by John Oller
Peter Gaillard, another member of that prominent Huguenot family, was John Coming Ball’s second in command. Although only a lukewarm Tory, Gaillard was under the influence of his rabidly loyalist father and had served on one of the early expeditions designed to hunt down Marion. John Peyre, whose family was related by marriage to the Gaillards, Balls, and Marions, had been neutral until the fall of Charleston, after which he took British protection and became a strong Tory. Captain John Brockinton, a resident of Black Mingo, was the man whose slave Adam Cusack allegedly shot at, leading to Cusack’s hanging. Brockinton had been with Wemyss when they tried—and failed—to catch Marion during his retreat to North Carolina.
Although these neighbors and relatives were out to kill him, Marion took none of it personally. He would later describe the Tory militia at Black Mingo Creek as “men of family and fortune” who had shown themselves to be “good men” before the outbreak of civil war. He even hoped to convert some of them to his cause.
But first he would have to beat them. When he heard about the Tory gathering at Dollard’s it was already nearing twilight, so he decided to let his men nap for a few hours in preparation for a night fight. He woke them from their slumber and led them south toward Black Mingo Creek, arriving close to midnight. They reached the Willtown Bridge, a wooden structure spanning the creek about a mile northwest of Dollard’s. As they were crossing it they heard an alarm musket sound in the Tory camp. Under similar circumstances, at Nelson’s Ferry, Marion’s men had charged the enemy as soon as their attack was exposed, and they would do the same here.
Marion sent his men in a full gallop toward Dollard’s, stopping on the main road about three hundred yards northwest of the tavern entrance. There they dismounted except for a small body of cavalry who stayed on their horses; believing that Ball’s men were likely holed up inside the tavern, Marion reasoned that foot soldiers would be more effective than mounted ones in the impending battle.
Marion devised a three-pronged attack. Captain Thomas Waties, the one-time University of Pennsylvania student, was to lead an assault on the front of the tavern. Colonel Hugh Horry and his infantry would drive forward on Waties’s right flank, while the cavalry would provide support on the left. Marion would sit back with a small reserve force and deploy as needed. In fact, due to his age and small size, he rarely engaged in personal combat; instead, like a modern general (and unlike the protagonist in The Patriot) he maintained command and control of the action from a secure position. Not immodestly, he also knew he was irreplaceable and the rebels could not afford to have him killed.
Ball, alerted to the patriots’ approach, did not want to be trapped inside the tavern without an escape route. Unbeknownst to the patriots, he moved his men into an open field to the south-southwest of the tavern and lined them in formation to face their attackers approaching from the west. This had the effect of shifting the center of battle so that, from the patriots’ viewpoint, Ball’s Tories were to the right of the tavern. As a result, Hugh Horry’s infantry, on Waties’s right flank, now directly faced the enemy while Waties’s men would be coming up on the Tories’ right.
It was pitch black that night, with no illumination from the moon. As Horry’s infantry moved east-southeast across the field, Ball’s men held their musket fire. They could hear Horry’s foot soldiers clomping toward them, but all they could make out in the blackness were a bunch of dark silhouettes.
When Horry’s men came within thirty yards the Tory muskets suddenly burst out in flames, piercing the night like a clap of thunder and lightning. Horry’s men were startled to be hit with direct fire, as they had been expecting to provide flanking support for Waties’s frontal attack on the tavern. Horry’s infantry fell back in confusion until Captain John James steadied and rallied them. Able to glimpse the Tories in the light of the muzzle flashes, James’s company returned the volley in the enemy’s direction. At this point Waties’s men rushed forward, attacking the Tory right flank. The two sides traded a few more rounds of fire, but Ball’s men, finding themselves in between two sets of volleys, gave way. After a fight that lasted about fifteen minutes, the Tories withdrew, taking refuge in Black Mingo Swamp to their rear.
