The frustrated British lieutenant colonel Banastre Tarleton apocryphally gave Marion his nickname: “As for this damned old fox, the devil himself could not catch him.” In truth, “Swamp Fox” was a nineteenth-century creation, and Marion’s legend didn’t begin until the fictional 1809 biography by Parson Weems, the author of an equally fictional biography of Washington.9
Far from being movie-star handsome, Marion was short, walked with a limp, and was in his forties during the war. One of his men said he was “rather below the middle stature of men, lean and swarthy. His body was well set, but his knees and ankles were badly formed; and he still limped upon one leg. He had a countenance remarkably steady; his nose was aquiline; his chin projecting; his forehead was large and high, and his eyes black and piercing. He was now forty-eight years of age [in 1780], but still even at this age, his frame was capable of enduring fatigue and every privation, necessary for a partisan. . . . He was dressed in a close round-bodied crimson jacket, of a coarse texture, and wore a leather cap, part of the uniform of the 2nd Regiment, with a silver crescent in front, inscribed with the words, ‘Liberty or death.’”10
Marion grew up in Georgetown, a port sixty miles northeast of Charlestown. When he was fifteen or sixteen, he worked as a crewman on a schooner sailing for the West Indies. The ship foundered, possible hit by a whale. The crew drifted in an open boat for a week (so the legend goes), two of the men died, and Marion’s career as a sailor ended. In 1761, in a war with the Cherokees, Marion fought as a lieutenant in a light-infantry company. He was, his captain said, “an active, brave, and hardy soldier, and an excellent partisan officer.”11
Marion was a member of the planters’ establishment, and in 1770 was elected to the legislature. As tensions grew between Britain and its colonies, Marion opposed the Crown. When the war began, he was elected a cavalry captain in a regiment commanded by his former captain, now Colonel William Moultrie. (Moultrie later commanded John Laurens at Savannah.) Their first action was to attack British Fort Johnson, which overlooked Charlestown harbor. They found the fort abandoned. Marion participated in Moultrie’s defense of Charlestown the next year from a different harbor fort, Fort Moultrie. By 1779, he was a lieutenant colonel, and he fought in an unsuccessful attempt to seize Savannah. The British captured Charlestown in 1780, taking as prisoners Lincoln, Moultrie, Laurens, and six thousand other men.
Marion wasn’t one of them. Earlier in the year, in Charlestown, an officer invited Marion to a dinner-and-drinking party. As was the custom, the host locked the doors after dinner. Marion, a light drinker and possibly a nondrinker, wanted to leave quietly. He jumped to the street from a second-floor window and broke his ankle. When the British took Charlestown, he was in the country recuperating.12
Gates succeeded Lincoln and exiled Marion to command partisans and state troops closer to Charlestown. Now, Marion missed Gates’s defeat at Camden in August 1780. But that month, his men rescued one hundred fifty captured Continentals. Weeks later, with just fifty men, he ambushed two hundred fifty Tory militia; overran a Tory outpost; and fought Tories again toward the end of October. South Carolina promoted him to general.
Greene relieved Gates on December 2, 1780. Two days later, the new commander wrote Marion with conciliatory orders, asking him to keep up the partisan raids and to be the eyes of the army: “I am fully sensible your service is hard and sufferings great, but how great the prize for which we contend! I like your plan of frequently shifting your ground. It frequently prevents a surprise and perhaps a total loss of your party. Until a more permanent army can be collected than is in the field at present, we must endeavor to keep up a partisan war and preserve the tide of sentiment among the people as much as possible in our favor. Spies are the eyes of an army . . . At present, I am badly off for intelligence.”13
When Greene and Marion met in person, one of Greene’s generals described an unimpressive sight: “Marion, a gentleman of South Carolina, had been with the army a few days, attended by a very few followers, distinguished by small black leather caps and the wretchedness of their attire. Their number did not exceed twenty men and boys, some white, some black, and all mounted, but most of them miserably equipped. Their appearance was, in fact, so burlesque that it was with much difficulty [that] the diversion of the regular soldiery was restrained by the officers.”14
The son of another Continental officer who had known Marion used a similar description.
