The Swamp Fox

by John Oller

  Marion decided to make a little probing incursion against Georgetown anyway. He heard that Micajah Ganey, the Tory whose force he had bested at the Blue Savannah, was in Georgetown to reinforce the British garrison there. On October 9 Marion entered the city unmolested with forty men on horse and, once inside, issued a rather audacious demand to the garrison commander to surrender. But after the predictable refusal, Marion withdrew, finding the fortifications too strong to storm. To have any chance at capturing the stronghold he would have needed artillery, which was impractical for his fast-moving guerrilla force to haul over long distances.

  Before leaving, however, and to show the enemy he was a force to be reckoned with—or just to show off—he took his men on a little parade through the town. They made off with a few horses and some of the enemy’s equipment and captured several notable Tory military men whom Marion immediately paroled to their homes. If nothing else, Marion served notice that if the British wanted to hold the second-largest population center in South Carolina, they would need to keep men and resources tied down there. “This damned Georgetown business,” as the British called it, would prove an unwelcome distraction for months to come.

  The Georgetown expedition had also scored another success. Two miles outside the city a separate advance guard of Marion’s horsemen, led by Peter Horry, ran into some mounted Tories under Ganey’s command and killed Ganey’s lieutenant. Sergeant Allen McDonald, one of the three American prisoners rescued at Nelson’s Ferry who had joined Marion’s brigade, then set his sights on Ganey. McDonald ran down the Tory leader on horseback and bayoneted him, the knife dislodging from McDonald’s musket and sticking in Ganey’s back. Ganey rode that way all the way back to Georgetown, but despite Marion’s assumption that he had been mortally wounded, he somehow managed to survive. Nonetheless the man Marion called one of “the most active persons against us” was put out of commission for several months.

  Marion reported to Gates on his little foray, saying he wished to hear from him as soon as possible, for he had received no word from him in a month. As Marion explained, this lack of information forced him to act with extreme caution lest he fall into the enemy’s hands. He closed by asking Gates to excuse his “scrawl,” as he had no table to write on in “this wild woods.” (Sometimes he lacked even paper to write on, which placed a premium on brevity.)

  After Marion returned to Ami’s Mill a letter showed up, finally, from Gates, sent from his headquarters in Hillsboro, North Carolina. Gates warmly congratulated Marion on his recent successes and asked him to continue his hostilities in the South Carolina Lowcountry to deflect attention from Gates’s army. Marion was happy to receive an assignment directly from the Continental general who once had not known what to do with him.

  Marion’s initial thought was to seek out Major John Harrison, the head of a hundred-man loyalist provincial mounted unit known as the South Carolina Rangers or Harrison’s Corps. They operated at McCallum’s Ferry on upper Lynches Creek in the Camden area. Although Harrison failed to raise the five hundred men Cornwallis was hoping for, his rangers often scouted and foraged for the regular British army. In particular, Harrison had helped guide Wemyss during his seventy-mile punitive expedition by pointing out the homes of rebel agitators to be burned. The Whigs considered him and his brothers Samuel and Robert, who served as captains in his regiment, to be among “the greatest banditti that ever infested the country.” Even Wemyss described them as “if possible worse than militia, their whole desire being to plunder and steal and, when they have got as much as their horses will carry, to run home.” He thought they were “not worth anything.” They were also accused of having recently murdered three members of the Salem Black River Presbyterian Church, all upstanding citizens, in their homes.

  As William James recalled, Marion wanted to “chastise” Harrison and his Tory band. But the militia was slow to respond to Marion’s call. He understood his men’s desire to spend time at home and to tend to their crops at planting and harvest season, but as a former Continental officer accustomed to having unquestioned authority over his soldiers, he was frustrated by the volunteer militia’s constant coming and going. Despairing that they might not return this time, he considered taking a few of his most loyal officers with him to North Carolina to offer their services to General Gates, who now appeared to appreciate their value. But Hugh Horry, Marion’s closest adviser, convinced him to stay. In time the militia began to saunter into camp, and Marion’s spirits brightened. He moved back down into the Williamsburg district, camping at Port’s Ferry, from where he sent out small patrols of five to ten men each night to gather intelligence on the enemy.

