by John Oller
After camping at the rebel stronghold of Kingstree for one night Major Robert McLeroth, unaware of Marion’s whereabouts, became worried that the partisan leader might swoop down upon him from out of nowhere at any moment. The Tory reinforcements McLeroth was expecting from Georgetown also had failed to show up; they had gone home after their leader, Barefield, was wounded in the skirmish with Marion’s men. Believing his position too weak to stay at Kingstree, McLeroth moved his 64th Regiment of Foot out of the patriot-infested Williamsburg area and down to Nelson’s Ferry, where reinforcements brought his total to about four hundred. There he set up camp around Sumter’s plantation, the site of Marion’s daring rescue mission in August. Unlike Wemyss or Tarleton, though, McLeroth did not vent his frustration by laying waste to the countryside. A Scotsman by birth, he declined to burn the homes of his Scotch-Irish kinsmen, earning him the disdain of Cornwallis and other British officers.
To the British high command McLeroth lacked enterprise and vigor. Still, they grudgingly acknowledged that he was better off staying put on the Santee rather than conducting freelance operations through the Williamsburg region. “I think the sooner he can be put into a situation where he has not to act [for] himself the better—otherwise I fear some accident to him,” Balfour wrote to Cornwallis from Charleston. Cornwallis expressed a similar concern to Rawdon, who had recently taken command at Camden after Turnbull, suffering from malaria, was granted leave to return home to New York. “I trust, my dear Lord, that you will have a constant eye to McLeroth, who by his letters requires much looking after,” Cornwallis wrote on December 3, adding that “a blow to any British regiment cuts deep.”
Deciding he was in no position to chase McLeroth from Kingstree to the Santee, Marion remained in hiding at the junction of Lynches Creek and the Pee Dee near Britton’s Ferry. But events in the first week of December convinced the partisan leader it was time to strike the enemy again. He found out that a marauding band of Whigs had burst into the home of two brothers of Major John Harrison, the hated Tory bandit, and murdered them as they lay sick in their beds from smallpox. Marion expected that news of this atrocity would lead to a Tory uprising if left unchecked. He also received intelligence that Samuel Tynes, who had fled from Tearcoat Swamp only to be captured a week later by Marion’s men, had escaped from General Harrington’s camp in North Carolina and was again embodying the militia in the High Hills of Santee. Tynes reportedly was planning to join forces with McLeroth to give the British a superiority in the Pee Dee region that would force Marion to retreat from there. Determined to prevent that outcome, Marion left Lynches Creek and moved down to Indiantown in anticipation of another fight with Tynes. He enjoyed a sudden influx of volunteers who were motivated to defend the region from the invaders and, with harvest season over, had time on their hands.
But the Tynes threat was short lived. From Indiantown, Marion dispatched Peter Horry and a troop of horsemen to reconnoiter Tynes’s position in the High Hills. Scared off by that movement and a false report that Harrington was marching from North Carolina to meet up with Horry, the Tories deserted their post. An “exceedingly frightened” Tynes rode into Camden and, explaining to Rawdon that he could do nothing with the militia, begged permission to resign. Rawdon accepted, and Tynes, who had fought initially as a patriot and then as a Tory, now would fight as neither.
In the meantime the British command had found a useful occupation for McLeroth. In Charleston two hundred raw recruits, earmarked for the British 7th Regiment of Foot (Royal Fusiliers), had just arrived from England and needed an escort to Cornwallis’s army in Winnsboro. Cornwallis was anxious to have fresh manpower, as he was again preparing to invade North Carolina, having concluded—rather optimistically—that South Carolina was now sufficiently quiet for him to depart. To protect the new recruits’ journey to the interior, though, Balfour wanted British regulars to accompany them. Marion, he told Cornwallis, was “too formidable” to oppose “without something better than militia.” And so the plan was to march the recruits north from Charleston to Sumter’s plantation at Nelson’s Ferry through territory south of the Santee not controlled by Marion. From Sumter’s, McLeroth and his 64th Foot would conduct them to the High Hills of Santee, where a cavalry unit from Camden would meet them.
