lacking shoes, blankets, and clothing, passed the time by growing mustaches. “When you see me,” Marion wrote to Lincoln, “you will find I have a formidable . . . Mustassho, which all the regiment now ware and if you have not one you will be singular.” (It is not known how long Marion kept his mustache.)

  Marion remained at Sheldon until the end of January, when he returned to Charleston. The town had received word that on the day after Christmas Clinton had sailed south from New York with a large flotilla and an expedition force of eighty-five hundred. After a rough six-week journey during which the British fleet was forced to toss their horses overboard due to violent storms, Clinton dropped anchor on February 11 less than thirty miles from Charleston. From there he would rendezvous with the British forces heading north from Savannah. Unlike in 1776, this time the British would not conduct their assault mainly by sea but instead via an overland route. They planned to encircle the city, conduct a classic siege, cut off escape routes, and eventually squeeze Charleston into submission.

  After a stint to guard Bacon’s Bridge near Dorchester, where he reported his two hundred infantry men complaining that they had no rum, Marion was back in command in Charleston in mid-March. He worked feverishly to improve the city’s fortifications, using slaves as laborers, although the legislature denied Lincoln’s request to arm them. Lincoln also ordered the felling of trees and leveling of houses just outside Charleston to deny the British cover during a siege, but property owners managed to thwart the plan. Rural militia, unwilling to leave their farms and families and fearful of smallpox, largely ignored Governor Rutledge’s request to come to the city’s aid. In many ways South Carolinians were their own worst enemy.

  On March 19 Marion attended an officers’ party at the home of Alexander McQueen, General William Moultrie’s adjutant general, at 106 Tradd Street at the corner of Orange and Tradd Streets. From a second-story window there he jumped to escape the endless drinking and shattered his ankle. By the first week of April the British had laid siege to Charleston, and on April 12 Lincoln, sensing doom, ordered all officers without an assigned command and any who were unfit for duty to leave the garrison and retire to the countryside.

  By the next day Marion was gone from the city, as was Governor Rutledge, who had left to set up a government in exile. Peter Horry, furloughed after a consolidation of regiments in January, had already departed Charleston and was home at his plantation, awaiting further assignment. Lincoln considered evacuating his entire army, and given the eventual surrender of his more than five thousand men, it would have been wiser to try to save the army than the city. But the civilian leadership insisted that Charleston be defended to the last extremity, and Lincoln, an amiable man who suffered from peculiar bouts of narcolepsy, was not strong enough to stand up to them.

  After April 14 it was probably too late to attempt an evacuation anyway. In the early morning that day Banastre Tarleton’s cavalry surprised and routed a larger force of Americans under General Isaac Huger and Lieutenant Colonel William Washington (second cousin of the commander in chief) at Biggin Bridge near Monck’s Corner, thirty miles north of Charleston. It had been the principal escape route from the city. Tarleton also managed to capture four hundred high-quality horses to help replace those lost on the voyage from New York. Huger, Washington, and most of the five hundred rebels stationed at Monck’s managed to escape into the swamps, but the noose around Charleston had tightened. Lincoln proposed to Clinton that the British could occupy the city if the American army was allowed to leave with all its supplies, but Clinton was holding all the cards, and he promptly rejected the offer.

  On May 6 Tarleton closed virtually the last way out. Some of the escapees from Monck’s had re-formed with local militia and were resting at Lenud’s Ferry, on the south side of the lower Santee River. They were waiting there for Virginia’s Colonel Abraham Buford, who was supposed to be bringing boats for the crossing. Acting on a tip from Elias Ball, a hard-core Tory who happened to be related to Marion by marriage, Tarleton raced his cavalry to Lenud’s and caught the two hundred Americans by surprise. Tarleton’s men killed, wounded, or captured half the patriot force as Buford’s men, just arrived on the north side of the Santee, could only watch the slaughter as it unfolded on the opposite bank. Lieutenant Colonel Anthony White, the American commander, and William Washington escaped by swimming across the dangerously swift river.

  On May 7, British seamen took Fort Moultrie without resistance. Two days later Clinton began a general bombardment of the town, and the same civilians who had earlier threatened to “open the gates for the enemy” if Lincoln attempted to evacuate now pressed him to accept whatever terms Clinton offered. On May 11, 1780, the white flag was hoisted above Charleston, and the next day the richest town in America—and the entire Continental southern army—surrendered to the British.

  One by one the British then established posts or accepted the surrender of existing garrisons as part of a semicircle of fortified towns stretching 140 miles from Savannah and Augusta, Georgia, up to Ninety-Six in northwest South Carolina, then down through Camden and on to Georgetown on the coast. Backcountry Whigs began accepting parole, including even such military stalwarts as Andrew Pickens and Andrew Williamson. Generals and politicians who were part of the surrendering force at Charleston were taken out of commission: William Moultrie became a prisoner of war in Charleston, while Benjamin Lincoln was forced to retire to his farm in New England. Christopher Gadsden was placed in solitary confinement in a dungeon in St. Augustine, Florida, and Henry Laurens was taken to England and imprisoned in the Tower of London.

