by John Oller
Marion did not need to be warned against indiscriminately hanging Tories; that had never been his style. He would instead seek revenge by going after the man who had captured Hayne—Major Thomas Fraser.
IN THE LONG RUN the British decision to hang Hayne was counterproductive, as it created a potent rallying cry for patriots in the South. But in the short term it achieved exactly the desired effect. Intimidated into thinking they might be the next to face the executioner, the Whig militia in Hayne’s home district, in the Lowcountry near Charleston, began quitting the field. Correspondingly the Tory militia became emboldened and turned out in force. The British capitalized on the situation, sending Fraser and others to raid the rice plantations in the fertile Lowcountry south and west of Charleston between the Combahee and Edisto Rivers.
For several months patriot militia colonel William Harden, an early member of Marion’s brigade, had been commanding an independent partisan unit, with Marion’s approval, to keep check on the Tories in that region. Despite a few setbacks, he had enjoyed some considerable success in harassing the British and disrupting their communications between Charleston and Savannah. But after Hayne’s execution Harden’s force was dwindling and the local population was discouraged to the point at which he asked Greene and Marion for help. With Greene’s approval, Marion decided to go to the aid of his old partisan colleague.
At this time, in mid-August, Marion was at Peyre’s Plantation on the Santee, where he had been for a few weeks. (With the British presence in that area diminished, he had less need to constantly move his camp.) He had two hundred men but figured he would need to pick up more along the way to be able to engage the enemy force to the south, which numbered upward of six hundred. He also wanted to take with him fifteen of Peter Horry’s state dragoons and twenty of Hezekiah Maham’s, but neither officer would agree without a direct order from Greene. After several back-and-forth letters, one of Greene’s aides finally confirmed to Marion that he could tell Horry and Maham that Greene had ordered them to provide the requested troops. Marion was now ready to move out with an all-mounted force.
Heading out at night on August 22 to avoid detection, Marion took his men on a forced march, a hundred miles south, on a circuitous route that crossed over the main roads used by the British. By August 25 he had reached the Horseshoe, a swampy area around the Ashepoo River in modern Colleton County. The next night he was joined by 150 militia from the southernmost tip of the state and 80 men commanded by a Major Harden (possibly the colonel’s son), as Colonel Harden was too sick to fight. Neither Peter Horry (who was left in command at Georgetown) nor Maham made the trip, although Peter’s brother, Hugh, was present as usual.
Marion was now up to just over four hundred men. His intelligence reported that the enemy consisted of a mixed infantry and cavalry force under the overall command of a Hessian lieutenant colonel, Ferdinand Ludwig von Benning. Von Benning had 540 troops: 180 Hessians, 150 British redcoats, 130 Tories, and 80 provincial dragoons under Fraser.
The British were not looking for a fight; they were occupied with loading up boats with the rice and cattle they had gathered and sending the forage off to Charleston. But Marion was intent on bringing them to battle. He was not in a position to attack them directly; besides being outnumbered, he was without artillery, and von Benning had two field pieces. The situation instead called for an ambush.
On the night of August 27 Marion tried to ensnare the enemy along a causeway at Godfrey’s Savannah, a grassy swamp west of the Ashepoo. He posted a small group there with orders to defend the pass until he could come up with his main body, which lay two miles away. But when the enemy came into sight the posted guards lost their nerve and left without firing a shot, allowing the British a clean passage. Marion aborted the attack.
After some sniping back and forth between the two sides, Marion tried again three days later. By this time, August 30, the British were camped, ironically, at Isaac Hayne’s plantation, where his body had been buried just the day before. Marion, camped three miles away, figured the enemy would head northeast along the road to Parker’s Ferry, where they would cross the Edisto on their way back to Charleston. In part his assumption was based on intelligence that a group of about a hundred Tories was camped on the east bank of the Edisto at the ferry crossing, waiting for von Benning. They were led by Brigadier General Robert Cunningham, the highest-ranking loyalist militia commander in South Carolina and cousin to the notorious “Bloody Bill” Cunningham.