By now Marion’s brigade had swelled to about three hundred, enough to confront McLeroth’s force. Thus, when he learned the Scottish major was leisurely marching the new recruits along the road from Nelson’s Ferry to Camden, Marion decided to give them a rude baptism. Around December 13 he caught up with McLeroth’s infantry at Halfway Swamp, about twenty miles north of Nelson’s and a mile from the Richardson Plantation where Marion had nearly fallen into Tarleton’s trap. Marion’s riflemen fired upon the British pickets, driving them back in upon the main column. Then Marion’s mounted troops swung around and attacked the enemy’s flank and front, killing or wounding several men. McLeroth, who had the disadvantage of no cavalry, hurried his panicked recruits into an open field and took protection behind a rail fence. Marion drew up his horsemen on the road alongside the Elliott Millpond, a lime green, cypress-filled quagmire that to this day is among the most visually striking swamps in all of South Carolina.
After the two forces glared at each other for a time, McLeroth sent Marion a messenger under a flag of truce, protesting the shooting of his pickets. McLeroth also dared Marion to come out and fight like a gentleman in the open field. Marion replied that the British practice of burning houses was more egregious than his shooting of armed pickets, adding that as long as the British persisted in the former habit he would continue in the latter.a
As for McLeroth’s defiant challenge to engage in open combat, Marion considered it an act of desperation, not chivalry. But then, according to William James, Marion issued a counterproposal that seems unprecedented in the annals of warfare—but actually dated to biblical times: he would not engage in a general combat, but if McLeroth agreed, each side could pick twenty “duelists” to meet on open ground and decide the contest that way. The British commander accepted, and the two sides selected a spot, south of an oak tree, to have their best marksmen square off.
Just what possessed Marion to make this unusual offer—if indeed he did—is difficult to imagine. As someone who prided himself in avoiding cruelty and barbarism, he may have been genuinely stung by McLeroth’s accusations of uncivilized conduct. Or perhaps Marion simply figured that his riflemen were better sharpshooters than the British and were sure to prevail.
In any event, according to James, the men were picked and each side formed a line facing one another more than a hundred yards apart. Marion appointed Major John Vanderhorst to take command of the patriot team, and Vanderhorst asked Captain Gavin Witherspoon what distance he would choose for firing the opening round of buckshot. Witherspoon replied “fifty yards,” and Vanderhorst, explaining that he was not a good judge of distances, told Witherspoon to tap him on the shoulder once they were fifty yards from the enemy. The two opposing lines then marched forward, but when the British advanced to within a hundred yards, they shouldered their muskets and retreated back toward the main body. Marion’s men let out a cheer, claiming a moral victory. Without a shot having been fired, both sides retired for the evening to plan the next day’s operations.
In his typically cursory report on the encounter with McLeroth, Marion omitted any mention of an unorthodox duel, saying only that he had “skirmaged” with the enemy. Perhaps he was reluctant to admit that he had gone along with such a gimmick. Or maybe the whole story was made up. The source of it—not Weems, for once, but William Dobein James—appears to have gotten it years later from Gavin Witherspoon, who claimed to be the first man picked for the patriots’ team. Witherspoon could have spun a tale for James that the author regarded as too good not to use.
Whatever the nature of the “skirmage,” it turned out that McLeroth had been stalling for time. That night he kept his campfires burning to create appearances and before dawn slipped awa
y toward Singleton’s Mills, nearly fifteen miles north. It was one of the few times the Swamp Fox was himself outfoxed. McLeroth left his supply wagons and heavy baggage behind, a costly sacrifice that indicated how much he wanted to avoid a general engagement.
Upon discovering McLeroth’s movement, Marion sent a detachment under Major John James, mounted on the swiftest horses, to take possession of the houses at Singleton’s, which commanded a strong position atop a hill. James reached the buildings just as the British infantry arrived at the foot of the hill. But there he found a new enemy more dreaded than the British and Tories: the Singleton family had just come down with smallpox. James’s men got off a single volley and killed a captain before fleeing the infected premises. McLeroth was reinforced there by 130 infantry (50 mounted, 80 on foot) under loyalist Captain John Coffin, and Marion elected not to pursue them.
