The Swamp Fox

by John Oller

  On December 14 the great day finally arrived. That morning Leslie took his troops to Gadsden’s Wharf and embarked them along with four thousand loyalists and five thousand slaves (many of whom would remain enslaved elsewhere). They set sail for various destinations, including Florida, Jamaica, New York, Nova Scotia, and England. The long British occupation was over.

  The American army entered the city in triumph. Anthony Wayne’s force followed a couple hundred yards behind the British rear guard as it marched down King Street to the sound of fife and drums. Later that day Nathanael Greene, William Moultrie, Governor Mathews, and their wives paraded in carriages ahead of a column of the Continental Army, and Greene escorted Mathews to the statehouse to assume the long-vacant governor’s chair. That night the city was full of celebration, ushering in a return of the prewar Charleston of dances, concerts, and general merriment.

  One group conspicuous by its absence was the militia. The reason has long been debated, but the simple and sad fact is that Governor Mathews—and Greene as well—did not want them there. Mathews ordered that no one was to enter Charleston for the British evacuation without his specific permission, and fearing that the militia’s presence might lead to violence with the loyalists, he did not allow them into the city. Greene took pains to tell Marion it was Mathews, not he, who was keeping the militia away. But Greene did not protest the governor’s order and shared the view that it was best they not attend the celebratory parade. “I wish you not to have the militia too near,” Greene wrote Marion, on the pretext that some citizens might resent the militia’s refusal to give them passes to go to Charleston as early as they might have wished.

  Greene told Marion it was all right for him to enter the town with “three or four of your particular friends,” and Mathews gave Marion permission to go into Charleston once the British had left. But Marion, recognizing a slight when he saw one, begged off with the excuse that he had never had smallpox and was afraid of catching it in Charleston. As for his men, he said they had no desire to go into town anyway. And so the militia, who for all of their shortcomings had been instrumental in liberating South Carolina, was not there to witness the historic and joyous occasion.

  Marion had Greene’s permission to dismiss the militia as soon as the enemy set sail. He gathered his men together for the last time, at Wadboo Plantation alongside the cedar trees that had sheltered them in their final engagement. The discharge ceremony, recalled William Dobein James, “was conducted with republican simplicity.” Marion “thanked his officers and men for their many and useful services, and bid them a friendly and affectionate farewell.” With that he mounted his horse Ball, captured at Black Mingo, and rode off to his Pond Bluff plantation.

  MARION HAD BEEN directly involved in about two dozen engagements or battles during the Revolution, most of them quite small. But his influence was to be measured by more than just the tallies of casualties inflicted and suffered. William Dobein James, who had first set eyes on the unlikely looking hero at Witherspoon’s Ferry two and a half years earlier, summarized him as follows:

  His appearance was not prepossessing, his manners were distant, but not repulsive, yet few leaders have ever been so popular among their men; none ever had more of their confidence. . . . Cool and collected, he was always the general, never the common soldier. In short the whole bent of his soul was how he should best provide for his men, how he could most annoy the enemy, and how he could soonest achieve the independence of his country.

  Few had done more to achieve those ends.

  a Despite their defeat in this engagement, the Black Dragoons continued to be of service to the British for the duration of the war. As late as November 1782 they shot two German Hessian deserters and laid them beneath a gallows to serve as a warning to others.

  b Wadboo Barony is not to be confused with the Colleton plantation known as Fairlawn, the site of the converted hospital that Maham and Shelby’s mountaineers attacked in November 1781. Wadboo Barony was owned by John Colleton Esq., whereas Fairlawn, five miles west and across the Cooper River, belonged to his cousin Sir John Colleton.

  26

  “The Purest Patriotism”

  Pond Bluff was a place of desolation—overgrown with weeds and without provisions, livestock, furniture, clothing, or household goods. Marion had some money left over from family inheritances, but not enough to buy cattle and horses, which he would now need to purchase on credit. Inland rice production was down due to declining soil fertility and unpredictable water supply, not to mention the general devastation caused by war. And with British trade all but ended, the export market for rice and indigo evaporated. Cotton would not be introduced to the area for another few years. The value of slaves plummeted from prewar levels.

  About half of Marion’s twenty slaves had either been taken away by the British or had left of their own volition when Pond Bluff was confiscated earlier in the war. (At least one escaped to the British lines and settled in Nova Scotia.) Ten of his working slaves had moved over, apparently voluntarily, to Belle Isle, the Pineville plantation of Marion’s late brother Gabriel. Marion, as executor, had placed Belle Isle under the management of a cousin while he was away at war. Also tending to Belle Isle were the slaves who had been singled out for favorable treatment in Marion’s prewar will: overseer June and his wife, Chloe; their daughter Phoebe (sister of Buddy); and her daughter Peggy. These most faithful of Marion’s servants, together with the ten field hands, went back with him to Pond Bluff.

