The Swamp Fox
Page 4
Whether through a knack of his own or the blessings of the soil, Francis almost immediately began producing profitable crops at Hampton Hill. A man of steady habits, he would have been content to live his life as a moderately successful gentleman planter along the Santee. Indeed, that is what he did, mostly without being heard from, for the next fifteen years. But the quiescence was twice interrupted during that period: first, at the outset, by a brutal Indian war on the western edge of the province and then again, at the end of those years, by the approaching fury of revolution. In the former case he would fight alongside British professional soldiers, trained by them as they would train their own. But later he would take up arms against them, applying the lessons he learned on the frontier.
3
Frontier Lessons
In October 1759 Oconostota, the great Cherokee warrior, had come to Charleston in peace, but the British royal governor, William Lyttelton, would have none of it. The Cherokees had been loyal allies of Britain against France throughout the Seven Years’ War, helping to procure the French abandonment of Fort Duquesne in the Ohio Valley in 1758. But on their way back home the Cherokees began to seethe. Believing the British had broken a promise to compensate them for the loss of horses during the campaign and feeling generally cheated by white traders and land grabbers, they decided to help themselves to some mounts belonging to colonists along the Virginia frontier. In retaliation the Virginians killed and scalped a number of Cherokees, who responded with murderous raids against settlers in the Carolina backcountry.
Upon hearing that Governor Lyttelton was preparing to raise a force to march against them, Oconostota led a delegation to Charleston and, laying deerskins at the governor’s feet as a peace offering, proposed a treaty based on mutual forgiveness. But Lyttelton, an ambitious thirty-four-year-old politician, was in search of military laurels. He refused to pick up the deerskins, took the entire delegation hostage, and brought them along on his march west, claiming he was acting to protect their safety. In the meantime some thirteen hundred colonials had volunteered for the expedition.
Among the enlistees was twenty-seven-year-old Francis Marion. In the earliest known writing to bear his signature, on October 31, 1759, he joined a number of prominent South Carolinians, including future revolutionary firebrand Christopher Gadsden, in pledging service in Lyttelton’s expedition. Marion turned out as a captain in a troop of provincial cavalry headed by his brother Gabriel. This was a military unit of the British royal government, not a local militia, and thus Marion became exposed to British army training and methods.
Lyttelton’s composite force consisted of British regulars, South Carolina provincial troops and militia, slaves, vagrants impressed into service, and assorted Native American foes of the Cherokees. In late 1759 they made their way to Fort Prince George in the far northwest corner of South Carolina near the border of the Cherokee Lower Towns. There, using the hostages as leverage, Lyttelton demanded the surrender of twenty-four other Indians, to be put to death as compensation for the same number of whites they allegedly had slain. The offended Cherokees refused and prepared to fight. Plagued by desertions from within the undisciplined, ill-equipped militia, Lyttelton was forced to quickly conclude a treaty, which he signed with Attakullakulla, the “First Beloved Man.”
But the ink was barely dry on the agreement before smallpox broke out in the militia camp, prompting many of the remaining volunteers to desert. Returning to Charleston, Lyttelton claimed a victory and sailed to Jamaica to become governor there. He had achieved peace without firing a shot, but the expensive venture had accomplished little more than to further Native American resentments, guaranteeing future hostilities.
Although he saw no actual fighting, Marion witnessed for the first time a pair of phenomena he would contend with in later campaigns: the arrogance of British military commanders and the fickleness of the colonial militia. The colonials resented the haughtiness of the British officers, who enjoyed better accommodations and imposed severe discipline, such as flogging, causing them to desert in droves. When Marion obtained his own militia command in 1780 he would not make the same mistake.