After the patriots abandoned Singleton’s, McLeroth and Coffin headed safely off toward Camden with the raw recruits. But the scare Marion had thrown into the newcomers would hamper their effectiveness at the critical battle of Cowpens a month later. As for McLeroth, his military career was effectively over. He asked leave to return to Charleston, and Rawdon, citing the Scotsman’s lack of aggressiveness, granted his request. Yet Rawdon, a hardliner when it came to dealing with rebels, told Cornwallis that, in fairness, McLeroth’s “mild and equitable behavior” toward civilians had been of great value. It was a lesson learned too late to save the victims of Wemyss’s and Tarleton’s excesses.
William Dobein James called McLeroth “the most humane of all the officers of the British army” and regretted that McLeroth and Marion, another man of moral principle, had been forced to war against each other. But regardless of McLeroth’s humanity, his departure left the partisan leader in control of the Santee around Nelson’s Ferry. “I must drive Marion out of that country,” Rawdon declared to Cornwallis on December 15, “but I cannot yet say what steps I shall take to effect it.” Cornwallis, who had bemoaned Marion’s aggravations at the rate of almost a letter a week over the previous few months, was getting tired of hearing his name. He wrote Rawdon two days later, saying that he wanted Marion “disposed of.”
a Marion intuitively had the better of the argument. Under modern rules of warfare pickets and sentries are members of the armed forces of a party to the conflict and, not being religious or medical personnel, may be attacked as enemy combatants. But any destruction of private property by occupying forces is prohibited unless necessary as a military matter.
12
“I Have Not the Honor of Your Acquaintance”
Never one to tempt fate, Marion did not stay in place for long. After McLeroth left for Camden, Marion lingered about the Santee for a few days to burn enemy boats, but upon hearing that a British force was on its way, he retreated again to the Williamsburg district. Leaving some small parties behind to continue agitating the British between Nelson’s and Singleton’s, Marion took post on December 22 at Benbow’s Ferry above Kingstree, where he had gone after the Tarleton chase.
Marion still had heard nothing from Horatio Gates. His last letter to him, written on December 6, was the tenth one he had sent the commanding general, only one of which Gates had bothered to answer. What Marion did not yet know when he sent the December 6 letter was that Gates was no longer head of the Continental army in the South. He had turned over that command on December 3 to the man George Washington had wanted for the position all along.
NATHANAEL GREENE HAD what was probably the best military mind in the Continental Army. Yet he had no military training and little formal education. A lapsed Quaker, he was suspended from their meetings after being seen at a public alehouse in 1773; later he formally withdrew from the pacifistic sect. In 1774 he organized a militia in his native Rhode Island to oppose the British. His military learning was self-taught, gained from books among his 250-volume personal library. When the Revolution came in 1775 Greene was promoted from private to major general of the Rhode Island state army, and in June of that year Congress appointed him as a brigadier in the Continental Army. He was only thirty-two.
His meteoric rise continued a year later when he was made a major general and placed in charge of the army on Long Island. During his time in New York he commanded at Fort Lee in New Jersey and Fort Washington across the Hudson in Manhattan, but he was unable to hold either against the British. He crossed the Delaware with Washington on Christmas Day 1776 and led a column in the great victory over the Hessians at Trenton. He also fought ably under Washington at the losing battles of Brandywine and Germantown, then again in the standoff at Monmouth Courthouse, where Greene’s Continental right wing held off a furious attack by Lord Cornwallis. It was the last major battle in the North before Clinton and Cornwallis sailed to take Charleston in 1780.