  Had he wished, Francis Marion could have come out of hiding along the Santee, limped back into Charleston, and accepted British protection for the duration of the war. He might have returned to Pond Bluff and lived comfortably there, unmolested by redcoat or Tory. But he had other ideas. He offered his services to Gates’s Continental army and was sent off to head up the Williamsburg militia. Then came the calamities of Camden on August 16 and Fishing Creek on August 18, leaving Marion alone in South Carolina to resist the British occupation. As he camped with his men along the upper Santee, he was determined to do something to prove the contest was not over. And a week after their initial gathering at Witherspoon’s Ferry, Marion’s Brigade would make their first strike.

  6

  Birth of a Partisan

  On August 23 Marion and his men drove off the British guard at Murray’s Ferry (where modern US Route 52 crosses the Santee River), then moved upstream to camp near Nelson’s Ferry, the major crossing point on the Santee between Charleston and Camden.

  On the night of August 24 a Tory deserter walked into Marion’s camp on the northeastern bank of the river with a tantalizing piece of news. Fearing that smallpox or malaria would break out among the American prisoners taken at Camden, Cornwallis was marching them off in groups of 150, under escort, down the road to Charleston to be put on prison ships. They consisted of Continentals from the Maryland and Delaware lines—the best-trained and, hence, most valuable soldiers in the American army. A convoy of about 150 of them was now being held at Thomas Sumter’s abandoned plantation home on the Great Savannah six miles north of Nelson’s Ferry.a They were being guarded by sixty troops under British army captain John Roberts—mostly veteran British regulars of the 63rd Regiment of Foot and
loyalist provincials of the Prince of Wales Regiment,b plus a few Tory militia troops.

  Marion had seventy men with him, as most of his brigade was still with Peter Horry, burning boats on the lower Santee. Determined to rescue the prisoners, he decided to attack in the dark, a tactic he would come to use many times. He roused his men and took them on a night ride toward Sumter’s plantation, arriving just before daybreak. Marion sent sixteen men under the command of Colonel Hugh Horry to seize the pass over Horse Creek, which ran parallel to the Santee through a swamp just above the river. By taking hold of the Horse Creek pass, Marion could block possible enemy reinforcements from the guard at Nelson’s Ferry, then under British control. Meanwhile the main body of men under Marion circled around behind Sumter’s house, which stood on elevated ground above the swamp, to attack from the rear.

  As is common in battle, things did not go exactly according to script. In the darkness Horry’s men stumbled upon a British sentinel who fired at their shadows and alerted the rest of the guard. Their cover blown, Horry did the only thing he could: he immediately led a mounted charge down the lane that led to the front of the house. To his surprise and delight, he discovered that the enemy had left all of their muskets carelessly piled outside the front door. Horry’s patrol seized the weapons and burst inside, soon joined by Marion. The fight was over in minutes. Before the astonished British even had time to react, two of their number were killed, five were wounded, and twenty were taken prisoner. (The rest apparently fled for their lives.) Marion had none killed and only two wounded. His men had retrieved all of the 150 American prisoners. The victory, though small, was complete.

  Ironically, the freed prisoners included some of the same men who had snickered at Marion’s “burlesque” little group in Gates’s camp a few weeks before. Instead of gratefully joining the ranks of their liberators, these Continentals decided they’d had enough of fighting. They had spent a harsh winter in New Jersey before marching with scant provisions to the unbearably humid South, only to be whipped in a battle deserted by their field general. The defeat they’d suffered at Camden under Gates had convinced them that their leadership was unreliable and the patriot cause hopeless. They saw no point in continuing to risk their lives for nothing. As a result, only 3 of the 147 retaken men accepted the offer to enlist in Marion’s brigade. Some 85 were so demoralized that they insisted on continuing on to Charleston, preferring the safety of a prison ship to the peril of combat. The remainder, about 60, went to North Carolina to rejoin their original Continental units, but most of those ended up deserting.

  Slender as the fruits of his victory may have been, Marion’s daring predawn raid was the one piece of good news in an otherwise dismal picture for the Americans at that hour. General Gates, upon receiving Marion’s account of the encounter, made his own report of it to Congress, briefly lifting its sagging spirits. Patriot newspapers included the name Francis Marion in their columns for the first time—though misspelling it as “Merien.” A legend was in the making.

  This was also the first time Cornwallis took notice of “a Colonel Marion.” The British commander was irritated by what had happened at Great Savannah. It was, after all, his prisoners taken at Camden who had been freed and his program to have them conducted safely to Charleston that had been interfered with. He demanded an explanation and received one from Major James Wemyss (pronounced “Weems”) of the 63rd Foot. “I am afraid negligence will mark the whole of it,” was Wemyss’s frank appraisal.