Black Mingo, like so many engagements in the South during the Revolution, involved relatively few men on either side: Ball’s Tories totaled only forty-seven, while Marion had perhaps seventy. (It was one of the few times he actually outnumbered his opponent, although it is not clear he knew this going into the encounter.) But because of the sharp exchange of fire at close range, the casualties were comparatively heavy. The Tories lost three killed and thirteen captured or wounded—a third of their unit—plus some unknown number later found dead or wounded in the swamp and adjoining woods.
Marion suffered two killed and eight wounded, but the psychological loss was greater—one of the dead was George Logan, who had left his sickbed and ridden miles to rejoin the brigade. The wounded included Marion’s friend Henry Mouzon, who was shot up so badly that he never took the field again. Such was the nature of the many small actions and skirmishes in South Carolina, where the death or dismemberment of a few friends or relatives could have a greater impact on the participants’ psyches than the loss of hundreds or thousands of strangers in full-scale army battles.
The significance of the engagement at Black Mingo was also greater than the numbers would imply. Marion’s men captured all the guns, ammunition, baggage, and horses the Tories left behind. Marion took the Tory commander’s steed for himself and, in a rare display of humor, renamed it “Ball.” He would ride it the rest of the war.
Several Tories captured by Marion at Black Mingo took an oath of allegiance and joined his brigade. After escaping, Peter Gaillard, the Tory second in command, made it known that he too would like to enlist with Marion’s band if they would have him without unduly humiliating him. Intermediaries (including Gaillard’s brother-in-law, Job Marion) arranged an interview between him and Marion. The partisan commander cordially received his former foe, praised his bravery at Black Mingo, and personally escorted him into the patriot camp in front of the rest of the men so as to quash the bitterness many of them felt toward their Tory neighbor.
The victory at Black Mingo—Marion’s third straight in a month—also brought Tory activity in the South Carolina Lowcountry to a virtual standstill. Ball, who managed to escape after the battle, refused to take the field again until late in the war. John Peyre and his brother Charles, both captured in the fighting and unrepentant, were sent off to prison in Philadelphia. With such prominent local men put out of commission, the Tories in the Santee region were in no mood to fight. As Marion explained in a letter to Gates in North Carolina a week after the engagement, “the Tories are so affrighted with my little excursions that many is moving off to Georgia.”
Marion’s victory reinforced the growing British belief that the loyalist militia was close to useless, at least without support from the regular British army. “I have found the militia to fail so totally when put to the trial in this province,” Cornwallis wrote to Clinton a few days before Black Mingo. Indeed, before learning of the outcome of that action, Cornwallis predicted that Ball’s militia would “meet with some disaster.” Two days later one of Cornwallis’s subordinate commanders wrote to him to say, “Depend upon it, [Tory] militia will never do any good without regular troops.”
Cornwallis and other British officers were probably overstating the deficiencies of the Tory militia; Marion, for one, never underestimated their ability to rebound and cause him trouble. But overall the Whig partisans did deliver greater value to the revolutionary cause than the Tory militia provided to the loyalist side. It may be that the loyalists were simply too few in number or too uncommitted in their support of the Crown to constitute an effective counter to the patriot militia. An estimated one-fifth to one-third of the free population in South Carolina became loyalists during the Revolution, but those percentages are much lower than what the British had been led to believe—or h
ad convinced themselves to believe—when they embarked upon their southern strategy.
Another factor may be even more important. With few exceptions the loyalist militia lacked the same high quality of leadership that partisan commanders such as Marion, Pickens, Sumter, and Elijah Clarke brought to the patriot side. When colonial militia elected their officers they usually chose men of property and standing in the community, and as the British were discovering, “all the leading men of property have been on the rebel side.” Most of the Americans who had distinguished themselves in the Cherokee War also became patriots, creating a talent pool the Tories could not match. Many leading Tories had left or been banished from the province early in the Revolution, and Cornwallis found those who remained to be “dastardly and pusillanimous”—so weak-willed and incompetent in combating the patriots that he lost all sympathy for them.
