The Swamp Fox

by John Oller

  MARION HAD ANOTHER festering problem to deal with in the spring of 1782. Loyalists from North Carolina were flouting the one-year truce with Ganey’s Tories, set to expire on June 17. Although the former loyalist commandant at Georgetown, Robert Gray, admitted that Marion had adhered to the treaty “with great good faith,” the same could not be said of the Tories. They did not consider the treaty binding in North Carolina and used the so-called neutral zone, between the Pee Dee and North Carolina line, as a haven for bloody raids across the border. The raiders also threatened the Snow’s Island community that Marion held so dear to his heart.

  Although Ganey may have tacitly approved of the treaty breaches, he told Marion he would personally try to put a stop to them. But he came under increasing pressure from diehard North Carolina loyalists to bring his South Carolina men back into the field against the patriots. The Tories were emboldened by their belief, shared by the ever-fretful Greene, that the British would any day mount a new offensive out of Charleston. The North Carolina loyalists’ ringleader was the maniacal David Fanning, who had captured the former governor of that state in a daring raid the previous September. Fanning allegedly swore he would take Marion “dead or alive” and offered to bring the heads of Marion and Greene to General Leslie in Charleston “for a handsome reward.”

  By late May 1782 the uprisings in northeast South Carolina had reached the point at which Governor Mathews sent Marion to quell them. North Carolina governor Alexander Martin put 250 of his own state’s troops under Marion’s command to “act as you will judge most conducive to the service.” He added that if Marion needed more North Carolinians, all he had to do was ask. Earlier in the war it had been next to impossible to get one state’s troops to take orders from another state’s militia commander; now Marion’s name and reputation gave him that power.

  Taking Maham’s dragoons and his own militia brigade with him, Marion rode north from the Santee through the Williamsburg district, camping on June 3 at Burch’s Mill, twenty-five miles above Snow’s Island. He shared Greene’s desire to resolve the crisis, if possible, without violence. British prime minister Lord North’s prowar government had fallen in March, and the combative Lord Germain resigned, leading to rumors of an imminent end to hostilities. Marion reported to Peter Horry that, according to one British officer, “we shall very soon take one another by the hand in friendship. Some say there is a cessation of arms to take place, and that peace is actually on the carpet.”

  From near Snow’s Island on June 2 Marion wrote Ganey to say he was coming to discuss a treaty to “prevent the effusion of blood and distresses of the women and children.” The British were ready to make peace, he reported, which left Ganey no hope of being supported by them. Marion made clear that if Ganey did not agree to terms, the patriots would prosecute the war to the fullest after the existing truce expired. It was in Ganey’s own interest, Marion concluded, to settle peaceably and avert “ill consequences from obstinacy which must terminate in your and your people’s destruction.”

  The threats worked. Awed by the word that Marion was on his way, Ganey’s Tories sought an armistice. A conference between the two sides to discuss terms broke down in acrimony, and after a brief skirmish Marion agreed to meet one-on-one with Ganey. Marion’s men thought it beneath him to entertain such a “leader of banditti” in person, but he went forward with the meeting. At Burch’s Mill on June 8 the two of them reached an agreement. A formal surrender ceremony took place a week or so later at Bowling Green, fifteen miles away.

  Similar to the truce agreed to a year before and consistent with instructions Marion had received from Mathews, the new treaty required the Tories to lay down their arms except in support of the American cause, return any plundered property (including slaves), deliver up any American deserters who had joined them or any loyalists who persisted in rebellion against the state, and swear allegiance to the United States and South Carolina while renouncing loyalty to the Crown. In return the Tories would receive full pardons and could keep their personal property. Those who did not agree to be bound by the treaty were given safe conduct, along with their wives and children, to the British lines in Charleston, with the officers to keep their pistols and sidearms and one horse apiece. All in all, they were generous terms.

