The Swamp Fox

by John Oller

  Marion nearly took the bait. Seeing the light near Richardson’s, he concluded that it was the plantation house on fire and that Tarleton was there. Not knowing the size of the enemy force, he crept forward, deliberating over his next move. Just then he was met by Richard Richardson Jr., son of the late general. He brought information that Tarleton was camped a couple of miles away with a hundred cavalry and three hundred dragoons. The junior Richardson, a thirty-nine-year-old militia major, had been taken prisoner at Charleston, paroled, and returned to service after being exchanged. By slipping away to alert Marion, he was risking his life. He also reported that Tarleton had two artillery pieces—a grasshopper (a light brass cannon, named for the way it jumped backward on firing) and a small field howitzer. He further informed Marion that one of his men had deserted to the enemy and was now serving as a guide for Tarleton.

  Realizing that Tarleton held the advantage, including artillery, which his men had not yet faced, Marion decided he needed to depart the area at once. He took his men on a fast ride in darkness through a major swamp, not stopping until they were past Richbourg’s Mill Dam on Jack’s Creek six miles away. With a nearly impenetrable swamp and almost nine miles lying between him and Tarleton, Marion decided he was safe for the night.

  The next morning, November 8, Tarleton was scratching his head over Marion’s failure to attack, so he sent a few men to find out why. They brought back a prisoner who had managed to escape from Marion’s brigade during the previous night’s mad dash. He informed them that Marion would have attacked him had some “treacherous women” (the widow Richardson and others) not smuggled out an emissary to warn Marion of Tarleton’s actual number. Tarleton immediately ordered his men to their arms and mounts, but they soon discovered that Marion had already flown from his camp at Jack’s Creek in the direction of Kingstree.

  Tarleton then embarked on a seven-hour hunt for his intended victim, trudging through twenty-six miles of miserable swamps and narrow gorges. Marion in turn took his men on a thirty-five-mile jaunt, up to the head of one creek, down along a river and then across another, through woods and bogs, always staying beyond shouting distance of his pursuers. As Tarleton reported to Cornwallis, due to Marion’s head start and “the difficulties of the country,” he was unable to catch him. He abandoned the chase at Ox Swamp, outside of present-day Manning, which was wide, mucky, and without roads for passage. It was there Tarleton is said to have uttered the words that gave Marion his immortal nickname. “Come my boys! Let us go back, and we will soon find the Gamecock [Thomas Sumter]. But as for this damned old fox, the Devil himself could not catch him.”c

  At that point, the night of November 8, Marion was about twelve miles east at Benbow’s Ferry, ten miles north of Kingstree. There he had established a strong defensive position with the Black River between him and his pursuers and swamps to his rear into which he could disappear if necessary. But Tarleton was giving up. He tried to put a good face on his excursion, telling Cornwallis that although he regretted not being able to bring Marion’s rebels to a fight, he was happy to have broken them up. In his memoirs seven years later Tarleton would also claim that he would have caught up to Marion had he not received a message from Cornwallis ordering him immediately to return to Winnsboro. But although Cornwallis did issue that directive, it was not until after Tarleton had already ended his pursuit at Ox Swamp. Cornwallis’s hope that Tarleton would “get at Mr. Marion” had gone unfulfilled.

  Tarleton’s frustration was evident from his actions immediately afterward. As he told Cornwallis, he “laid . . . waste” to all the houses and plantations of the rebels around Richardson’s Plantation and Jack’s Creek. (As usual, Cornwallis turned a blind eye to such depredations.) Tarleton paid a visit back to the widow Richardson’s home and, as Marion reported to Gates, “beat” her to “make her tell where I was.” Doing what he had earlier pretended to do in order to lure Marion to battle, Tarleton then burned Mrs. Richardson’s home and some of her cattle, destroyed all her corn, and left her without so much as a change of clothes. From Nelson’s Ferry to Camden he destroyed the homes and grain of thirty plantation owners. Worst of all, Marion reported, Tarleton had “behaved to the poor women he has distressed with great barbarity. . . . It is beyond measure distressing to see the women and children sitting in the open air round a fire without a blanket, or any clothing but what they had on, and women of family, and that had ample fortunes; for he spares neither Whig nor Tory.”d

