According to a legend that grew out of the much-repeated anecdote, the British officer was so inspired by the Americans' resourcefulness and dedication to the cause—despite their lack of adequate provisions, supplies or proper uniforms—that he promptly switched sides and supported American independence.
In his version, the primly attired Redcoat seems uncomfortable with Marion's ragtag band, who glare at him suspiciously from the shadows of a South Carolina swamp. The movie The Patriot exaggerated the Swamp Fox legend for a whole new generation.
Although Francis Marion led surprise attacks against the British, and was known for his cunning and resourcefulness, Mel Gibson played The Patriot 's Marion-inspired protagonist as an action hero. Many of the legends that surround the life and exploits of Brigadier General Francis Marion were introduced by M. Marion into the garb and dress of a military romance," Weems wrote in to Peter Horry, the South Carolina officer on whose memoir the book was based.
Weems had also authored an extremely popular biography of George Washington in , and it was he who invented the apocryphal cherry tree story. Marion's life received similar embellishment.
Fortunately, the real Francis Marion has not been entirely obscured by his legend—historians including William Gilmore Simms and Hugh Rankin have written accurate biographies. Based on the facts alone, "Marion deserves to be remembered as one of the heroes of the War for Independence," says Busick, who has written the introduction to a new edition of Simms' The Life of Francis Marion , out in June Marion was born at his family's plantation in Berkeley County, South Carolina, probably in The family's youngest son, Francis was a small boy with malformed legs, but he was restless, and at about 15 years old he joined the crew of a ship and sailed to the West Indies.
During Marion's first voyage, the ship sank, supposedly after a whale rammed it. The seven-man crew escaped in a lifeboat and spent a week at sea before they drifted ashore. After the shipwreck, Marion decided to stick to land, managing his family's plantation until he joined the South Carolina militia at 25 to fight in the French and Indian War.
Most heroes of the Revolution were not the saints that biographers like Parson Weems would have them be, and Francis Marion was a man of his times: he owned slaves, and he fought in a brutal campaign against the Cherokee Indians. While not noble by today's standards, Marion's experience in the French and Indian War prepared him for more admirable service. The Cherokee used the landscape to their advantage, Marion found; they concealed themselves in the Carolina backwoods and mounted devastating ambushes.
Two decades later, Marion would apply these tactics against the British. From the first biography of Marion in to the short-lived Disney series of the late s and the more recent Hollywood film, The Patriot , the legends surrounding Marion are generally more fiction than fact. In the following extract, we enter the story in when Francis Marion and Banastre Tarleton were crisscrossing South Carolina in a deadly game of cat and mouse. Tarleton rarely paid any compliments to his rebel adversaries, but he respected Marion, later writing that 'Mr.
Marion, by his zeal and abilities, shewed himself capable of the trust committed to his charge. He welcomed the opportunity to pursue him, and Cornwallis approved the operation, telling Tarleton, 'I They heard a rumor he was at Singleton's Mills in the High Hills of Santee, but when they arrived, Marion was nowhere to be found. Instead, he was camped thirty miles farther south, just above Nelson's Ferry, where he planned to attack the British guard. He had arrived there with two hundred men on the evening of November 5 after a day-and-a-half ride west from Lynches Creek.
By November 7 Tarleton had moved down to the plantation of the recently widowed Dorothy Richardson, whose late husband, Brigadier General Richard Richardson, had been the victorious Whig commander in the Snow Campaign in From a local slave Tarleton learned that Marion was bivouacked sixteen miles south, near Nelson's Ferry.
Marion had likewise detected Tarleton's presence in the vicinity. The two of them then engaged in a game of cat and mouse. Marion laid an ambush at Nelson's and waited until night, expecting Tarleton to cross there, but the Legion commander fell back a few miles in the other direction. Marion then came up to within three miles of Tarleton's camp, intending to surprise him. But Tarleton was crafty as well: he spread the rumor that his main body had returned to Camden and sent out small patrols with instructions to show little signs of fear by leaving camps abruptly with food still cooking in order to draw Marion to attack.
He lit bonfires at Richardson's Plantation designed to give the impression that he was burning the home of a revered patriot family. In the meantime he wheeled out two small artillery pieces capable of a kind of firepower Marion's men were not used to facing.
Then, knowing Marion's penchant for making surprise attacks at night, Tarleton hid in the woods with his force of four hundred and waited for Marion to come to him. Marion nearly took the bait. Seeing the light near Richardson's, he concluded that it was the plantation house on fire and that Tarleton was there.
Not knowing the size of the enemy force, he crept forward, deliberating over his next move. Just then he was met by Richard Richardson Jr.
He brought information that Tarleton was camped a couple of miles away with a hundred cavalry and three hundred dragoons. After the victory, he was commissioned a lieutenant colonel in the Continental Army. Fortunately for the patriot cause, Marion was recovering at his estate from an injury, incurred from jumping out of a second-story window to leave a party in which the series of toasts had led to distasteful drunkenness, when C harleston fell to the British in May Marion challenged British rule in the South Carolina lowcountry after these two military disasters and targeted British lines of communication and supply.
His tactics frustrated British efforts to mobilize loyalists in the Georgetown District. Marion, unlike Thomas Sumter, coordinated effectively in the field with the Continental Army, led by Maj. Nathanael Greene.
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