General Marion was in stature of the smallest size, thin as well as low. His visage was not pleasing, and his manners not captivating. He was reserved and silent, entering into conversations only when necessary, and then with modesty and good sense. He possessed a strong mind, improved by its own reflection and observation, not by books or travel. His dress was like his address—plain, regarding comfort and decency only. In his meals, he was abstemious, eating generally of one dish and drinking water mostly. . . . Even the charms of the fair, like the luxuries of the table and the allurements of wealth, seemed to be lost upon him. The procurement of subsistence for his men, and the contrivance of annoyance to his enemy, engrossed his entire mind.15
Appearances deceived. Throughout 1781, Marion raided and attacked the enemy with an army that ranged from forty to one thousand men. The British sent out two unsuccessful expeditions to destroy him. Tarleton led the first mission. A lieutenant colonel led the second. Marion surprised him and attacked, killing twenty. The British complained that Marion “would not fight like a gentleman or a Christian.”16
Cornwallis concurred. “Marion has so wrought the minds of the people, partly by the terror of his treats and cruelty of his punishments, and partly by the promise of plunder, that there was scarcely an inhabitant between the Santee and Peedee [rivers] that was not in arms against us.” Tarleton described Marion’s tactics. “He collected his adherents at the shortest notice . . . and, after making incursions into the friendly districts, or threatening the communications, to avoid pursuit, he disbanded his followers. The alarms occasioned by these insurrections frequently retarded supplies on their way to the army . . .” Although Marion was “timid and cautious, and would risk nothing,” said a Loyalist colonel, he succeeded.17
Marion and Greene maintained a strong rapport. Greene had Marion co-lead the first attack line with his nearly four hundred infantry and cavalry at the Battle of Eutaw Springs in September 1781. Greene lost the battle, but so devastated the British that it accelerated their pulling in troops from the countryside, culminating with Leslie’s arrival at year’s end.
Two months after Eutaw Springs, Greene and Marion became concerned that the British were stealing slaves from residents near Monck’s Corner, forty miles north of Charlestown. Marion ordered Colonel Hezekiah Maham to take four hundred dragoons and riflemen to the area to intercept the British and “to recover, if possible, a number of Negroes they were sending to [Charles]town.” Maham wasn’t able to attack the well-defended enemy redoubt, but forced a nearby hospital in a plantation house to surrender, in hopes of drawing out the main body of enemy soldiers from their fortification. From the hospital, he captured arms and supplies, two doctors, and 80 convalescing soldiers. Finally, he burned the building, destroying arms and supplies he couldn’t carry off.18
The British protested to Marion. “The burning a hospital and dragging away a number of dying people to expire in swamps is a species of barbarity hitherto unknown in civilized nations—especially when the hospital has been left without a guard for its defense—that could justify an attack upon the defenseless inhabitants.” To the contrary, Marion and Maham replied: The convalescing soldiers were able to bear arms, and the amount of arms and supplies at the hospital constituted a military installation.19
Around New Year’s 1782, Leslie, in Charlestown, learned from spies that parts of Marion’s force might be vulnerable about fifteen miles northeast of the city. He ordered Major William Brereton with nearly four hundred cavalry and infantry to try to engage the enemy.