No sooner had Lyttelton’s expedition ended than word reached Charleston of a fresh outbreak of hostilities in Cherokee country. Egged on by their French allies, a Cherokee raiding party attacked South Carolina’s frontier settlements, killing, scalping, and mutilating women and children, among other settlers. At the request of panicked South Carolinians, England sent Colonel Archibald Montgomery, the dashing leader of the 77th Highland Scots Regiment, down from Canada to lead a second expedition against the Cherokees. In April 1760 Montgomery set out with thirteen hundred British regulars, supplemented by some colonials and friendly Indians. Although Marion’s participation in this campaign is undocumented, he likely was present because it followed closely upon Lyttelton’s expedition and had the same objective—to eliminate the Cherokee threat on the western frontier.
Montgomery’s force, which rose to seventeen hundred, managed to surprise the Cherokees and destroy several of their villages near Fort Prince George. But after moving deeper north into Cherokee territory, his men were ambushed at a narrow pass near the Middle Town of Etchoe in present-day North Carolina. Taking protection from the higher ground on the adjacent hills, the Cherokees fired down upon the invaders, killing or wounding about a hundred of them. The Cherokees also had the advantage of long rifles, which were accurate at a much greater distance than British muskets. That lesson in weaponry was one that Francis Marion would tuck away for future use.
Montgomery’s expedition ended in retreat back to Charleston, and his prompt departure for New York caused South Carolinians to question the British commitment to their safety. Even more alarming was the news out of Fort Loudoun, in the Tennessee Overhill Towns territory. After capturing the fort, the Cherokees started to escort the garrison prisoners toward Virginia. But angered upon learning that the whites had hidden and destroyed ammunition—in breach of the surrender terms—the captors massacred twenty-nine of the prisoners, three of them women. The commanding officer was scalped alive and made to dance until he died, after which the Indians “stuffed earth into his mouth and said, ‘Dog, since you are so hungry for land, eat your fill.’”
Having twice failed to rid the Carolina frontier of the Cherokee threat, the British put together a much larger surge force for a third attempt. Leading the contingent was a forty-year-old, hard-nosed Highland Scot, Lieutenant Colonel James Grant. He took charge of an army of twenty-eight hundred, split evenly between British regulars, South Carolina provincials, and specially trained rangers, plus fifty-seven Mohawk, Catawba, Stockbridge, and Chickasaw Indians as well as eighty-one slaves. Francis Marion was commissioned a lieutenant in the provincial infantry, serving directly under Captain William Moultrie.
In June 1761 Grant marched his army into Cherokee territory. At night his Native Americans danced the War Dance around a bonfire, and as one British officer recalled, “The camp was a little alarmed one night by a vast howling of wolves—our Indians, screaming at the same time, making it impossible to judge for some time what it was.” The Indians—and four dozen white woodsmen dressed and painted to look like them—were placed at the vanguard of Grant’s force.
A few days later Grant’s men passed a tree carving showing a British soldier being dragged away by hostile Indians, a warning not to go any farther, which they ignored. The next morning, on June 10, the two-mile-long army column entered a mountain ravine about a mile from the same pass where Montgomery had been ambushed the year before. There Grant was met by at least six hundred warriors, led by Oconostota, sounding the Cherokee “Yelp” that echoed down the line.
Again the Cherokees had formed an ambush, but after several hours of fighting they ran out of ammunition and were reduced to using bows and arrows. During the battle, as recorded by British captain Christopher French, a Cherokee warrior “was met by a relation of a Catawba Indian who was killed in the action, who knocked him
down with a war club, tomahawked and scalped him, then blew out his brains, cut open his breast, and belly, and cut off his privy parts, and otherwise mangled him in a most shocking manner.” Wanton killing was not limited to Native Americans; Captain French himself was under “orders to put every soul to death.”
Grant’s forces pushed through the pass and on to Etchoe, after which they burned fifteen settlements and thousands of acres of crops. Grant boasted to his superiors that his troops had managed “to demolish every eatable thing in the country” and had driven “5,000 people including men, women and children . . . into the woods and mountains to starve.” The Cherokees were forced to sue for peace. Grant and Attakullakulla smoked a peace pipe and concluded a treaty. By the time the War of Independence came around, the Cherokees would be back fighting on the British side.
