The Swamp Fox

by John Oller

  Marion also received a letter from his mentor, the imprisoned William Moultrie, who had been informed by Balfour in Charleston that Marion’s troops had been mistreating prisoners and had murdered three of them. Moultrie assured Balfour that such behavior was contrary to Marion’s character, which was “generous and humane.” But in writing to Marion, Moultrie issued what amounted to a reprimand. “I know you are acquainted with the customs of war, and that your disposition will not countenance such cruelties,” he wrote his protégé. Appearing to credit Rawdon’s allegations, Moultrie then ordered Marion to prevent his men from taking private revenges that only served “to disgrace the generous and the brave.”

  Peeved by the correspondence he had been receiving and with the attempt on Fort Watson seemingly going nowhere, Marion was feeling like the one under siege. He would have preferred to be off chasing Watson. Sensing Marion’s frustration, Lee penned a note to Greene saying that Marion was feeling “neglected” and suggesting that Greene write a “long letter” to the partisan leader acknowledging his service and value.

  Lee, himself unhappy that the field piece had not arrived, “despaired of success” as the siege dragged on into its sixth day. But a breakthrough was soon to come. After the fort’s defenders solved their water issue a couple of days earlier, one of Marion’s officers, Lieutenant Colonel Hezekiah Maham, had approached Lee and Marion with a bold idea. He proposed they build a log tower high enough to enable marksmen to fire down upon the fort’s defenders inside. The concept dated to ancient times. It would be no small undertaking: with a stockade wall seven feet high atop the twenty-three-foot mound, this would mean constructing a tower more than thirty feet tall. But with nothing to lose, Marion and Lee gave Maham the go-ahead for his plan.

  Grabbing every ax from neighboring plantations they could lay their hands on, the besiegers felled trees and cut logs from the nearby swamps. On the afternoon of April 21 they brought up a “wooden machine,” as McKay called it, which they placed outside the fort beyond the firing range of British muskets. All that day and through the following night the patriots were busy piling the logs in crisscross fashion atop the base until the wood and earthen oblong structure rose above the height of the British fortification. They topped it off with a sniper’s perch with portholes to poke guns through.

  Under cover of darkness the prefabricated tower was finished on the night of April 22 and moved into place next to the fort. A party of Marion’s riflemen took position in the perch. To guard the tower against enemy sallies from the fort, a contingent of Maryland Continentals was posted nearby on the ground behind a breastwork of logs. As dawn broke the American sharpshooters began raining fire down upon the helpless redcoats and Tories crammed inside the tiny fort. The defenders jumped into a ditch they had excavated with a protective earthen wall to shield them from sniper fire, but it was not good enough: Lieutenant McKay was wounded and two men were killed, with more deaths sure to come.

  In the meantime, under protection from their marksmen, the patriots crept closer to the fort and obtained a foothold. From there they began ripping apart the abatis and taking axes to the stockade walls. Lee’s infantrymen fixed bayonets and stood ready to charge the fort to finish off the work.

  Marion issued another surrender request, and this time McKay raised the white flag. “We were reduced to the disagreeable necessity of capitulating, by the cowardly and mutinous behavior of a majority of the men, having grounded their arms and refused to defend the post any longer,” McKay recorded in his journal. Marion and Lee granted generous terms: the British officers and regulars were paroled to Charleston to await exchange, with the officers allowed to keep their personal belongings and sidearms. The Tory irregulars were treated as prisoners of war.

  It was the first time since the fall of Charleston that American troops had captured an entire enemy garrison. Lee and Marion had also acquired a rich supply of ammunition that would sustain them for some time. In his report to Greene on April 23 Marion commended Lee for his “advice and indefatigable diligence in every part of this tedious operation, against as strong a little post as could well be made on the most advantageous spot that could be wished for.” Marion also gave credit to Maham, telling Greene it was Maham’s innovation that “principally occasioned the reduction of the fort.” It soon became known as the Maham Tower, and other combatants would come to copy it.

  Lee, who rarely praised anyone’s efforts but his own, was now convinced of Marion’s merit as a leader. He wrote Greene to say that he would like to be formally under Marion’s command “in some degree,” as he knew that would please the militia general.

