The Swamp Fox

by John Oller

  Watson was now forty miles equidistant from Fort Watson and Georgetown. Marion, coming up on his rear, was between him and the fort, so returning there, over difficult terrain, was not an option. Georgetown also had what Watson’s men needed most: rum, salt, shoes, and ammunition. He sent his infantry double-timing down the road toward Georgetown. As Watson’s soldiers scurried away, Marion attacked them from behind while Peter Horry, with the cavalry and riflemen, harassed them in front and on their flanks. In this mad dash Marion and Watson had switched positions; the fox had become the hound.

  On March 20 Watson reached the Sampit River Bridge, nine miles from Georgetown. Peter Horry’s horsemen, sent ahead by Marion, had destroyed the span there too. Marion had spent the first part of the campaign tearing up bridges to impede his British pursuers; now he was doing the same to prevent them from escaping him.

  Watson’s desperate soldiers went plunging into the river. He was nothing if not resourceful—his artillerists blasted grapeshot to stem Marion’s attack from the rear, and his veteran foot soldiers flashed their shiny bayonets at Horry’s dragoons on the opposite bank, causing them to fall back when a frightened officer, John Scott, who was stationed with patriot riflemen, called for a retreat. (Years later Scott claimed he’d been “outflanked.”) Still, before retreating, the American riflemen managed to inflict heavy damage on the enemy. Watson got his men across the river, but twenty of them were killed and nearly twice that number wounded. His own horse was shot out from under him.

  Marion suffered a single killed. Watson left his dead where they lay, loaded up two wagons full of wounded, and limped back to Georgetown. Marion, his men exhausted as well, chose not to pursue Watson to the British-occupied town.

  The Bridges Campaign was at an end. It had showcased Marion at his most brilliant, first in evading and then in demoralizing an enemy blessed with superior numbers and firepower. Watson’s casualties in the campaign were in the dozens, whereas Marion’s were minimal. On March 21, while camped at Trapier’s Plantation just outside Georgetown, Watson complained about Marion’s style of warfare. “They will not sleep and fight like gentlemen,” Watson told the plantation owner, “but like savages are eternally firing and whooping around us by night, and by day waylaying and popping at us from behind every tree.” Had he heard this indictment, Marion might have taken it as a compliment.

  HOWEVER MUCH HE may have wanted to let his men rest on their laurels, Marion could not do so for long. After leaving the Georgetown area he headed back along the Pee Dee toward Snow’s Island, stopping on the way in the Britton’s Neck area to visit the homes of several of his men. But upon arriving at Britton’s Ferry around March 26 to set up camp, or on the way there, he received alarming news: Colonel Doyle had found and destroyed Marion’s Snow’s Island base camp a few miles away.

  A local Tory led the Irish-born Doyle and his New York Volunteers there, and they found easy pickings: Marion had left but a skeleton crew there, many of them sick or wounded, while he was out contending with Watson. Colonel Hugh Ervin, in charge of defending Snow’s, could put up little of a fight before he dumped the rebels’ arms and ammunition into Lynches Creek to keep the enemy from taking them. Ervin and some others escaped the island, leaving fifteen of their number, who were too sick to flee, to be taken prisoner. During the confusion Cornet Merritt, the flag bearer who had been detained a couple of weeks earlier, made his escape from the Bull Pen, the “small, nasty, dark place, made of logs,” that Marion’s men had constructed to hold prisoners. Marion’s Sherwood Forest hiding place was history.

  Although Marion did not mention the loss of his base camp in any of his writings, the loyalist press trumpeted it as a major victory. Within a week after the episode Charleston’s Royal Gazette giddily reported the destruction of “Marion’s repository of stores and plunder on Snow’s Island” as well as Merritt’s daring escape. Even if Marion sought to downplay the military significance of the episode, it was an embarrassment of the type he was more accustomed to inflicting than suffering.

  Doyle, knowing Marion was near, did not linger at Snow’s. As soon as he learned Doyle had moved upriver a few miles to Witherspoon’s Ferry, Marion sent McCottry’s mounted riflemen after him. They found him on the opposite (north) side of Lynches Creek, scuttling a ferry boat to slow Marion’s expected pursuit. The patriot riflemen on the south bank fired across the river and struck a couple of soldiers; Doyle’s musketeers returned the volley to little effect.