Moving swiftly to get ahead of the British, Marion found a good spot for an ambush a mile southwest of Parker’s Ferry along the road leading directly to it. On either side of the road (a narrow, barely elevated causeway) was a thick, jungle-like swamp. He formed his men in three groups. The main body of dismounted musket and riflemen, commanded by Marion, concealed themselves behind felled trees in the swamp, parallel to the causeway and within forty yards of it. The second group, the eighty men commanded by Major Harden, were ordered to retire a hundred yards from the line and to charge forward once the shooting began. A third group of sixty mounted swordsmen, under Major George Cooper, a subordinate of Colonel Harden, stayed back of Marion’s line with orders to fall in the rear of the enemy once the firing became general and “to follow them whenever they moved, and to keep in fight . . . at all hazards.”
It was near sunset on a steaming hot day when a party of Cunningham’s Tories from the far side of the river crossed over to the west bank and began marching southwest down the causeway, apparently in search of von Benning’s force. The Tories passed in front of Marion’s line as the rebels waited in ambush. Marion intended to let the small group go by unmolested, and they had all but gotten past when they spotted one of Marion’s men (by legend, due to a white feather in his cap). The Tories called out to him, and when he failed to answer they started shooting. Marion could restrain his men no longer, and when the patriots returned the fire the Tories scampered in fright back toward the ferry, in the same direction from which they had come. Marion sent a few horsemen after them who chased them back across the river.
Von Benning, being not far away, heard the shots and assumed it was just a few patriot militia skirmishing with Cunningham’s Tories. Marching up front with the infantry and artillery, von Benning ordered Fraser and the cavalry, who were in back, to push down the road toward the ferry and disperse the rebels. As his dragoons came in front of Marion’s ambush line Fraser saw Marion’s horsemen on the causeway in the distance. Assuming them to be Harden’s militia, he ordered his cavalry to charge them.
The next few minutes may have marked the supreme moment of Marion’s career to that point. The twenty-five-year-old Fraser, a Scotsman who settled in New Jersey before the war, was very much in the Tarleton mold—a bold dragoon commander who had been antagonizing the patriots for months. He had routed Sumter in battle, eluded Lee at Monck’s Corner, and captured Isaac Hayne. Lately he had been harassing Harden’s militia and stealing rice from Whig plantation owners. And now he had fallen directly into Marion’s carefully laid ambush.
As Fraser’s men entered the killing zone, Marion’s shooters let out the first barrage of buckshot, at which the front column of Fraser’s horsemen raced forward. It was the only direction they could go. Wedged in together on the narrow causeway, they could not turn around and run into the horsemen charging up the road behind them, as it would have been like going the wrong way on a one-way street. Nor could they charge—or even see—the ambushers hidden in the heavy swamp behind the abatis they had formed. And so Fraser’s dragoons continued moving forward, even though it exposed them to the rest of Marion’s men, who shot them as they passed by. Fraser’s riders were like people without umbrellas who try to outrun the rain, only to be drenched.
Both Marion and one of Fraser’s cavalrymen, twenty-four-year-old Stephen Jarvis, used the identical phrase to describe what happened: “running the gauntlet.” That specific military term, together with Marion’s statement that the enemy ran the gauntlet
“through” his men, suggests Marion had placed riflemen on parallel sides of the road. Trapped on the causeway, Fraser’s dragoons were forced to absorb the fire along the entire length of the ambush as they galloped toward Parker’s Ferry. Jarvis, a loyalist from Connecticut, called it “the most galling fire ever troops experienced.”
Fraser’s cavalry was annihilated. Twenty of his men fell dead on the spot, with dozens more wounded. Horses quickly piled up on the road, around twenty dead and an equal number wounded, “all of them capital horses,” Marion wrote. Fraser had his horse killed and was badly hurt when his cavalry rode over him. One disabled Tory soldier reported being “shot through the body, through the knee and in the head.”