  After the patriots razed the fort, Marion and Lee moved up to Bloom Hill Plantation in the High Hills of Santee to be closer to Greene’s army and to await further orders. From the High Hills they were in position to block Watson’s expected route to reinforce Rawdon’s garrison at Camden, which Greene was preparing to attack. As Greene camped in battle formation outside the town he took time, per Lee’s earlier suggestion, to assure Marion that he was, in fact, appreciated. “When I consider how much you have done and suffered and under what disadvantages you have maintained your ground, I am at a loss which to admire most, your courage and fortitude, or your address and management,” Greene wrote to Marion on April 24. “Certain it is no man has a better claim to the public thanks, or is more generally admired than you are.” He promised to make known Marion’s merit to Congress, to General Washington, “and to the world in general.”

  Two days later Greene congratulated Marion on his success against Fort Watson and the “spirit, perseverance and good conduct” of the operation. In the same letter Greene also reported on his battle the day before with Rawdon at Hobkirk’s Hill just north of Camden. Already outnumbered by Greene by about fifteen hundred to nine hundred and with no prospect of reinforcement from Watson anytime soon, Rawdon decided he had to strike offensively before Marion and Lee with their four hundred men could further enhance the Continental Army. Rawdon also had to worry that Sumter, with eight hundred militia not far away, would link up with Greene. (That fear proved unfounded; Sumter refused Greene’s request to join him, leading a disgusted Greene to conclude that Sumter was interested only in plunder.)

  Rawdon, a fearless, aristocratic, twenty-six-year-old, won a tactical victory at Hobkirk’s Hill, driving Greene’s soldiers from the field in a twenty-minute battle. This time the patriot militia could not be blamed—none of them had fought there. It was, instead, the 1st Maryland Continentals, the cream of Greene’s army, who broke ranks and ran after being confused by an officer’s order. In writing to Marion, Greene minimized the loss and asked him to quell the rumors spreading among the militia that the Americans had been routed at Hobkirk’s. “By mistake we got a slight repulse,” Greene maintained. “The injury is not great. The enemy suffered much more than we did.” He tried to make the best of it, telling Lafayette, “We fight, get beat, rise and fight again.”

  Privately, though, Greene was crestfallen. He even briefly considered leaving South Carolina and going up to Virginia. But there was much truth to what he told Marion. Although both sides had suffered heavy casualties, Rawdon, who lost more than a quarter of his force, could ill afford such attrition, nor could he hold down the garrison in Camden any longer. He had hoped for reinforcements from Watson’s 64th Regiment, and Watson said his men “would have crawled upon their hand and knees” to join Lord Rawdon. But delayed by the Bridges Campaign, Watson was unavailable to help. By the time he made his way to Camden on May 7 after crossing seven creeks and two nearly impassable swamps to get around Marion and Lee, it was too late to do any good. He arrived only to learn that his namesake fort, which he bypassed in his haste to come to Rawdon’s aid, had been taken and destroyed.

  The fall of Fort Watson was a major strategic blow to British hopes for holding South Carolina. It cut off Rawdon’s communication and supply line to Nelson’s Ferry and, thus, to Charleston. The lack of support from the local p
opulation and the absence of Cornwallis’s army left Rawdon in an untenable position. To stay in Camden was to starve. And so on May 10, after destroying the fortifications and much of the town, Rawdon evacuated Camden, the site of Cornwallis’s great victory over Gates nine months earlier. He marched south in the direction of Nelson’s Ferry, intending to come to the relief of a post that Marion and Lee were hoping to make the next domino to fall. For a beleaguered Marion, it also threatened to become the last straw.

  17

  Ball of Fire

  Fort Motte, thirty miles upriver from Fort Watson, posed an even more formidable challenge to the team of Marion and Lee. When they arrived there on May 6, 1781, to plan their siege, they found a virtual citadel that, as Marion described it, was “obstinate, and strong.”