  For the moment, however, Marion felt powerless to confront Tarleton. The patriots were low on ammunition, and the militia, afraid of the Legion cavalry, was reluctant to turn out. This gave Tarleton a temporary feeling of triumph. He laid down his torch and issued a proclamation from Singleton’s Mills on November 11, offering pardons to any rebels who returned to their homes to live peaceably and promised to alert the Tory militia leaders to any future insurrections. “It is not the wish of Britons to be cruel or to destroy, but it is now obvious to all Carolina that treachery, perfidy, and perjury will be punished with instant fire and sword,” his proclamation read. “The country seems now convinced of the error of insurrection,” he boasted to Cornwallis. And if there had been even one local Tory not otherwise cowed by Marion who had given him any help, Tarleton maintained, he would have achieved “the total destruction of Mr. Marion.” Yet Cornwallis was pleased with the results. He believed that by forcing Marion to take to the swamps, Tarleton had convinced the patriot citizenry that “there was a power superior to Marion” who could reward and punish them. Tarleton had “so far checked the insurrection,” Cornwallis told Clinton, “that the greatest part of them have not dared openly to appear in arms against us since his expedition.”

  Even as the British were claiming to have subdued Marion, though, he was planning another offensive operation. Within a few days, as soon as he became satisfied that Tarleton was heading back to Winnsboro, Marion had gathered enough of a force to threaten Georgetown again. Nisbet Balfour, head of the garrison at Charleston, needled Cornwallis by reminding him that his favorite Tarleton had claimed to have ended the Marion threat. Despite Ban’s claim, Marion had reappeared, which was “no joke to us,” Balfour assured his Lordship. “I do not think that Tarleton flattered himself that he had done more than stopping his immediate progress and preventing the militia from joining him,” Cornwallis coolly responded. Shortly thereafter Cornwallis acknowledged that Marion was still a problem. “We have lost two great plagues in Sumpter [sic] and [Elijah] Clarke,” Cornwallis wrote to Balfour, based on a false report that those two partisan leaders had been killed. Then he added, “I wish your friend Marion was as quiet.”

  a Like traditional dragoons, both patriot and Tory militia generally traveled on horse but dismounted to fight with whatever weapons they could bring to a battle, whether muskets, rifles, pistols, or swords. In practice the distinctions between “heavy” and “light” cavalry, “dragoons,” mounted infantry, and “light” horse as well as “rangers” tended to blur. Especially in the South, where distances between engagements could be vast, almost all militiamen rode horses to and from battles and fought either on foot or from a mounted position, depending on circumstances.

  b Refusing quarter was hardly alien to Tarleton’s Legion. At Monck’s Corner, as recounted by Cornwallis’s own surgeon, they had continued to slash and hack one of the patriot commanders who had given up the fight, mangling him in “the most shocking manner.” And before the battle of Camden, Tarleton himself vowed to Cornwallis to “give these disturbers of the peace no quarter.” They “don’t deserve lenity. None shall they experience,” he wrote.

  c Ironically, neither Tarleton nor anyone writing during Marion’s lifetime is known to have referred to him as the Swamp Fox. In Weems’s 1809 biography two young women in the company of British officers during the war supposedly called Marion a “vile swamp fox,” expressing the colonial period view that swamps were dark, dank places fit only for lowly creatures. It was not until an 1829 poem an
d William Gilmore Simms’s 1844 biography of Marion that the nickname Swamp Fox, as applied to Marion, took on a positive connotation.

  d The oft-repeated story that Tarleton dug up General Richardson’s grave to gaze upon his face is almost certainly fanciful. But even Tarleton’s defenders do not dispute that he harshly treated Richardson’s wife and family, though one writer argues that “there is no record of humans being harmed beyond being left homeless and hungry.”

  11

  “I Must Drive Marion Out of That Country”

  Marion’s diversion of Tarleton had another positive—if indirect—repercussion that warmed patriot hearts: the disabling of the hated Major Wemyss. The direct credit for that achievement would belong to a reinvigorated Thomas Sumter, who remained very much alive.