  Marion even allowed Ganey to travel to Charleston to yield his British commission to General Leslie in person upon his word that he would return and enlist for six months in the patriot militia, which he did. Marion also warned his men that any Tories who received pardons for submitting, no matter how outrageous their prior conduct, were not to be molested; any patriots who took “private satisfaction” by taking revenge upon such “reformed” Tories would be punished to the full extent of the law. “It is recommended as Christians to forgive and forget all injuries which have been committed by such who have been led away by our enemies,” he wrote. But he was not confident his men would spare the lives of those who had committed “so many enormities,” even if they had a pardon on paper. For their own protection, Marion sent off a group of the most detested loyalists to the British lines in Charleston.

  A few loyalists were considered so incorrigible or guilty of such atrocious crimes that they were excepted from the treaty. One of them was the Tory who had killed Abel Kolb in cold blood outside his home. Another was David Fanning, still hoping to kindle loyalist resistance, who took flight to Charleston to avoid capture. When he arrived he asked for safe passage for his new teenaged bride to go to the garrison there with some of their property. Marion granted a pass to her to meet him but, Fanning wrote later, did “not let her have any of our property, not even a Negro to wait on her.” Needless to say, if Fanning had in fact vowed to bring the heads of Marion and Greene to Charleston with him, he showed up empty handed. He shortly left for Florida and eventually settled in Nova Scotia after being convicted in Canada, then pardoned, on a charge of rape.

  AS 1782 TURNED to summer the war was clearly winding down. The British evacuated Savannah on July 12, leaving Charleston as the only city north of Florida with any British troops. After those in Britain favoring a negotiated peace took power, Parliament replaced Clinton as the chief American commander with Sir Guy Carleton, the former defender of Quebec. Upon his arrival in New York in May, Carleton issued secret instructions to Leslie in Charleston to begin preparations to abandon the remaining southern posts. Yet the Americans would not learn of any evacuation order until August, and even then Greene distrusted the British, suspecting they would leave only to return after defeating the French. And so, with the support of Congress and the civilian authorities, Greene rejected several proposals from General Leslie for a ceasefire.

  Leslie also requested permission for the British to buy rice and other provisions from farmers in the countryside rather than having to forcibly forage for them. But Greene rejected this overture as well, fearing the British would use the provisions to support their West Indies operations against the French. Although the Americans were weary of war and his own army’s morale was low due to lack of pay and clothing, Greene preferred to keep the pressure on the enemy by starving them into submission. Given the absence of French naval support to besiege Charleston, that was the only way Greene could see to bring about a final surrender of the British southern force.

  And so the British would continue to forage outside Charleston. Greene would continue to rely on Marion to oppose those sorties. Although Marion told Greene he was “much fatigued” and admitted he no longer had the energy he once did, Greene kept ordering him here, there, and everywhere at the drop of a hat, often changing his instructions. As Marion dryly noted to Peter Horry, Greene’s custom was always to “keep . . . me between him and the enemy.”

  And the fighting would go on.

  a Maham’s cantankerous behavior continued after the war. In 1784 he refused to accept some writs for nonpayment of debts that a deputy sheriff was trying to serve on him, and he forced the deputy, upon threat of death, to swallow the papers. After elu
ding arrest and refusing to appear for trial, he was sentenced to three months in jail and fined one hundred pounds. But the punishments were later lifted based on Maham’s claim that he acted out of passion because the creditor suing him was an ex-Tory.

  25

  “An Affectionate Farewell”

  Of all the combat deaths suffered during the Revolutionary War, that of John Laurens was the one Americans most mourned.

  A devoted aide to Washington and cherished friend of Hamilton and Lafayette, Laurens had fought bravely—if recklessly—in every major northern battle. He had almost welcomed death at the disastrous Battle of Savannah in 1779, in which Marion participated. Educated in Geneva and London, where he studied law, Laurens went to Paris to help secure French financial and naval assistance. At Yorktown he was part of the “forlorn hope” of Hamilton’s troops who successfully stormed the critical Redoubt #10, following which he helped negotiate the British surrender. After spearheading an aborted attack on British-held Johns Island outside Charleston in January 1782 he went to the Jacksonboro legislature where he pressed, unsuccessfully, for the bill to arm slaves. Greene then gave him command of the army’s light infantry, including that of Light-Horse Harry’s Legion, when Lee resigned his position. As always, Laurens would serve without pay.