  The fortification was built on the plantation of Rebecca Motte, a recently widowed aristocrat and rabid patriot who had previously used female slaves to slip intelligence to Marion in Charleston. Just a few months earlier the British had commandeered her three-story mansion, building a wall, ditch, and abatis around it for protection. They had moved there from the nearby Thomson plantation, Belleville, that Sumter tried and failed to overtake in February.

  Although small by traditional fort standards, the enclosure was at least double the size of Fort Watson, with about forty yards on each side. The plantation house sat atop a 245-foot hill. The protective wall, just outside the plantation house, was made of thick wooden stakes, almost ten feet high, buttressed by an earthen rampart. The ditch was seven and a half feet wide and six feet deep. At the corners of the fort were two blockhouses with apertures for guns.

  Inside, the fort was defended by a force of 184, consisting of 80 British redcoats, 59 Hessians, and 45 loyalist militia. Their commander was Lieutenant Donald McPherson of the highly regarded 84th Regiment of Foot (Royal Highland Emigrants), a unit of Scottish immigrants who had fought in Canada and were promoted from a provincial regiment into the regular army establishment.

  Marion’s 150 partisans spread themselves around the perimeter of the fort while Lee and his 250-man Legion camped on a hillside about a quarter-mile north. This time the Americans had an artillery piece, the six-pounder Greene had sent them at Fort Watson but was never delivered. Their plan was to dig zig-zagging trenches ever closer to the wall and then pound it with cannon fire. Marion’s riflemen would provide cover for the excavators, and Lee’s infantry would then storm the fort with bayonets. Lee figured that because the defenders were without artillery themselves, their defense would fail unless they were reinforced by Rawdon.

  AS THE SIEGE BEGAN, Marion was in another of his sour moods, this one the worst yet. To begin with, he had just learned that Abel Kolb, the respected Cheraws District militia colonel, had been murdered in cold blood by a band of Tory militia near the North Carolina border. Kolb had helped keep Ganey’s Tories in the Little Pee Dee area in check and had sent men to assist Marion at Fort Watson. Late at night on April 28 a group of Tories surrounded Kolb’s home, where they roused him and his family from their sleep. When the Tories threatened to burn the house down with everyone inside it if he refused to surrender, Kolb came out to lay down his arms. Outside his front door, in the presence of his wife and sisters, he was shot dead by a Tory private. The Tories then took a torch to Kolb’s house.

  Marion felt compelled to detach a party to chase after Kolb’s killers, but they never caught up with them. Greene, writing to Marion, said he was sorry about Kolb’s murder but he seemed even sorrier that Marion had to divert men from the important business at Fort Motte for a retaliatory mission.

  Greene also raised another sore subject with Marion—horses. In a letter to Greene on May 2 Henry Lee had let slip—or, in his eagerness to curry favor with Greene, had volunteered—that Marion, if he were willing, could certainly spare at least 60 dragoon horses taken from Tories and maybe as many as 150. Sumter, always happy to disparage Marion behind his back to Greene, chimed in to say that Marion was “getting good horses” lately. Greene, believing Marion was holding out on him, immediately dashed off a letter to the partisan commander reminding him that he had written several times about dragoon horses without a satisfactory response. “I am told,” Greene wrote, without naming his sources, that Marion’s men had been impressing many high-quality steeds from Tories. Although he claimed to take a dim view of such plundering, Greene asked Marion to send him “sixty or eighty good dragoon horses.”

  Ever sensitive to criticism, this time Marion blew up. Responding on May 6, the day he arrived at Fort Motte, he began by noting that his men were weary and starting to drop away for lack of support. Then he addressed the horse issue. “I acknowledge that you have repeatedly mentioned the want of dragoon horses, and wish that it had been in my power to furnish them, but it is not, nor never had been,” he wrote. “The few horses which has been taken from Tories has been kept for the service and never for private property,” he asserted. Nonetheless, if Greene wanted the militia to donate their horses to the Continental Army, Marion said he would have it done—although he was “certain we shall never get their service in future.”