Brereton,
like Leslie, came from a military family. He was three when his father was killed at Braddock’s defeat in 1755. At seventeen, Brereton joined the army, serving under Leslie as they both were promoted through the ranks. He fought at Brandywine and Germantown in 1777, and participated in raids against New England rebels. In the British redeployment from Philadelphia to New York, he was seriously wounded, and took nearly a year to recover. He returned to the army in 1781, reuniting with Leslie in South Carolina.20
On January 2, Brereton rested his men at a plantation, bordered on one side by a swamp crossed by a causeway and the Videau Bridge (possibly named after Joseph Henry Videau, whose daughter married Marion after the war). Inexperienced rebel state troops and militia spotted the British vanguard near the bridge and charged. They had the upper hand—until Brereton’s main force counterattacked and overwhelmed them. Leslie praised how Brereton’s troops “with great gallantry cut to pieces and took nearly 100 of the rebels,” with just one Loyalist killed.21
Marion’s report to Greene was less believable: His men killed four enemy and wounded fourteen, while only six Whigs were killed and nine wounded, with fifteen missing. Given the power of the counterattack and the victors’ ability to see dead bodies, Leslie’s account is probably more accurate.22
Marion’s next major encounter was another debacle. Unlike Brereton, this time, the enemy commander was an amateur, a brilliant amateur. Benjamin Thompson, 29, was born in a farming village eleven miles northwest of Boston. His father died a year later, and his mother married again to a man Thompson remembered as “tyrannical.”23
When he was thirteen or fourteen, Thompson became apprenticed to a Salem storekeeper, and nearly killed himself from an explosion he created experimenting with fireworks. While working for a dry-goods merchant in Boston in 1769, he spent his spare time attending lectures at Harvard, and learning French and fencing. “I had been destined for trade,” he said years later, “but after a short trial, my thirst for knowledge became inextinguishable, and I could not apply myself to anything but my favorite objects of study.”24
The next year, he studied medicine with a physician, and chemistry and physics on his own. He submitted his first scientific paper to an academic society in 1772, and taught school in Rumford (now Concord), New Hampshire. That year, he married a rich widow, and his world changed. He became a landowner and a friend of the royalist governor. As tensions between the Crown and colonists increased in 1774, the governor commissioned Thompson as a major in the New Hampshire militia. But Whigs accused him correctly of collaborating with the British, and he fled the state for British-occupied Boston. “Nothing short of the most threatening danger could have induced me to leave my friends and family,” he wrote a friend.25
But his collaboration didn’t stop. He became a British spy, at one point telling the Whigs that he wanted a Continental commission, and that the reports from New Hampshire about his loyalty were false. The Whigs jailed him, but released him because of ambiguous evidence. In fall 1775, Thompson’s collaboration was exposed, and he fled again to Boston. When the British evacuated Boston, Thompson sailed to London, leaving his wife and daughter in New Hampshire. He became the primary liaison between Tory refugees in London and George Germain, secretary of state for the colonies and a war hawk.
It became a close relationship. One acquaintance talked about his frequent visits to Germain’s home, where Thompson “always breakfasts, dines, and sups, so great a favorite is he.” Germain put him on the payroll first as the nominal secretary to the colony of Georgia, later as deputy to the inspector general of provincial forces, and finally as an undersecretary for the colonies. That gave him the wherewithal to study naval architecture and conduct ballistics experiments. The Royal Society elected him as a member in 1779.26
But Thompson wanted to do more than theorize about fighting. In 1780, Germain arranged for his commission as a lieutenant colonel and commander of a Loyalist cavalry regiment whose men he would have to recruit, the King’s American Dragoons. He sailed for New York in late 1781, but bad weather and winds forced him to Charlestown. There, he asked Leslie for an active command. Leslie didn’t ignore Germain’s friend, even one with little military experience. He gave Thompson two hundred cavalry and five hundred infantry.
For the first couple of months, Thompson led foraging raids, stealing cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, and other supplies. He wrote to Germain that he wasn’t impressed by the rebels: “If the prisoners we took the other day . . . are a fair specimen of their cavalry, I would venture to attack the whole with 150 of the dragoons that are under my command. They [the rebels] are absolutely no better than children, and their horses are much too fat, as ours are too lean.”27
In late February 1782, Leslie and Thompson received more intelligence about Marion’s location, and secretly planned an operation; if they were lucky, they would capture Greene himself.