  Doyle withdrew farther up the river, and Marion gave chase. With Lynches Creek flooded and no boats around, the patriots had to move five miles upstream from Witherspoon’s, finally crossing at a shallower ford where they could swim their horses across. By now, around March 28, Doyle was off and running to the west, having received orders to return to Camden. Following the breadcrumb-like trail of baggage, which Doyle had discarded to move faster, Marion caught up with him by March 30 at Willow Grove, in present-day Lynchburg. There the two forces skirmished until nightfall. The next morning Doyle took off west toward Camden, thirty-five miles away, and was back there on April 1. Given Doyle’s superior force, Marion did not pursue him further.

  That day Marion camped at Burch’s Mill on the west bank of the Pee Dee, about twenty-five miles above Snow’s Island. From there a clearly frustrated Marion issued an order that anyone who refused to join his brigade if called to service would be branded an enemy of the state, with their property subject to confiscation. But like similar decrees Marion would issue from time to time, it was intended more as a deterrent than as an edict to be enforced. As Marion told Peter Horry, a militia officer’s command was a “skulking position”—he dare not deal too severely with his men for fear of them abandoning him—even worse, they might turn Tory.

  In the meantime Watson, refreshed and reinforced from Georgetown, had marched north to resume his war with the Swamp Fox. In the first week of April he reached the Snow’s Island area. Emboldened by this move, Micajah Ganey, recovered from his wounds, brought in two hundred Tories to help Watson crush their mutual foe. As word spread among the locals that Marion’s base camp on Snow’s had been destroyed, Marion’s force dropped to 150 and was daily diminishing. Watson was confident that loyalist supremacy could finally be restored in the Williamsburg area. Arriving at the home of the widow Elizabeth Jenkins (mother of the Jenkins boys) near Snow’s Island on April 7, he even teased her that Marion had become so discouraged that he had gone over to the other side and joined Lord Rawdon at Camden, which she refused to believe.

  Marion had not, of course, switched sides, but it was true he was becoming discouraged. He was now dangerously close to Watson, who was only five miles away with much greater numbers. Marion’s ammunition was down to two rounds per man, most of it having been used up in the Bridges Campaign and the rest destroyed in the raid on Snow’s. He expected none from Greene, who was still in North Carolina. It seemed no matter how ably his men performed, no matter how nimbly they eluded their pursuers, the British would not let up until they achieved the total destruction of his brigade.

  Marion held a council of war among his most trusted officers to ask whether they would follow him if he should decide to retreat over the mountains into North Carolina, perhaps to join Greene’s army. Marion was not one for making speeches, but one brigade member recalled that he “made an animated appeal to our patriotism and requested that we would remain with him longer.”

  They unanimously resolved to follow wherever he led. The only dissenting vote came from Gavin Witherspoon, who wanted to stay and fight Watson before any more Tories joined him. Marion sympathized with his eager captain but said that without ammunition, fighting was not a viable option.

  And then, just as suddenly, the mood in the camp turned joyous. Messengers came in with the electrifying news that General Greene had stymied Cornwallis at Guilford Courthouse in North Carolina. Even better, Greene was heading back to South Carolina with the goal of liberating the state. Then came the best news of a
ll: Light-Horse Harry Lee was on his way to rejoin Marion.

  a The British regular infantry generally was armed with the .75-caliber, British-issue Brown Bess flintlock musket, whereas the American Continentals were issued the French .69-caliber Charleville musket, which many militia used as well.

  16

  “A War of Posts”

  With the news of Greene’s return and Lee’s approach, Ganey’s Tories, who had been so eager to help Watson finish off Marion, melted away in fear. Watson decided to retreat, hoping somehow to make his way to Camden to reinforce Rawdon, who was outnumbered almost two to one by Greene. To speed his flight, Watson dumped his two field pieces into a creek and discarded his heavy baggage. Then he headed back south to Georgetown, taking a circuitous route well out of the way of the American forces.