  Clinton had left Cornwallis with instructions not to move into North Carolina until South Carolina was firmly secured. Anxious to get on with his planned northern invasion, Cornwallis was concerned that South Carolina was not quite as pacified as he had assumed. He expressed wonder that the “disaffection” of the people east of the Santee was so great that they had not allowed the defeat at Camden to stamp out their revolutionary ardor. Cornwallis also understood that he could not safely move his army north as long as Marion was strangling his supply line running from Charleston to Camden, chiefly through the choke point at busy Nelson’s Ferry. Accordingly, on August 28 Cornwallis ordered Major Wemyss to sweep the area between the Santee and Pee Dee Rivers of any rebel forces. He also directed Wemyss to “disarm in the most rigid manner all persons who cannot be depended on and punish the concealment of arms and ammunition with a total demolition of the plantation.” As he reiterated to his outpost commanders:

  I have ordered in the most positive manner that every militia man who had borne arms with us and afterwards joined the enemy should be immediately hanged. I . . . desire that you will take the most vigorous measures to extinguish the rebellion in the district in which you command and that you will obey in the strictest manner the directions I have given in this letter relative to the treatment of the country.

  Despite his title, his Lordship was no mere genteel British nobleman but instead a determined and at times ruthless adversary. No stranger to brass-knuckle tactics, he had attended Eton academy, a rough place in those days, and chose a military career at age seventeen over a life of leisure. In his letter to Clinton he went on to boast, “I have myself ordered several militia men to be executed, who had voluntarily enrolled themselves and borne arms with us, and afterwards revolted to the enemy.”

  Just two months earlier Cornwallis had informed Clinton that British operations had “put an end to all resistance in South Carolina.” But now he was starting to realize that the war in South Carolina was far from over; indeed, as far as Francis Marion was concerned, it had only just begun.

  No longer a Continental officer except in name and virtually alone in the field, Marion was embarking on a new career as a partisan leader. There was no script telling him what to do or where to go. He knew he wanted to inflict as much damage on the enemy as possible, but surely Banastre Tarleton and others would be coming after him. To accomplish anything useful Marion needed to keep another objective in mind—staying alive.

  a Nelson’s Ferry is now submerged under manmade Lake Marion that was created as part of a hydroelectric power project in the 1940s. Sumter’s abandoned plantation on Great Savannah, also probably under water as well, is not to be confused with a different Sumter home that Tarleton had burned, which was located farther north in the High Hills of Santee in current Sumter County.

  b Provincials were Americans loyal to the king who were recruited into units led by British army-trained officers and operated as adjuncts to the regular army. One source states that the British had more Americans in provincial units than Congress had in the Continental Army.

  7

  Hitting and Running

  After the victory at Nelson’s Ferry on August 25 Marion marched his men and the freed prisoners back in the direction of Witherspoon’s Ferry, where his brigade had formed just eight days earlier. Unable to care for the enemy prisoners he had taken at Sumter’s plantation, Marion sent them off to a Continental camp in Wilmington, North Carolina.

  After passing Witherspoon’s, Marion camped a few miles away in the vicinity of Britton’s Neck, a narrow strip of land between the junction of the Great and Little Pee Dee Rivers. Home to a close-knit Whig community and geographically isolated by rivers and swamps, the area would provide a frequent safe haven for Marion’s partisans in the months to come.

  On August 27 Marion wrote to Peter Horry, who was still burning boats on the lower Santee, to inform him of Gates’s defeat and of his own success at Nelson’s Ferry. As Marion explained, he had been forced to retreat in light of Gates’s withdrawal to North Carolina. He ordered Horry to come up to meet him at Britton’s Neck and to bring as many men as would follow him. But by the time they met, around September 1, Marion’s militia numbered just over fifty, with many of the men having gone home. Citizens first and soldiers second, his rank-and-file would return to their farms at planting or harvest season to tend to their crops and families. Marion understood and acquiesced to the practice, but that does not mean he liked it.

  Despite his ins
piring victory at Nelson’s Ferry, Marion was feeling very much alone. He had no logistical support from any government or military authority. On August 29 he wrote the first of several letters to Gates in which he asked, in effect, “Where is the army?” As he informed Gates, the lack of any news about the general’s situation or even his whereabouts had dispirited the Whigs in South Carolina.

  By now, too, the redcoats were coming. Major Wemyss had his August 28 orders from Cornwallis to “disarm in the most rigid manner” all rebels between the Santee and Pee Dee. From his position in the High Hills of Santee,a Wemyss was about to embark on that mission with the 63rd Foot. He was ordered to clear the Pee Dee region of opposition, then return by way of the Cheraws District, northeast of Camden and near North Carolina. The Cheraws had a fair number of Tories that Cornwallis expected Wemyss to recruit for an organized militia.

  In fact, the Tories, too, were already coming after Marion. On September 3, while camped in the Britton’s Neck area, Marion learned from spies that a large band of Tory militia from the Catfish Creek and Little Pee Dee regions to the north were on the march and planning to attack him by surprise the next day. They were led by Major Micajah Ganey, a hot-headed ex-patriot who had served under Marion in the 2nd South Carolina Regiment. Ganey had switched sides because a Whig had stolen some of his horses. Ganey’s second in command was Captain Jesse Barefield, also a former 2nd Regiment member—he fought with Marion at Fort Sullivan—who joined the Tories because he felt he’d been insulted by a rebel officer. Now strident loyalists, Ganey and Barefield would remain nemeses of Marion for much of the war, posing an ongoing threat to Marion’s dominance in the Pee Dee region north of Georgetown. Soon they would have their first encounter.