  The golden boy of the Revolution, Laurens had no faults, thought George Washington, “unless intrepidity bordering on rashness . . . excited by the purest motives” counted as one. It was totally in character, then, when he leapt from his sickbed in late August 1782 to lead his troops against a British foraging party on the Combahee River fifty miles west of Charleston. Tradition holds that he spent the night of August 26 at the Stock family plantation, where he regaled Mrs. Stock and her daughters with tales of a gallant cavalier and a preview of the next day’s encounter, which he invited them to watch from a secure vantage point.

  Before sunrise he was dead, caught in the first volley of an ambush that he impetuously tried to charge his men through. “Poor Laurens is fallen in a paltry little skirmish,” Greene wrote to Otho Williams. “You knew his temper, and I predicted his fate. I wish his fall had been as glorious as his fate is much to be lamented. The love of military glory made him seek it upon occasions unworthy his rank. This state will feel his loss; and his father will hardly survive it.”

  John Laurens’s death had been a needless effusion of blood in the late stages of the Revolution. Francis Marion did not want any of his men to be the last to die in the war, but they would continue to engage the enemy as necessary. Two days after Laurens met his fate a twelve-man scouting party under one of Marion’s captains, George Sinclair Capers, surprised and routed a detachment of the so-called Black Dragoons—a volunteer unit of former slaves under the independent command of African American officers. Twenty-six of these dragoons were in the process of escorting a small group of American prisoners to Charleston when Capers’s patrol fell upon them and “cut them to pieces.”a

  At the time of this encounter Marion lay camped forty miles north of Charleston at one of his favorite locations, the deserted plantation of loyalist John Colleton at Wadboo Barony. The twelve-thousand-acre estate, just three miles from Marion’s place of birth, was near Wadboo Bridge, the span that Coates had crossed during his retreat from Biggin Church a year earlier.b Marion had his headquarters in the Colleton plantation house (described as a “castle”), while his men occupied the slave quarters and outbuildings. Marion’s cavalry was out on patrol six miles away, and only a few of his men at the barony, including his officers, had horses. The rest were on foot, Governor Mathews having ordered most of the militia to be dismounted to save money as the war wound down. With Marion was a group of his old Williamsburg militia and forty reformed Tories who had laid down their arms at Bowling Green, including their former leaders Micajah Ganey and Jesse Barefield.

  Meanwhile Marion’s old adversary Thomas Fraser was cruising the area around Monck’s Corner in search of beef cattle for the British in Charleston. He had with him more than a hundred provincial cavalry, including some of the Black Dragoons. Under the impression that Marion was in Georgetown, Fraser learned otherwise when he ran into and captured some patriot sentinels at Biggin Church who told him Marion was at Wadboo Plantation three miles away.

  By this time Marion had learned of Fraser’s presence and was preparing his men for battle. He posted them in and around three small outbuildings and along a lane of cedars that ran from the castle to the approaching road. With the owner living in London, the cedars had not been trimmed for several years; as a result, their overgrown branches of Spanish moss trailed almost to the ground, creating perfect cover for an ambush. Marion then sent a party on horse under Captain Gavin Witherspoon to reconnoiter the enemy.

  Fraser had decided to attack Marion from the rear of the mansion across a large, open field. When he spotted Witherspoon’s patrol he gave chase at full gallop. Witherspoon turned back toward the plantation and led Fraser’s horsemen into the ambush zone. When Fraser’s dragoons came within thirty yards Marion’s shooters let out a yell and opened a deadly fire from behind the cedars and the buildings on the other side of the road.