  On October 24 one such patrol returned with a report that a sizeable group of Tory militia, which Marion later reported to number two hundred, was lazily camped in a field near Tearcoat Swamp, some fifty miles west. The Tories were under the command of Colonel Samuel Tynes, a man of some prominence in the High Hills of Santee who had been ordered to collect militia in that area to replace Wemyss’s troops. A Virginia-born man of about thirty, Tynes joined the patriot militia in 1775 with his brother, but unlike Fleming Tynes, Samuel switched sides to the British after the fall of Charleston. Cornwallis called him a “weak, well intentioned man,” and from a military standpoint it seems he had little to offer. Marion saw him as a ripe target because Tynes, in mustering his militia, had stocked up in Camden on guns, ammunition, and equipment, all of which Marion needed. Marion also believed it important to snuff out any new Tory muster in the area before loyalist sentiment was able to rekindle. He jettisoned the idea of pursuing Harrison’s Corps—he would go after Tynes instead.

  As he marched, first to Kingstree on October 24, then on toward Tearcoat the next day, Marion’s force rose to 150, the largest it had ever been. Again he revealed his plans to no one. On the evening of October 25 Marion arrived near Tynes’s camp at the fork of the Black River and sent out a couple of youths to reconnoiter it. They came back with confirmation that security there was lax and that most of the loyalists had gone to sleep; those still awake were playing cards. Just as at Black Mingo, Marion divided his brigade to attack from three directions—right, left, and center. After resting his men until midnight he fired his pistol to start the attack. The patriots rushed in, whooping and hollering like Cherokees as they overran the camp.

  Most of the frightened Tories, including Tynes, abandoned their posts, left their guns behind, and fled into Tearcoat Swamp. Marion’s men killed six, wounded fourteen, and captured twenty-three. Marion’s losses were two horses and no men. Among the Tory dead was Amos Gaskens, a reputed thief who, like the Harrisons, had helped conduct Wemyss on his house-burning excursion. Legend holds that Gaskens, or another of Tynes’s card players, was shot to death still clutching the ace, deuce, and jack of clubs in his hands. “He seemed to be in a fair way to do well,” Parson Weems wrote, “but Marion came down upon him with a trump that spoiled his sport, and non-suited him forever.”

  The haul from the battle was substantial: eighty horses, with bridles and saddles, and all of the enemy’s muskets, ammunition, food, and personal baggage. For the first time in a while Marion was able to equip his men. As after Black Mingo, a number of Tynes’s men decided to join Marion’s brigade and, according to William James, fought bravely for him thereafter.

  To Marion’s consternation, Tynes himself got away, just as several Tory leaders before him had managed to do after being routed by Marion’s brigade. This time Marion decided to do something about it. He sent Captain William Clay Snipes, a zealous if uncontainable Tory-hater, with a party of men to the High Hills of Santee to seize all the militia and civil officials they could find. Snipes came back a week later with Tynes in custody, along with a few other militia officers and two justices of the peace. Marion sent the captured men to a patriot militia post in North Carolina and went into camp on Lynches Creek near Witherspoon’s Ferry.

  Marion’s victory at Tearcoat Swamp left the British high command in a st
ate of panic. With no effective enemy force in the field, Marion now had the ability to strike at will throughout the entire area of South Carolina east of the Wateree River and north of the Santee. As a result it had become almost impossible for the British to safely send supplies or communications from the coast to Cornwallis’s army. The Santee, the major navigable river flowing through the heart of the state, did not connect directly to either Georgetown or Charleston. Therefore, to move supplies from the coast to Camden and Winnsboro, it was necessary to use both roads and waterways. Typically the British traveled either overland or by boat to Nelson’s Ferry, where they crossed the Santee, then by wagon to Camden. But because of the threat Marion posed, the British were afraid to cross at Nelson’s and began taking a longer, more circuitous route to the northwest over more difficult roads to Friday’s Ferry on the Congaree River. From there they crossed the Congaree and traveled overland to Camden and Winnsboro.