  Reelected to the Senate in November 1782, Marion was not able to stay long at his plantation before heading to Charleston—smallpox or no—to attend the opening of the new legislative session that began on January 6. Writing from there on January 18, 1783, he commiserated with Peter Horry about their straightened financial circumstances and the lack of government recognition of their efforts. His letter even bore traces of eloquence not found in his military writings:

  I am much obliged to you for the favourable opinion of my endeavors to serve my country but had it not been assisted by such brave officers as the colonels Horry it would not have been in my power to do what I have done. I only regret that my country had not considered the merits of such officers and provided for them, instead of giving to strangers ten thousand guineas . . . but as the old saying is, “that kissed goes by favor.”

  Marion’s mention of “ten thousand guineas” for “strangers” was an obvious reference to the largesse bestowed on Rhode Islander Nathanael Greene, who had received exactly that amount from the legislature with which to buy a South Carolina plantation. As a subordinate commander, Marion may have deferred to Greene’s “superior judgment,” as he had recently called it, but the self-effacing Marion was apparently envious of the man who was being hailed for having liberated the South despite failing to win a single battle. Tellingly, although Marion and Greene had corresponded almost constantly over the previous two years, they ceased writing each other after the war. (Greene would die just three years later at the age of forty-three.)

  Marion, now fifty as he wrote Horry, lamented that he did not know how he would procure what he needed to turn Pond Bluff into a viable operation again. Like many Continental Army officers, he hoped for a lifetime of half pay as promised by Congress, but that would not materialize; nearly fifty years would pass before pensions became widely available for veterans who were neither disabled nor destitute. “I have no prospect that my country will so much as put me in a post of emolument,” Marion added, because “idle spectators of the war” were in charge of conferring such benefits. He also let Horry know that he had applied for some clothing for him “but was told the supernumerary officers were not to have any and if Col. Pinckney had not taken a few articles for me I should have gone without.” Still, he insisted that all of this “neglect,” as he termed it, could not diminish “my love for my country [and] my principles.”

  In early 1783 the South Carolina Senate did vote Marion a commendation for his “eminent and conspicuous serv
ice to his country” and a gold medal “for his great, glorious and meritorious conduct.” In response Marion said that the honor “will be ever remembered with gratitude, and I shall be always ready to exert my abilities for the good of this State, and the liberties of her inhabitants.” But it is not clear whether the medal was ever delivered. Two years later he would receive a 302-acre land grant from South Carolina for his service, although for reasons unknown he never applied for a 500-acre land bounty granted by Congress to Continental officers. (Eventually his heirs would claim it.)

  In September 1783 Congress “promoted” Marion from a lieutenant colonel to full colonel in the Continental line. But it was not the brigadier generalship he had expected under prior congressional resolution. That twenty-six other lieutenant colonels were brevetted as brigadier generals at the same time suggests there was not enough money to go around. But the slight may have been partly intentional. Marion’s lenity toward Tories had made him unpopular with powerful elements in South Carolina who believed that too many “obnoxious” individuals were being pardoned or removed from the confiscation lists. As one influential militia colonel had complained to Governor Mathews, various “villains” guilty of murdering and plundering Whigs had been “received by Gen. Marion as citizens” and had been restored to “equal privileges with the men who have suffered everything by them” and who had “borne the burden and heat of the day.”

  In March 1784 Marion received a sinecure in the form of the commandant post at Fort Johnson in Charleston Harbor, which he had helped take from the British (albeit without opposition) in 1775. The job, essentially that of a port collector, paid him five hundred British pounds sterling a year and required him to spend much of his time at the fort. Living in Charleston, a place of high society, did not much appeal to him, but the pay was decent and the work was not demanding. Four years later, though, budget cutters in the legislature decided to reduce his salary to five shillings a day, or about 20 percent of what he had been making. The pay was further conditioned on his living in the fort, a dreary, dungeon-like edifice. After a while the job no longer was worth it to him, and rather than swallow his pride, he resigned the position.

  Marion was also too proud to accept another benefit South Carolina offered him. In early 1784 the legislature took up a bill to prevent lawsuits against any state or militia officers for taking private property from citizens for use in prosecuting the war. The intent was to give immunity to those who had plundered under Sumter’s Law. According to one early postwar account, which gained acceptance through the years, Marion saw his name listed among those to be protected by the new law and nobly demanded it be removed. “For if,” he is quoted as saying, “in the course of command, I have in a single instance departed from the strict line of propriety, or given the slightest cause of complaint to any individual whatever, justice requires that I should suffer for it.”

  The quotation is probably fanciful, but like so many Marion legends, this one has elements of truth. A bill did pass the Assembly in March 1784 specifically exempting Thomas Sumter and Andrew Pickens or any state or militia officer acting under their authority or command from liability for appropriating private property for public use. Marion was not named in the law—although arguably, as a subordinate militia officer to Sumter, he fell within the statute’s protection. It may be that Sumter and Pickens had powerful friends who pushed the bill through for their benefit. Or, given that Marion had stridently refused to participate in Sumter’s Law, some legislators may have felt he did not need or deserve specific legal protection. In any event no lawsuits were ever brought against him for alleged plunder.