  It was Parker’s Ferry all over again. Twenty of Fraser’s dragoons were shot from their horses; four were killed, including the captain who had led the charge, and more than a dozen were wounded. The British lost seven horses killed and five captured. Marion had a few men wounded, and a couple of his pickets were taken prisoner separate from the action. The British also captured Marion’s ammunition wagon during the battle when the frightened driver drove off, contrary to orders. With the loss of ammunition, the patriots had to leave the field, allowing the enemy to take a mule team and Marion’s tent and personal baggage. Fraser moved off to Huger’s Bridge about ten miles away and collected cattle and sheep for the garrison in Charleston.

  Writing to Greene from Wadboo on August 30—a year to the day since Parker’s Ferry—Marion was lavish in his praise for his men. They had directed their ambush fire so well that the enemy broke and retreated in confusion; they then alertly shifted their positions to prevent Fraser from mounting an effective counterattack. And although Horry’s reformed Tories had not performed well at Wambaw Bridge in February, Ganey’s men had stood the test at Wadboo. “The militia, though the greatest part was new made Whigs, behaved with great spirit,” Marion reported to Greene. Refusing to yield their position, they wanted to pursue Fraser’s men in the open field, but that would have given the enemy too great an advantage, Marion explained. William Gilmore Simms would later offer an explanation of the ex-Tories’ bravery: “They fought with halters about their necks. Not a man of them, if taken, would have escaped the cord and tree.”

  Greene congratulated Marion for “the very honorable check you gave the enemy.” He was particularly gratified that the British had been disappointed to find that despite Marion’s embarrassing defeat at Tidyman’s, the Swamp Fox had not lost his touch. Greene considered the action important enough to note in a letter to George Washington that “Fraser attempted a surprise upon General Marion but was repulsed.”

  The engagement at Wadboo Plantation, also known as Avenue of the Cedars, was to be Marion’s last as a military commander. According to the conventions of the day, the patriots had “lost” because they abandoned the field to the enemy. But Marion had inflicted far greater damage on Fraser than the other way around. It was fitting that in his final military action Francis Marion, the Continental commander-turned-partisan, had won a Nathanael Greene–style victory.

  MARION WOULD REMAIN at Wadboo for most of the next few months. He felt cut off from Greene, who was camped northwest of Charleston, fifty miles from Marion’s location. Marion expressed a desire for more frequent communication and suggested Greene move his cavalry up to Goose Creek to be nearer the militia. He asked Greene to pardon this “hint,” adding, “I wish not to exceed the station I am in and pay every deference to your superior judgment.” Greene declined the suggestion but orde
red Marion to keep himself “in the most perfect readiness for any operations.”

  Marion received sporadic reports of British threats upon Georgetown or elsewhere, but nothing ever came of any of them. In fact, with the exception of some minor clashes not involving Marion’s men, the fighting was over. A treaty with the Cherokees in October 1782, after Pickens’s campaign, ended the last hostilities of any significance in South Carolina.

  The British were preparing to evacuate Charleston, and the loyalists had thrown in the towel. “It does not suit me to follow the English any more,” wrote loyalist Robert Blair to Marion. After thanking Marion for the “great humanity” he had shown by protecting his wife when she was “in the greatest distress and persecution by some of her neighbors,” Blair pleaded with Marion to espouse his case in a petition to remove his property from the confiscation list. Blair argued that his only sin was loyalty to a cause, that he now wished to “repent my folly,” and that he hoped Marion would not “condemn that in me which you have done with so much honor to yourself and country.” Citing Marion’s “innate goodness,” he begged for protection “for myself and what few negroes I have.” He ended up being moved from the confiscation to the amercement list.

  In November 1782 the Americans and Great Britain signed preliminary articles of peace in Paris. Although it would take almost another year to finalize the Treaty of Paris that formally ended the war, the British were ready to leave the South. In early November, Marion’s informants sighted several large British frigates anchored in Charleston harbor, brought there to conduct the evacuation. Greene and Leslie agreed that the British could leave unmolested if they committed not to burn the town on their way out. (Ironically, the British negotiator of the deal was none other than James Wemyss, who had torched so many patriot homes two years earlier.)