  Anxious for the fate of any supplies headed his way, Cornwallis was desperate to end Marion’s dominance in the country between the Santee and Pee Dee Rivers. Nisbet Balfour, the commandant at Charleston, worried that unless further measures were taken, all communication between Charleston and Cornwallis’s army would be “at an end.” Marion was bleeding the British to death by a thousand cuts.

  But what to do? George Turnbull, Cornwallis’s commander at Camden, thought the answer was obvious: if you want to beat the enemy’s best, you have to send your own best up against him. And Turnbull had just the man for the job.

  10

  The Swamp Fox

  In many ways Banastre Tarleton (“Ban,” as he preferred) was the complete opposite of Francis Marion. Young (twenty-six in 1780), boyishly handsome, athletically built, a drinker, gambler, and womanizer, he cut the sort of dashing figure that some have mistakenly ascribed to Marion. His stock in trade was his ruthless pursuit of his quarry followed by a headlong, frontal cavalry attack, with sabers flashing and slashing when he inevitably caught up with them.

  Son of a wealthy Liverpool slave-trading merchant, Tarleton attended Oxford and studied law at London’s prestigious Middle Temple before quitting to follow his friend and fellow Oxfordian, Francis Rawdon, into the military. He purchased a “cornet,” or commission, in the British cavalry in 1775 and voluntarily sailed to America to fight with the king’s men. He was part of Clinton’s first, unsuccessful attack on Charleston, saw action at Brandywine, and helped capture Charles Lee, the Continental commander, in a raid on a tavern in late 1776. During the British occupation of Philadelphia he gambled away his salary, nearly dueled an officer whose mistress he dallied with, and took part in a theatrical group formed by John André, who would later be hanged as Benedict Arnold’s coconspirator.

  In 1778 Tarleton, on the recommendation of Cornwallis, was promoted to lieutenant colonel in the British Legion, a loyalist provincial cavalry unit organized in New York. British in name only, its members were almost entirely American-born Tories recruited from New York and Pennsylvania. Like other “legions” during the Revolution, Tarleton’s consisted of both traditional cavalry, who carried sabers and charged directly into battle, and dragoons—trained infantrymen who traveled on horseback but usually fought on foot, armed with pistols, swords, and sometimes short muskets called carbines. (During the Revolution, however, the term dragoon was used interchangeably with cavalryman.) Tarleton’s soldiers wore short green coats and huge leather helmets with fur plumes to distinguish them from the red-coated British regulars. In a coincidence of history the dragoons took their name from the seventeenth-century French monarch’s soldiers who entered the homes of Marion’s Huguenot ancestors and “dragooned” or carried them off.a

  Tarleton first gained prominence just before the fall of Charleston when his Legion routed the Americans at Monck’s Corner and Lenud’s Ferry and cut off the last escape routes from the city. In both cases he had been greatly outnumbered, but he was a risk taker going back to his student days in London, where he spent nights gambling at the fashionable Cocoa Tree club on St. James’s Street.

  Yet his greatest fame—or infamy, in patriot eyes—came from his follow-up to those encounters. In late May, Cornwallis had dispatched Tarleton and his Legion of 230, along with a company of 40 British army dragoons, to pursue Colonel Abraham Buford. Having arrived too late to reinforce Charleston, Buford and his 350 Virginia Continentals were then on the run toward North Carolina. With them were Governor John Rutledge and some members of his council, who had fled Charleston before it fell. Although the Americans had a ten-day head start on him, Tarleton drove his men relentlessly forward, covering 150 miles in fifty-four hours to catch up with them. Rutledge barely avoided capture by veering off from the main force hours ahead of the pursuers, but Tarleton overtook Buford just shy of the North Carolina border at a place called the Waxhaws.

  There, in Tarleton’s own words, “slaughter was commenced.” Though outnumbered, Tarleton succeeded, as he boasted to Cornwallis immediately afterward, in cutting Buford’s men “to pieces.” The lopsided casualty figures bear out that characterization: as against 5 killed and 14 wounded on the British side, the Americans had about a 70 percent casualty rate: 113 killed, 150 wounded and captured (many of them “dreadfully mangled,” one observer noted), and 53 others taken prisoner. Buford, who had refused relatively generous surrender terms before the conflict, managed to escape on horseback.