  By April 14 Lee had arrived at Marion’s camp at Benbow’s Ferry on the Black River. Having been present at Guilford Courthouse, he was able to provide additional color on what happened there. In a classic set-piece battle that Greene called “long, obstinate, and bloody,” both sides suffered heavy losses. (Tarleton had two fingers amputated afterward.) Cornwallis had kept the field and the honor of a technical victory. But the victory was Pyrrhic, for in chasing Greene through North Carolina he had far outrun his already precarious supply line to Charleston, and his sick, exhausted, and famished army could not go on. “They had the splendor, we the advantage,” Greene wrote to Baron von Steuben.

  Cornwallis withdrew his forces to Wilmington, North Carolina, on the coast to recuperate, and when Greene turned south to reenter South Carolina, Cornwallis elected not to follow him. Despairing of the “universal spirit of revolt” that prevailed southward and fearful of the patriot militia who lay between him and Camden, Cornwallis would not return to his former headquarters—he had had enough of South Carolina and its partisans. Leaving Rawdon in charge, Cornwallis abandoned the state forever and moved north to invade Virginia, where he would end up at a place called Yorktown.

  Greene understood he needed to take back as much southern territory in British hands as possible because if a peace treaty were signed with Great Britain, then under international law the British could keep whatever ground they controlled. And even if they did not control the countryside due to interference from the partisans, the British still held Charleston as well as the chain of garrisons and forts they had established at Georgetown and throughout the interior of the state.

  But with the departure of Cornwallis’s army, the British position in South Carolina was more tenuous than appeared on the surface. Although they had eight thousand soldiers in South Carolina to Greene’s army of fourteen hundred, most of the British force was concentrated in Charleston, with the rest spread thinly among the various outposts. With eight hundred men at Camden, Rawdon was not strong enough to take on Greene himself; in fact, that was why Doyle was abruptly called back to Camden after his raid on Snow’s Island. But Rawdon dared not call in the defenders of the forts, as that would leave the outposts exposed to Marion, Sumter, and Pickens. The posts had become critical to the British hopes of holding the state, for they protected the supply lines from Charleston and kept Rawdon’s army in Camden provisioned. Without them Rawdon would be forced to abandon the interior and retreat to Charleston.

  Having once minimized the importance of the “war of posts,” Greene now saw them as the key to regaining South Carolina. He would focus his army on the largest garrisons, first at Camden and then at Ninety-Six, the main British station in the northwest quadrant of South Carolina. The militia was responsible for recovering the smaller posts. Sumter was sent off to try again at Fort Granby as well as at the Orangeburg garrison south of Camden. Pickens would operate in the west and move down to the forts on the Georgia border around Augusta. To topple recently established Fort Watson and even newer Fort Motte upriver from it, Greene assigned the duo of Marion and Light-Horse Harry Lee.

  Fort Watson was a tough nut to crack. Sumter had failed miserably in his attempt to take it, and although Greene had repeatedly asked Marion to attack it in January, Marion concluded it was impracticable because it was well protected and defended by 250 men under Colonel Watson. Marion had been willing to have a go at it in February with Lee, but then Greene called Lee back to join him, so the plan was dropped. Now that Lee, with his three-hundred-strong Legion, was back with Marion and Watson was gone from the fort, attacking it had become an option again.

  Marion still needed convincing. He preferred chasing Watson toward Georgetown, either to overcome him in battle or prevent him from reinforcing Rawdon. Fort Watson was far from home for most of his men, and reducing it would require a siege—a mode of warfare with which Marion had little experience, and none of it good. The only offensive siege he had been part of was the disastrous one at Savannah in 1779. He had called off his prior attacks on Georgetown rather than laying siege to it. Harassing the enemy was what he was used to and good at. Sieges were tedious. And as Savannah had proved and as Sumter had recently shown, they tended to end with rash, near-suicidal assaults when the besiegers lost patience.

  Henry Lee was a twenty-five-year-old second in command to the now forty-nine-year-old renowned Swamp Fox. Many men in Lee’s position would have backed down. Lee did not. He argued that pursuing Watson would take their combined force too far from Greene’s army; besides which, Greene had ordered them to cooperate in attacking the forts. They also lacked ammunition, which they could obtain by capturing the outpost garrisons. Lee further pointed out that from Fort Watson they would be able to intercept Colonel Watson on his way to Camden.