  Ever since his crushing loss to Tarleton at Fishing Creek in August, Sumter had been stirring about in the western part of South Carolina above Camden, looking for an opportunity to reenter the fray. But in three months he had done little. One of his militia regiments had participated in the battle of King’s Mountain, but Sumter himself was absent, off angling for a promotion from South Carolina’s exiled governor, John Rutledge, in Hillsboro, North Carolina. The day before King’s Mountain, Rutledge commissioned Sumter as a brigadier general, making him the highest-ranking militia officer in the state.

  Sumter’s reputation had a way of staying elevated. Cornwallis considered him “our greatest plague in this country”—not so much for his battlefield prowess as for his ability to recruit large numbers of men quickly, even following defeat. Part of his recruiting talent was due to his willingness, unlike Marion, to indulge his men’s desire for private plunder. In Sumter’s defense, the line between arbitrary plunder and legitimate foraging was a blurry one. And Marion’s scrupulous refusal to tolerate the practice marked him as a killjoy in the minds of some, making it more difficult for him to muster the rank-and-file. Marion preferred the loyalty of a few good men to the fickleness of many uncommitted ones.

  While Tarleton was off chasing Marion, Sumter was gathering force and moving down from near the North Carolina border toward Winnsboro, where Cornwallis still had his winter headquarters. Wemyss, while patrolling and protecting the area in Tarleton’s absence, learned that Sumter was just thirty miles away from the main British army. Not having been tested yet in actual battle in the southern theater, Wemyss asked Cornwallis for permission to engage Sumter. Although Cornwallis would have preferred Tarleton for the mission, he approved a dawn attack on Sumter’s presumed camp on the Broad River. Wemyss enthusiastically went forward, even putting together a team of five men to kill or capture the Gamecock.

  James Wemyss was good at burning plantations and hanging rebels when no enemy was around to stop him. But he was no battlefield tactician. Finding that Sumter had moved to Fish Dam Ford five miles downriver from where he was thought to be, Wemyss ordered an ill-advised, postmidnight cavalry assault. In his eagerness he had ignored Cornwallis’s orders not to attack at night. The Americans repulsed the British and Tory horsemen and shot Wemyss through the arm and knee, unsaddling him from his horse and maiming him for life. Taken prisoner, Wemyss was paroled, then exchanged, but he never took the field again. He would be remembered in history mainly as the man who set fire to Presbyterian Church “sedition shops.”

  The one near success the British had at Fish Dam Ford came from the Sumter assassination squad. They burst into the sleeping militia commander’s tent, from which he barely escaped, running half naked to hide in a briar patch while the fighting continued around him. He shivered all night until he climbed onto a bareback horse and hugged its neck for warmth.

  Immediately after Fish Dam Ford, Sumter was bragging of his victory and reporting that his militia force had gone from three hundred to a thousand men overnight. Tarleton was to the south, burning houses and issuing his proclamation, when he received the summons from Cornwallis to return at once to address the Sumter threat. Thus, although the quote attributed to Tarleton—that he would leave the “damned old fox” and go find the “Gamecock”—undoubtedly is apocryphal, the essence of it is not far from the truth.

  Tarleton succeeded in finding Sumter but failed to finish him off as hoped. To the contrary, it was the Green Dragoon who was routed this time. On November 20 Tarleton’s force of three to four hundred met Sumter’s thousand-man militia at Blackstock’s plantation, seventy miles northwest of Winnsboro. Tarleton had with him his green-coated Legion and redcoats from Wemyss’s old command, the 63rd Foot, mounted on horses they had stolen from the Pee Dee area during their burning spree. Tarleton had another 250 foot soldiers lagging behind him—the bagpipe-playing Scottish Highlanders—plus an artillery unit, but he decided not to wait for them before engaging Sumter’s militia. Although Tarleton would falsely claim victory, in fact his men were mauled. About 60 percent of them were killed or wounded, while patriot casualties were minimal.