Loyalist provincial commander Robert Gray, himself a Tory militia leader earlier in the war, admitted that Marion and Sumter “established a decided superiority” in the Whig militia over their Tory counterparts. This was true even though the two men had completely different styles. Sumter (nicknamed the “Gamecock” for his combative nature) was “bold and rash” and ran many risks, Gray wrote, whereas Marion was “timid and cautious and would risk nothing.”
Marion was anything but timid—Cornwallis called him “cautious and vigilant”—and he often took risks, though they were always calculated ones. He would not jeopardize his men’s lives by sending them into battle hopelessly outnumbered. He further sought to minimize the perils of war through a combination of intelligence operations, careful planning, and shrewd tactics. Among the latter were his attacks on lightly defended targets, ambush and surprise (often at night), use of rivers and creeks as a buffer against the enemy, and strategic retreat.
All of which raises a question about the operation at Black Mingo—namely, what went wrong such that Marion’s approach set off the alarm and allowed the Tories to gain the initial advantage of surprise? Had the assault been undetected, Marion might well have routed the enemy, as at Nelson’s Ferry and Blue Savannah, while suffering few if any casualties.
For more than two hundred years the answer to that question has rested on an account by Weems that has been repeated ever since. According to Weems, when Marion’s men crossed the wooden bridge a mile above Dollard’s Tavern, their horses’ hooves loudly rattled on the loose planks, piercing the stillness of the night and alerting the enemy. From then on, under this telling, Marion made sure that whenever his men crossed a wooden bridge on horseback within the enemy’s hearing distance, they placed blankets down to muffle the sound.
Although that innovation is usually cited as an example of Marion’s ability to learn from tactical mistakes, it seems like something he should have thought about ahead of time. Marion was familiar with the Black Mingo area and knew he would need to cross the Willtown Bridge, which he had crossed any number of times. Either in planning the attack or at least when he arrived at the bridge, he would have known that dozens of horses trampling across the rickety boards in the dead of night would make a noise the enemy might hear. A truly attentive guerrilla commander would have anticipated the issue and found a way to deal with it.
As it turns out, he did.
At least four separate pension applications independently submitted under oath by veterans who fought with Marion at Black Mingo state that before crossing Willtown Bridge they spread blankets on it to prevent the Tories from hearing them cross. Parson Weems apparently decided it would make a better story if Marion did not think to lay down blankets on this occasion and then adopted the precaution from that point forward.
The question remains: How did Ball’s Tories know Marion was about to attack? The answer is suggested in Marion’s letter to Gates a week after the battle. “They had intelligence of our coming,” Marion explained. That would indicate that it was not loud horse hooves a few moments before the battle that tipped off the Tories but rather some earlier advance warning. Marion was not the only person who had spies working for him. Plenty of Tories in the Black Mingo area would have been eager to spoil a patriot attack. Certainly that was true of Elias Ball. “He had about a hundred and fifty slaves, and he was a mean fella,” one of his descendants recalled. Perhaps Elias Ball or another local Tory got wind of the action and told his brother John. But it was not enough to prevent Marion’s triumph.
Immediately after Black Mingo, Marion wanted to go after Wigfall, who, along with Ball, had been sent into the Williamsburg area to keep the Whigs in check. Wigfall was now stationed with about fifty men at the Salem Black River Presbyterian Church upriver from Kingstree and was an especially enticing target for Marion. He had served under Marion earlier in the war, and Marion pointedly excluded him by name from the thanks he gave his officers at Dorchester. John Wigfall was one of those South Carolinians who blew with the prevailing winds, siding with whoever held the advantage. Marion wanted to pursue him but, as he told Gates, could not because “so many of my followers was so desirous to see their wifes and family, which have been burnt out.” As a result, he withdrew in the first week of October to Britton’s Ferry on the Pee Dee and then again to Ami’s Mill. Even so, Wigfall, like Ball, feared Marion so much that he declined to come out and fight anymore.