Greene was to become the fifth commander of the Continental southern army, following Charles Lee, Robert Howe, Benjamin Lincoln, and Horatio Gates. He received his appointment from Washington (who was finally allowed by Congress to pick his own man) in mid-October 1780 but did not arrive at Gates’s headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina, until December 2. There, in a little log cabin town, Greene found a starving, half-naked, dispirited army of twenty-three hundred men. Only fifteen hundred of them were fit for duty and eight hundred adequately clothed and equipped. On December 4, his first full day on the job, he sat down to write to several notables, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, to report on the deplorable condition of the army remnants he had inherited. One of his letters was to Francis Marion, who received it on December 22 at his camp at Benbow’s Ferry. It was the first of more than dozens of letters Greene would write to Marion over the next two years.
“I have not the honor of your acquaintance,” Greene began, “but am no stranger to your character and merit. Your services in the lower part of South Carolina in aiding the forces and preventing the enemy from extending their limits have been very important and it is my earnest desire that you continue where you are until further advice from me.”
“I like your plan of frequently shifting your ground,” Greene continued. “It frequently prevents a surprise and perhaps a total loss of your party.” Having already perfected if not invented this method of operation, Marion hardly needed Greene to tell him how sensible it was. But after being ignored for so long by Gates, Marion would have welcomed a little flattery. Greene went on: “Until a more permanent army can be collected than is in the field at present, we must endeavor to keep up a partisan war and preserve the tide of sentiment among the people as much as possible in our favor.”
Privately Greene often derided the partisan militia, likening it to “the garnish of a table” whose little “partisan strokes” merely kept the contest alive and, in comparison with the main army, provided no substantial national security. The goal of the war in the South, he wrote to Sumter around this time, was not to capture little outposts but to win the “contest for states,” which only the army could accomplish. The British would never relinquish South Carolina, Greene added, until they saw a better barrier in the field than a volunteer militia who came and went as they pleased.
Too often, Greene told Sumter, the militia were more interested in pillage and plunder and placed their desire for private gain or personal glory above the cause. He also found that they demanded greater care and feeding than the Continentals, many of whom had endured the winters at Valley Forge and Morristown before coming south. The militia, Greene complained to a fellow Rhode Island general, were “like the locusts of Egypt [who] have eaten up every green thing.” They were “of no more use than if they were in the moon.”
Sumter, who had helped keep patriot hopes alive while risking his life the previous eight months, understandably took umbrage at Greene’s stinging put-downs of the militia. Greene’s disparaging attitude would strain his relationship with Sumter going forward. But Marion did not wholly disagree with Greene’s comments. As a Continental colonel earlier in the war, he had promoted �
��good harmony” between the Continental troops and state militia and said he would not be “partial to either.” But there were times during his Continental command when he found the militia to be “not of the least service.” By now, having directly experienced what it was like to command them, he was just as frustrated with what he called the militia’s “diffidence” as was Greene. And if anything he was even more intolerant of plunder, once going so far as to threaten execution of “any soldier of any denomination who is found taking any article from any plantation wither from white or black.”
Much as Greene may have held the militia in low esteem, he would learn to use them cooperatively in a way that Gates never did. Greene knew he could not count on reinforcements from the North, where Washington was reduced to eyeing Clinton warily in New York and pleading for French help. To retake South Carolina, Greene would need the patriot militia’s help. In time he would also come to view the “war of posts” as of signal importance.
Marion, too, understood that the Continental Army and the militia needed each other. Marion did like designing his own program and sometimes would chafe at instructions that differed from his own ideas on how best to engage the enemy. It was a natural reaction on the part of someone who had enjoyed considerable success trusting his own judgment and instincts. But unlike Sumter, who preferred flying solo, Marion was willing to subordinate himself to Greene if necessary for the greater good. Marion also favored the system of discipline and order that marked the regular army, as compared with the anarchy that prevailed within the militia. There was still much of the old Continental officer in the relatively new partisan leader.
To show he understood the militia’s needs, Greene also responded to Marion’s unanswered letters to Gates asking for various help. “Ammunition I am told is gone to you since you wrote [to Gates],” Greene assured him. Greene apologized that he could not supply Marion’s men with any clothing because the army had none. Greene was too unfamiliar with the medical department to give Marion an answer regarding a surgeon but promised to send one if possible. “I am fully sensible your service is hard and sufferings great,” he sympathized, “but how great the prize for which we contend!”