  Never one to let his own ego get in the way of the right decision, Marion agreed. He had to see the merit to Lee’s points, although later he was heard to regret that his orders did not allow him to pursue his nemesis Watson at that time. That Marion had only eighty men to Lee’s three hundred and thus he lacked bargaining power also may have had something to do with his acquiescing.

  On April 15 they arrived at Fort Watson and surrounded it. After they issued the customary demand to surrender, a reply came back that a British officer never timidly surrendered a fort and that “if they wanted it, they must come and take it.”

  The fort was small—under twenty yards on each side—but its position strong. It stood at the summit of a twenty-three-foot-high, pyramid-shaped Indian temple mound that Watson’s builders had truncated and flattened at the top. Three rows of abatis surrounded the stockade. The enemy had cleared away all the trees and brush within shooting range of the fort so that patriot marksmen had no cover from which to fire on the fort. Inside the stockade were 114 defenders, a mix of British redcoats and loyalists, most of whom had recently arrived there. A provincial officer, British Lieutenant James McKay, commanded them in Watson’s absence.

  Lee and Marion initially thought they could reduce the fort by cutting off its water supply. They posted riflemen to pick off the occupants when they left to gather water from nearby Scott’s Lake. But McKay sunk a deep well just outside the fort that his men could reach at night by a covered passage they had built. When the well struck water, four days into the siege, the patriots needed another plan.

  The British had no cannon to ward off attackers, as the pair of three-pounders Watson had with him during the Bridges Campaign were now at the bottom of Catfish Creek. But the Americans were without artillery too, which Marion and Lee knew they would need to penetrate the fort’s walls. Lee asked Greene for a field piece, saying that with one he could “finish the business” in “five minutes” and promising to return it immediately. Greene sent them a six-pounder, but the infantry carrying it got lost and returned to Camden.

  The patriots had not counted on a long siege. They were starting to run out of ammunition for their long rifles. They also lacked such basic tools as picks and shovels with which to dig trenches. They managed to break ground a hundred yards from the enemy’s works and kept digging with whatever utensils they had, but the process was slow. Morale was low. Marion’s m
en, unlike Lee’s Continentals from the North, had not been inoculated against smallpox, and some of them began coming down with the dreaded disease. Others, bored and restless, started going home. Marion published orders threatening capital punishment for deserters, but his troops had figured out that Marion rarely if ever put any of his own men to death.

  Marion was burdened with other personnel issues as well. Captain Snipes, who had been freelancing and looting to the southwest of the Santee, was now bad-mouthing Marion to convince others not to augment his force at Fort Watson. According to Abel Kolb, a patriot militia colonel of Marion’s in the Cheraws District, Snipes was taking all the men Kolb had ordered to join Marion and encouraging them to join Sumter, who promised they could hang and plunder Tories. When Kolb reminded Snipes of Marion’s directive that no one leave his brigade without permission, Snipes responded that he had orders from Sumter to raise men wherever he could and that Marion’s order meant nothing to him.

  Informed of this exchange, Marion complained to Sumter and threatened to bring the matter to Governor Rutledge’s attention. Sumter responded dismissively, saying that Snipes was not acting at any “particular direction” from him and adding that if he or Snipes had done anything wrong, it was up to Rutledge, not Marion, to say so.

  Marion also voiced his disapproval of “Sumter’s Law,” the Gamecock’s new solution to the problem of disappearing militiamen. Under the informal edict South Carolinians who enlisted in a regiment of state troops for ten months would be paid—not in cash, which the government lacked, but with horses, clothing, equipment, and slaves taken from Tories. (The pay scale was “one grown negro” for a private and up to “three grown negroes and one small negro” for a regimental commander.) Marion, who disliked plunder, doubted that men who needed such incentives would make better soldiers than volunteers, however transitory, whose only “pay” was fighting for the freedom of their country. But he was in the minority. Rutledge consented to Sumter’s Law; Greene, despite some misgivings, enforced it; and Pickens raised a regiment under it.