Cornwallis’s plan to secure South Carolina’s countryside east of the Santee had failed. Wemyss had not swept the rebels from the area—the citizen population had been further inflamed, not pacified—and few Tory militia turned out in response to Wemyss’s call for recruits. Those who did were men of “suspicious” character, Wemyss thought. By October 4 Wemyss had left Cheraw to return to Camden, while Cornwallis, who had moved up to Charlotte, North Carolina, just over the border, was planning to march farther north in the next two weeks to conquer that state. Still worried about Marion menacing his eastern flank, Cornwallis ordered Wemyss to try again: he was to return to the Williamsburg area as soon as possible “to prevent the enemy being thoroughly masters of the country you have left.”
But Wemyss did not go back, and Cornwallis did not march north. On October 7, the same day Cornwallis gave Wemyss his orders, more than a thousand rebel frontiersmen annihilated an approximately equal number of loyalists at King’s Mountain in the South Carolina backcountry next to the North Carolina border. The rebels were backwoodsmen from North Carolina, “over mountain” men from present-day Tennessee, and militia groups from Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina. They attacked up the mountain and surrounded the Tories, killing or wounding a third of their force and capturing more than six hundred. The inspirational British commander Patrick Ferguson (the sole non-American participant in the battle) was shot dead from his horse by a half dozen rifle balls, then dragged along the ground with his foot caught in his stirrup. His lifeless body, bones broken in several places, was then stripped naked. Shouting cries of revenge for atrocities they attributed to Tarleton, the patriot militia slaughtered the Tories who were trying to surrender until patriot commanders stopped the massacre. Afterward the rebels summarily tried and convicted thirty-six loyalists for treason and hanged nine of them before the rest were reprieved.
King’s Mountain was a significant turning point in the war in the South. It destroyed Tory morale in the South Carolina backcountry just as Marion had done through his string of smaller victories in the Lowcountry. Cornwallis was now exposed on his western (left) flank to the ascendant backcountry patriot militia on South Carolina’s northern frontier. Bad as that state of affairs was, he told Clinton that his situation on his eastern (right) flank—where his supply lines ran to Charleston—was even worse. He was still threatened on that front by Marion, who had so affected the minds of the people between the Santee and Pee Dee that, as Cornwallis lamented, “there was scarce an inhabitant” in that area “that was not in arms against us.” Indeed, although Marion had not been at King’s Mountain, his incursions east of Camden resulted in Wemyss not being there either. Cornwallis had planned to reinforce
Ferguson’s militia with Wemyss’s 63rd Foot, and Wemyss would have been available to do so had he not been off chasing Marion.
With South Carolina decidedly unsecured, Cornwallis had to abandon for the time being his plan to invade North Carolina. Leaving Charlotte, where his army was constantly harassed by the locals, he retreated back across the border into South Carolina, setting up winter camp at Winnsboro, thirty miles west of Camden. By this time Cornwallis had come down with a feverish cold so severe he could not lift a pen and was forced to temporarily transfer command to twenty-five-year-old Francis Rawdon, the Irish-born head of the Volunteers of Ireland loyalist provincial regiment. A former aide to Clinton, Rawdon would prove to be the British army’s most talented military leader in the South. As one of Cornwallis’s last acts before turning over the reins to the younger man, his Lordship, feeling in need of reinforcements, recalled Wemyss to Camden, rescinding the order for him to return to the Williamsburg district.
Wemyss, the most hated man in Williamsburg, would never set foot there again. But his departure from the area created a vacuum the British decided had to be filled. They would raise a new force to replace the one commanded by Wemyss. It would provide Marion with his next big opportunity.
9
Dead Man’s Hand
With the quieting of the Tory threat east of Camden, Marion sat at Ami’s Mill pondering his next move. On October 4 he confessed to Gates that he had suffered many fatigues over the previous few weeks but had managed to surmount them. He had never had more than sixty or seventy men with him of all ranks, and sometimes as few as a dozen. In some cases he had been forced to fight against men who had left him to join the enemy; he regretted that he had no authority to punish them. If he had a hundred men from Gates’s army, he thought, he could “certainly pay a visit to Georgetown” and attack the British garrison there. But Gates had answered none of his letters—besides which, Marion was not entirely sure where Gates even was at that point.