Colonel Peter Horry commanded Marion’s brigade in the absence of Marion, who was sitting in the legislature in Jacksonboro, eighty miles to the west. Horry was an experienced fighter. He was also an experienced feuder; he and his fellow colonel, Maham, despised each other, each claiming seniority over the other. Marion complained to Greene that “the dispute between the two colonels is very injurious” to the broader military campaign, and that he had been forced to assign the two and their respective troops to different locations, “which weaken[s] the force.”28
Horry’s men camped near his plantation on Wambaw Creek near the Santee River, northeast of Charlestown. On February 24, Horry’s scouts spotted Thompson’s men and quickly reported it to Horry’s next in command: Horry, ill and staying at his plantation, had temporarily relinquished command to a subordinate colonel, who thought the scouts’ report was exaggerated. Near sunset, Thompson attacked, and the rebels retreated. Because the light was waning and the bridge over the creek collapsed, Thompson didn’t pursue them, but said his men killed at least thirty rebels. Horry reported just four men killed and six wounded, with seven missing.29
In Jacksonboro, Marion had already heard reports that Thompson was advancing, and left to rejoin his men. By the 24th, he had ridden about sixty miles to the plantation home of the Laurenses. There, he picked up reinforcements—dragoons from Maham’s detachment—and learned of the fighting at Wambaw Creek. They rode another thirty miles, camping at Hester Tydiman’s plantation on the Santee River, a couple of miles from Wambaw.
Thompson found Marion the next morning. Almost simultaneously, the two commanders ordered their troops to charge each other. Marion’s panicked. Thompson’s didn’t.
“We had the good fortune this morning to fall in with a chosen corps under the command of General Marion, in person, which we attacked and totally routed, killing a considerable number of them, taking sixteen prisoners, and driving General Marion and the great part of his army into the Santee, where it is probable a great many of them perished,” Thompson told Leslie. Rebels who tried to escape through the swamps were shot or drowned. Thompson also captured most of Marion’s arms and supplies, including “General Marion’s tent and his canteens full of liquor, which afforded a timely supply to the troops.”30
Thompson claimed to have killed or captured one hundred rebels. Marion claimed twenty-eight were killed, wounded, or captured. Regardless, “the disgrace was great,” Marion told Greene.31
In a month, Thompson sailed for New York. Marion retreated across the Santee. The now-reduced Horry and Maham regiments were combined, and Marion chose Maham to lead them. Horry resigned, but Marion appointed him commander at Georgetown, sixty miles from Charlestown.
Despite periodic successes, Leslie’s pullback to the Charlestown area stressed the Loyalist militia. In June 1781, Horry had agreed to an armistice with Tory major Micajah Ganey (also spelled Gainey) in the area between the Great Pee Dee River and the North Carolina border, including part of what is now called Marion County. The armistice failed because Whig militia continued to raid Loyalists, and Ganey felt responsible for de
fending his people.
After a brief skirmish in June 1782, the two parties reached a new treaty. The Loyalists would restore plundered Whig property, lay down their arms, turn over Whig deserters, and sign an oath of allegiance. In return, Marion promised that the now-former Loyalists would be free from persecution.32
The only exceptions to the pardon: three notorious Tories, including David Fanning of North Carolina and a man known as “Bloody Bill.”
13. “Bloody Bill” Cunningham Raids the Backcountry
WILLIAM CUNNINGHAM “SUFFERED FEARFUL WRONGS, AND fearfully did he avenge them,” wrote George Atkinson Ward, a mid-nineteenth-century historian whose own great uncle, a Loyalist, was forced to flee Massachusetts. The sympathetic Ward conceded Cunningham’s reputation for blood, but said “not even his greatest enemies have ever alleged that, stern as he was, he was at any time guilty of what was but too common in those times: harshness or cruelty towards women and children.”1
The Whigs disagreed. “Savage barbarity,” said William Moultrie. “Heartless unfeeling monster,” others said. “Cold-blooded demon.” “Bloody Bill.”2
His origins are obscure. He probably was born in South Carolina, where Cunninghams had lived for several generations, but he claimed his birthplace was in Ireland. In 1775, he was probably nineteen—but he might have been twenty-seven.3
He started as a Whig, a rebel against Britain, and helped raise a militia company. He took part in the capture of a backcountry fort, then agreed to participate in a low-country action near Charlestown with the proviso that he be allowed to resign his commission later. But Cunningham’s commander refused his resignation, jailed him for mutiny, and tried him. He was acquitted, and returned home near the inland town of Ninety-Six. Cunningham remained a Whig after the court-martial. In late summer 1776, he campaigned with state militia against the Cherokees who sheltered Tories.
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