  Then came the punch line. Marion said it would not bother him if his militia never came back, as he had “for some time” determined to resign his militia command as soon as Greene arrived. He now proposed to do so as soon as Fort Motte was either taken or abandoned by the patriots. He would stick around long enough to help reduce the post there, but after Lee returned to Greene, Marion said, he would seek permission to go to Philadelphia, where he might apply to Congress for relief or reassignment within the Continental Army.

  The stress and strain of war had caught up with Marion. For nearly nine months he had been doing his best to keep his brigade together under trying circumstances with little or no logistical support, all the while being hunted by one enemy death squad after the other. His flag had been disrespected by the British, who had treated him condescendingly in their correspondence, and even his friends, such as Moultrie and now Greene, were questioning his conduct. His secret base camp at Snow’s Island had been discovered and destroyed, creating a sense of violation if not humiliation. His favorite nephew had been cruelly murdered. The wonder is that he had not snapped earlier.

  After receiving Marion’s letter Greene immediately backed off. He wrote to say he had no intention of taking horses from the militia if Marion thought it would adversely affect their morale or create problems for him in dealing with them. As for the threat to resign, Greene said he could not believe Marion meant it. Appealing to his conscience, Greene averred that if such a respected leader as Marion left “in the midst of our difficulties” to indulge in “more agreeable amusements,” it would dampen the spirits of the rank-and-file. He also made clear that Marion had no monopoly on hardship; he himself, Greene wrote, had not had an hour’s leave of absence or any private or family time since coming south. “Your state is invaded, your all is at stake,” he emphasized. “What has been done will signify nothing unless we persevere to the end.” He would say no more on the subject, he wrote in conclusion, until he and Marion had a chance to meet in person.

  Marion pretended not to be mollified, but his tone began to soften. He assured Greene that he was serious about resigning but made clear that it was his frustration with the militia’s comings and goings, more than Greene’s request for horses, that had put him in such bad humor. He told Greene that he had just sent him a good quality horse for his personal use and would send more as soon as he was able to procure some. Then he went back to the business of besieging Fort Motte.

  LEE THOUGHT THE trench operations were progressing with “rapidity,” aided by slaves from neighboring plantations. But the digging was not fast enough. On May 10 McPherson learned that Rawdon had evacuated Camden and was on his way to the relief of the fort. By the following night the defenders could see the campfires of the British army burning in the distance. Rawdon was within forty-eight hours of Fort Motte. McPherson’s men let out a loud cheer
and resolved to hold out against the siege. When asked to surrender that day, McPherson vowed he would defend the fort to the last.

  Conferring on May 11, Marion and Lee knew they needed to take the fort by the next day or else abandon the siege. But at the current pace of operations the fort was not going to fall that quickly. As at Fort Watson, they needed a bright idea. (A Maham Tower was not a practical option at Fort Motte.) Once again they found one—they would burn the British out.

  With the recent hot, dry weather, the roof of Rebecca Motte’s mansion made an enticing target for a ball of fire. The patriot trenches were now close enough that it was possible to launch a flaming projectile to the top of the house. But first the American commanders needed to secure permission from Mrs. Motte to destroy her property.

  Accounts differ on who did the asking. According to Parson Weems, it was Marion who approached Rebecca Motte with this proposition. By contrast, a famous early nineteenth-century painting by John Blake White shows Marion and Lee making the request together. And Lee in his memoirs says it was he alone who spoke to her about it.

  At the time Mrs. Motte was living in the overseer’s log cabin on the plantation grounds, where the British had moved her, her mother, and two unmarried daughters when they took the mansion for themselves. At her request Lee’s men had made her cabin their headquarters, where they enjoyed her hospitality, food, and what Lee praised as the “best wines of Europe” throughout the siege. According to Lee, when he gently proposed the idea of setting her main house on fire, she instantly agreed, saying it would be an honor to serve her country thusly. Lee recalled that she even supplied a special bow and arrow, imported from India, to substitute for the ones she saw being prepared, as she thought hers better suited the deed. But William Dobein James, who was also there, wrote that Sergeant Nathan Savage, whose house near Snow’s Island was among those burned by Wemyss the previous year, set a ball of rosin and brimstone on fire and slung it to the top of the roof.