Marion’s success would have been even greater had two of his commanders not failed him. As soon as the fighting broke out, Major Harden’s eighty men retired without firing a shot, and Cooper’s sixty swordsmen, who were supposed to hound the enemy cavalry’s rear, were nowhere to be found. There may have been some loyalty issues; most of Harden’s and Cooper’s men were from Georgia or near the Georgia border and had not previously fought under the Swamp Fox. In any event Marion was deprived of a third of his entire force at a critical juncture, just as Fraser’s horsemen were reeling and von Benning’s infantry and artillery were coming up to join the battle.
Still, Marion’s shooters managed to kill or wound almost all of the enemy artillerymen. Unfortunately at that point some of Harden’s men (“villains,” Marion called them) mistakenly cried out that the enemy was flanking them on the right, causing the patriots to break in confusion. As Marion tried to rally them, von Benning used the opportunity to retreat from the road, carrying off his field pieces and his wounded. Marion brought his men back to take possession of the road, where they stayed for three hours, but it was now dark, and neither side was anxious for further battle. As his men had not eaten for twenty-four hours, Marion took them two miles away to refresh them.
The next morning, August 31, Marion sent a small party to the causeway to bury the enemy dead, but they withdrew when they saw von Benning’s superior infantry force coming up with two field pieces. The British buried their own dead, left twenty-seven horse corpses to rot under the scorching sun, and crossed the Edisto at Parker’s Ferry uninterrupted. They then headed off to Dorchester to place rice on boats destined for Charleston, where they were headed as well.
All told, the British at Parker’s Ferry suffered around twenty-five killed and another eighty to a hundred wounded. In addition, the British lost forty horses, almost all of which they previously had taken from the Continental Army. Marion had three privates wounded and one killed. It was the most lopsided victory of his career. In his report to Greene he singled out Hugh Horry and John Ervin for behaving like true “Sons of Liberty.” Greene congratulated Marion on his success, saying it reflected “the highest honor upon your command.” In a report to Congress, Greene praised Marion’s “good conduct, judgment, and personal bravery.”
Marion’s trouncing of Fraser was a sweeter revenge for Hayne’s execution than any retaliatory hanging would have been. It also served to allay the fears among the Whigs in that area that had caused militia strength to shrink. As Governor Rutledge told South Carolina’s delegates to Congress, the victory had given “fresh spirits” to the militia.
Parker’s Ferry was perhaps Marion’s greatest triumph as a partisan commander. For all of a day he rested his men and horses, weary from their hundred-plus mile journey, then rode another hundred miles back to Peyre’s Plantation to await his next assignment from Greene. It would be his most important one yet.
a Williamson would later partially redeem himself in patriot eyes by providing valuable intelligence to the American forces.
21
“At Eutaw Springs the Valiant Died”
Having spent much of the summer resting his army, Nathanael Greene was ready to fight. But despite his many misgivings about the quality of the militia, he did not want to go into battle without them.
Just as Marion was heading south to go to Harden’s aid, Greene decided to end his respite in the High Hills of Santee. Since mid-July he had been camped at John Singleton’s Midway Plantation in the High Hills, barely fifteen miles north of the British army at William Thomson’s Belleville plantation (next door to the site of the former Fort Motte). Ever since Alexander Stewart, Rawdon’s replacement, had moved to Belleville with more than fifteen hundred men in early August, the two armies had been close enough to see each other’s campfires. But they were separated by a large, impassable lake that had accumulated from the heavy rains that summer. By the last week of August, Greene had resolved to attack Stewart, but he would not be able to go directly at him.