  IF MARION WAS feeling underappreciated by the powers-that-be, he had at least one not-so-secret admirer. Mary Esther Videau, a spinster in her late forties, was Marion’s first cousin and had known him since childhood. A Huguenot neighbor of his, she was a member of the influential Cordes family, her mother being Anne Cordes Videau, a sister of Marion’s mother, Esther. Over the years Mary Videau had inherited a considerable fortune in money and land from her deceased parents and brothers. She also kept up a correspondence with Marion, provided him with intelligence carried by slaves, and is said to have attended the ball at Cantey’s Plantation that he threw to celebrate the victory at Yorktown. Yet she had never succeeded in getting the shy Marion to reciprocate her romantic feelings toward him.

  But in that goal she had important allies in another pair of cousins: Marion’s beloved niece, the widow Charlotte Ashby, a daughter of his late brother Gabriel, and her fiancé, Theodore Marion, son of Marion’s deceased brother Job. Charlotte and Theodore prodded their uncle to pay a call on Mary Videau. He did; the two of them hit it off; and on April 20, 1786, a Thursday evening, the lifelong bachelor Francis Marion, now fifty-four, married forty-nine-year-old Mary Esther Videau. Apparently it was a double wedding, for that same day the cousins Theodore Marion and Charlotte Ashby were married as well.

  The Marions made a sweet elderly couple and enjoyed a happy and loving marriage. Little is known about Mary’s physical appearance, although William Dobein James wrote that she closely resembled him facially (not exactly a compliment). But they shared interests and heritage; traveled, camped, and fished together; played backgammon; and entertained dinner and overnight guests in their one-story, multibedroom home he rebuilt at Pond Bluff. Among his frequent visitors was Peter Horry, the two of them having repaired their long friendship.

  As Mary was beyond her child-bearing years, they had no offspring, but they did each “adopt” a favorite child. For Mary, it was Charlotte Videau Ashby, daughter of Charlotte Ashby the matchmaker. The little girl’s father, Anthony Ashby, a former member of the 2nd Regiment, had died around the time of her birth in 1784. For Marion’s part, in a new will he executed in 1787, he adopted a grandnephew—ten-year-old Francis Marion Dwight, the grandson of Marion’s brother Isaac. Marion provided that the income from his estate would pay for a college and professional education for the boy until he was twenty-one. His inheritance, however, was conditioned on him taking the name “Francis Marion” and dropping the name “Dwight” entirely. Marion had no known antipathy toward Samuel Dwight, the boy’s father; it was, rather, an effort to perpetuate his name in a direct line of succession.

  Unfortunately it did not work. Although Francis Dwight did legally change his last name to Marion in 1799 after turning twenty-one, a subsequent marriage produced eight daughters and not a single son. When seven of those girls married, and the other one died childless, the Marion surname disappeared forever from the general’s direct line. It would survive in collateral lines, and in the years to follow, thousands of Carolinians would give their sons the first and middle names “Francis Marion.”a

  As money generally begets money and land was cheap at the time, Marion was able to build a substantial estate from the property his wife brought to the marriage. He focused on raising cattle and hogs, and gradually the rice market improved. He hired out some of his slaves to do work at Fort Johnson while he was commandant there—in effect, paying himself for their services. Eventually his land holdings would total nearly six thousand acres. To the poorest of South Carolinians, Marion would have seemed rich, but he would more accurately be described as upper-middle class. He liberally extended loans to family members, comprising approximately a third of the value of his personal (non-real estate) assets.

  Marion’s postwar state Senate career bears few marks of distinction.b He was a “moderate Federalist” and thus a member of the same party as George Washington, to whom his character has often been compared. But he was not active in politics. He attended the South Carolina convention that ratified the US Constitution in 1788 but for reasons unknown was absent for the final vote (as was Peter Horry). As a Federalist he probably favored ratification, along with William Moultrie, Henry Laurens, and former Marion brigade members Hezekiah Maham, James Postell, and Thomas Waties (by then a judge). States’ rights advocates such as Thomas Sumter and Wade Hampton voted “nay,”
as did the irascible William Clay Snipes. The states’ righters would have their day in 1860, when South Carolina voted to secede from the Union and shots were fired a few months later on the federal fort that bears Sumter’s name.

  In 1790 Marion was a member of the convention that drafted the new South Carolina Constitution, but his input, if any, is unrecorded. As a state senator, according to Peter Horry (as embellished by Weems), Marion urged legislation to establish free public schools to better educate the state’s citizens. But if he did, no record of his involvement in any such debates or proceedings remains. Even less plausible is the rationale Weems attributed to Marion—namely, that it was lack of education and the resulting public ignorance that led so many South Carolinians, unlike the united New Englanders, to take up Toryism. Marion knew that for every Ganey or Brockinton or Harrison from South Carolina who was fighting him, there was a Fraser from New Jersey, or Thompson from Massachusetts, or New Yorkers under Tarleton, Watson, and Doyle who were equally zealous loyalists.

  And yet, as evidenced by his early will and by his putting his nephews through college, Marion did place a high value on education. He may have envied the greater learning of men such as Henry Lee and Thomas Waties who fought alongside him. And he resented being patronized by Watson, Balfour, and other more cultivated Englishmen in their correspondence with him over prisoner exchanges. It would have been natural for him to have wished he had more formal schooling. Setting aside the flowery speeches Weems put in his mouth on the subject, Marion probably did favor free public education.