  The patriot side claimed that after the fighting stopped, Tarleton’s men were guilty of outright massacre, hacking Buford’s men to death even as they lay down their arms and begged for quarter. “Tarleton’s Quarter” (meaning take no prisoners) and “Buford’s Massacre” became rallying cries for the patriots in later battles, notably King’s Mountain. What is sometimes overlooked is that although the commander of the king’s troops at both King’s Mountain and the Waxhaws was a Briton, virtually all the slaughtering was done by Americans against Americans.

  Some revisionists have argued that Tarleton’s Legion committed no atrocities at the Waxhaws at all, that the entire patriot narrative was invented for propaganda purposes. Others allow that irregularities may have occurred but were brief in duration and resulted not from any bloodthirsty order by Tarleton but from confusion on the part of his men. Tarleton himself, who went down unhurt when his horse was shot from under him, claimed that his cavalry was influenced by a false report that he had been killed, even after the Americans raised the white flag. In his memoirs several years later he wrote that when his men heard they had lost their commanding officer, it “stimulated the soldiers to a vindictive asperity not easily restrained.” By his own admission then, which likely was significantly understated, something atrocious happened after Buford’s men tried to surrender.b

  Whatever the truth of what happened at the Waxhaws, to the patriots Tarleton became known as “Bloody Ban,” the “Green Dragoon” who mercilessly slaughtered his foes. He has remained so in popular American history, even serving as the inspiration for the sadistic “Colonel Tavington” character in The Patriot.

  What mattered to Turnbull, though, was that Tarleton had a perfect winning record. From Camden on November 1 Turnbull wrote to Tarleton at Winnsboro, imploring him to gather up his Legion to hunt down Marion. Tarleton rarely paid any compliments to his rebel adversaries, but he respected Marion, later writing that “Mr. Marion, by his zeal and abilities, shewed himself capable of the trust committed to his charge.” Still, over the previous six months Tarleton had thrashed several more senior commanders—Isaac Huger, William Washington, Abraham Buford, and Thomas Sumter—and he had no reason to doubt he would do the same to Marion. He welcomed the opportunity to pursue him, and Cornwallis approved the operation, telling Tarleton, “I . . . most sincerely hope you will get at Mr. Marion.”

  On November 5, after conferring with Turnbull in Camden, Tarleton and his Legion, joined by Harrison’s Rangers, the Tory “banditti,” set out south after Marion. They heard a rumor he was at Singleton’s Mills in the High Hills o
f Santee, but when they arrived, Marion was nowhere to be found. Instead, he was camped thirty miles farther south, just above Nelson’s Ferry, where he planned to attack the British guard. He had arrived there with two hundred men on the evening of November 5 after a day-and-a-half ride west from Lynches Creek.

  By November 7 Tarleton had moved down to the plantation of the recently widowed Dorothy Richardson, whose late husband, Brigadier General Richard Richardson, had been the victorious Whig commander in the Snow Campaign in 1775. From a local slave Tarleton learned that Marion was bivouacked sixteen miles south, near Nelson’s Ferry. Marion had likewise detected Tarleton’s presence in the vicinity. The two of them then engaged in a game of cat and mouse. Marion laid an ambush at Nelson’s and waited until night, expecting Tarleton to cross there, but the Legion commander fell back a few miles in the other direction. Marion then came up to within three miles of Tarleton’s camp, intending to surprise him.

  But Tarleton was crafty as well: he spread the rumor that his main body had returned to Camden and sent out small patrols with instructions to show little signs of fear by leaving camps abruptly with food still cooking in order to draw Marion to attack. He lit bonfires at Richardson’s Plantation designed to give the impression that he was burning the home of a revered patriot family. In the meantime he wheeled out two small artillery pieces capable of a kind of firepower Marion’s men were not used to facing. Then, knowing Marion’s penchant for making surprise attacks at night, Tarleton hid in the woods with his force of four hundred and waited for Marion to come to him.