Logically, to reach the enemy from his position in the High Hills, Greene would have marched south and crossed the Santee at Nelson’s Ferry, then moved upriver to Stewart’s camp just below the Congaree. But the approach to Nelson’s was flooded. Thus, when he broke camp on August 23, Greene set out north, away from Stewart’s army. For almost two weeks he marched in a counterclockwise direction that took him up, around, and then back down toward Stewart. He marched at a leisurely pace during the cooler morning and early evening hours to conserve his troops’ strength and to give time to various militia commanders to respond to his orders to join him. With Cornwallis now at Yorktown, Virginia was no longer willing to send Greene the two thousand militia it had promised him, so he needed every militiaman from the Carolinas he could get. Greene’s Continental army numbered about 1,250, and as he explained to Lee, he was confident that with the addition of six or eight hundred militia he could defeat Stewart with little loss to the regular army.
With his Continentals, including Lee’s Legion, Greene headed north up the east side of the Wateree and ferried across at Camden on August 26. He picked up a group of 150 to 200 newly raised militia from North Carolina under French army officer François de Malmedy. From Camden he moved south to cross the Congaree at Howell’s Ferry, where he camped on August 28. He was joined there by Pickens with 300 South Carolina militia (including members of Sumter’s old brigade) and by Colonel William Henderson, Sumter’s replacement, commanding about 150 to 200 South Carolina state troops. William Washington’s Virginia Continental cavalry united with the army as well.
Greene was now within striking distance of Thomson’s plantation, where he had planned to attack Stewart. But after learning of Greene’s movement toward him, Stewart had moved almost forty miles southeast down the Santee to Eutaw Springs on the south side of the river a mile below Nelson’s Ferry. He went there to meet a wagon train of supplies coming up from Charleston. At Eutaw Springs, Stewart now commanded an army of about two thousand.
Knowing Marion was busy far to the south, Greene had excused him from his orders to join him for the march against Stewart. But when Greene arrived at Fort Motte on September 2 he decided to wait there a few days to see if Marion’s militia, estimated at 240, might be able to link up with him after all. Although he had not yet received Marion’s report on the August 30 battle at Parker’s Ferry, Greene had his aide-de-camp send the Swamp Fox a letter on September 4 saying he was collecting his force and intended to march the next day and attack the enemy. Greene, anxious to know Marion’s whereabouts, wanted him to join him promptly because the army was moving in expectation of it.
It was the next day, September 5, when Greene received Marion’s report on Parker’s Ferry and realized Marion had already returned to the Santee and was only twenty miles below Eutaw Springs. Greene wrote Marion to tell him to come up as soon as possible, but he need not have worried about Marion’s ability to move expeditiously. As soon as he received Greene’s letter at his camp, Marion immediately ordered a night march in Greene’s direction. To avoid being detected by the British army, which outnumbered him ten-to-one, Marion took his men on a clockwise route under cover of darkness below and around Stewart.
By September 6 Marion was at one of Henry Laurens’s plantations, Mt.
Tacitus, seventeen miles northwest of Eutaw Springs. He wrote Greene from Laurens’s to say that his men and horses were exhausted and that he would remain there to await further orders.
The next day, September 7, Greene and his army met Marion at the Laurens farm and marched with him to Burdell’s Tavern, just seven miles above Eutaw Springs. Greene’s combined force now stood at over two thousand. At 8 p.m. that night he issued orders from Burdell’s for the Americans to march at 4 a.m. the next morning to attack the enemy. He revised his order of battle to put Marion’s brigade on the front line. Fighting on his home turf, just four miles from his Pond Bluff Plantation, Francis Marion was about to lead the first large-scale pitched battle of his career.
Eutaw Springs was a bucolic spot on forested land nestled along a creek that feeds into the Santee at Nelson’s Ferry. The cold springs that bubbled up there were next to a handsome brick mansion with a walled garden overlooking a field cleared for crops. A small portion of the site near Nelson’s Ferry, including the creek and springs itself, has since been submerged under manmade Lake Marion. Small houses and mobile homes as well as commercial establishments surround the area today. But most of the land is still there, and a key part of the battlefield is preserved in a small, peaceful park along the main road. It is hard to imagine that this quiet enclave was the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the entire Revolution.