  Among the patriot wounded was Thomas Sumter, who was hit with five buckshot in the chest and one in the shoulder. But he had just won his greatest victory of the war. The American militia had defeated not only Tories but also seasoned British regulars and had handed Tarleton the first battlefield loss of his career. Fighting from covered positions rather than in open fields, the militia even managed to beat back a bayonet charge by the 63rd Foot, which had dismounted to make the redcoats’ usual bone-chilling thrust with cold steel.

  It was Sumter’s finest hour. But his injuries were so serious that they sidelined him for the next three months. In the meantime Francis Marion was again the sole patriot commander operating in South Carolina. And he was not happy about it.

  THE DAY AFTER Sumter’s victory at Blackstock’s, Marion wrote to General Gates to report on his prior week’s attempt on British-occupied Georgetown. Based on information that just fifty severely wounded soldiers (“invalids”) garrisoned the town, Marion decided to enter it in search of sorely needed ammunition, clothing, and salt. He also knew that the capture of Georgetown would cause a heavy blow to British morale. But as it turned out, while Marion was busy evading Tarleton, a force of two hundred Tories under Jesse Barefield entered Georgetown to reinforce it. When Marion came near the town he sent out two separate reconnaissance parties, both of whom ran into bodies of Tories. Marion’s men scattered one group of Tories and drove the other back into Georgetown, but as with Marion’s first attempt to take the city, the enemy fortifications were too strong to permit an assault.

  The expedition was not without success. In the skirmishing outside the city around November 13 Marion’s horsemen killed a Tory captain and wounded the redoubtable Jesse Barefield on the head and body before he got away. The patriots also took twelve Tory prisoners. But Marion’s men suffered a grievous loss of their own. In the scuffle with Barefield, Marion’s nephew Gabriel Marion, a lieutenant in the brigade, was captured and then shot through the chest at point blank when the Tories learned his identity. Recently turned twenty-one at the time of his death, Gabriel was Marion’s favorite nephew—the son of Marion’s closest and late brother, Gabriel, who had done so much to help Marion financially over the years. Young Lieutenant Gabriel Marion must have realized how dangerous it was to be a member of his uncle’s brigade: three weeks before he was killed he made out a will naming Francis Marion as a beneficiary.

  Marion, childless himself, mourned young Gabriel’s death as a father would a son. But his official report of the skirmish was typically laconic: “Our loss was Lt. Gabriel Marion and one private killed and three wounded.” When, the day after the skirmish, one of Marion’s soldiers put a bullet through the head of a captured mulatto man suspected—without evidence—of having killed his nephew, a furious Marion severely reprimanded the captain of the prisoner guard for failing to prevent it.

  Marion concluded his November 21 letter to Gates on a desperate note. While camped at Britton’s Ferry he learned that a force of two hundred Hessians and militia under Major Robert McLeroth had taken post at Kingstre
e. A loyalist provincial unit was also on its way there to drive off livestock and destroy provisions, à la Wemyss and Tarleton. Once again the British meant to challenge Whig supremacy in the Williamsburg area. Marion wanted to come to the rescue of the locals, but without more men and ammunition, he told Gates, he was unable to “do anything effectual.” Marion asked Brigadier General William Harrington, head of the North Carolina militia, to send him some of his mounted troops to help dislodge the enemy from Kingstree. But he did not really expect Harrington—who had done nothing with the troops he had—to part with any of them. Marion also told Gates that he was greatly in need of a surgeon; one of his wounded had bled to death for lack of a doctor’s attention, and many others had returned home for lack of medicine.

  But Marion’s biggest complaint was that he still had no idea when—or even if—the Continental Army was planning to return to South Carolina. “Many of my people has left me and gone over to the enemy, for they think that we have no army coming on, and have been deceived,” he informed Gates. “As we hear nothing from you a great while, I hope to have a line from you in what manner to act, and some assurance to the people of support.” The next day he wrote Gates to reiterate the point. “I seldom have the same [militia] set a fortnight,” he lamented, “and until the Grand Army is on the banks of Santee, it will be the same.”

  Marion was not overstating the difficulties he faced, but he was underestimating the psychological impact his recent successes were having on the enemy. The British chronically overestimated his numbers, partly because of the many patrols he had spread out around the countryside, creating an illusion that he was everywhere. In war the appearance of strength can be as important as the reality in scaring the enemy.