Marion’s precise role in the 1761 expedition is uncertain. Weems paints a dramatic picture of Marion being chosen by Grant to lead a detachment of thirty men on a suicidal advance through the pass. In this telling, as deadly fire rained down upon Marion and his unit, only nine of the thirty made it through alive, but they opened the pass for the main column.
Weems’s tale has some grounding in fact. Grant did send a platoon of William Moultrie’s provincial light infantry across a ford to fire at the enemy and cover the river crossing by the rest of the line. Because Marion was Moultrie’s first lieutenant in the provincial light infantry and was a small man of the type often used for light infantry operations, he was likely one of those chosen for the assignment.a It was no easy task. Describing the provincials’ effort, Colonel Henry Laurens, a future South Carolina revolutionary leader, wrote, “Our men behaved bravely, returned their [the Cherokees’] fire, advanced briskly up the hills, and pushed with great intrepidity across the river.”
But to call it a suicide mission would be an exaggeration. According to contemporaneous army accounts, the light infantry who were in front were fired at from a great distance and suffered only one slightly wounded private. Out of Grant’s entire army of twenty-eight hundred that day, only eleven soldiers were killed (and only one of them a Carolina provincial)—barely half the number of dead that Weems ascribed to Marion’s unit alone. Moultrie, whose 1802 memoirs preceded Weems’s book by seven years, merely described Marion as “an active, brave and hardy soldier” during Grant’s campaign. William Dobein James said he “distinguished himself . . . in a severe conflict between Colonel Grant and the Indians, near Etchoee” while acknowledging that the particulars were unknown.
More recently Marion’s participation in the Cherokee campaign has been cited against him. In a backlash to the release of The Patriot in 2000 the British press asserted that Marion was not the virtuous gentleman farmer turned heroic fighter portrayed by Mel Gibson in the movie but rather a man given to “slaughtering Indians for fun.” There is no proof Marion personally committed any atrocities during the Cherokee War, at least as a matter of choice, although he participated in some by order. Weems quotes from a letter Marion wrote to a friend, in which he recalled the Cherokee campaign with sorrow. “We arrived at the Indian towns in the month of July,” he wrote. “The next morning we proceeded by order of Colonel Grant, to burn down the Indians’ cabins. Some of our men seemed to enjoy this cruel work, laughing very heartily at the curling flames, as they mounted loud crackling over the tops of the huts. But to me it appeared a shocking sight. Poor creatures!” He is then quoted as saying that when ordered to cut down the fields of corn, on which the Indians depended for their survival, and where their children so often played, he “could scarcely refrain from tears.”
Marion may not have penned these exact words, which are written in a more florid style than he employed in his military writings, but precious few of his private writings exist, so it is possible that this highly personal message is in fact largely his own. In any event, the sentiments reflected in the letter are similar to those he would express twenty years later when he participated in a war just as vicious and brutal.
Marion’s views toward Native Americans also may have softened over the years through close personal contact with them. One of his favorite slaves, Peggy, was the “mustee” daughter of an Indian man and an African American woman. And Joseph Willis, born a slave to his white, plantation-owning father and Native American or possibly mixed-race slave mother, claimed to have served with Marion during the Revolutionary War as a free person of color.
Whatever he did or saw during the Cherokee War of 1759 to 1761, Marion came away from the experience with a profound distaste for the cycle of vengeance that is set off when one side’s atrocity is met with barbarism from the other. He also witnessed, firsthand, the ambush and hit-and-run style of warfare that would serve him so well when fighting the British and their Tory allies in the Revolution.
After the Cherokee War ended by treaty in late 1761, Marion returned to tilling the soil on the fertile western banks of the Santee and cultivating the increasingly profitable crops of rice and indigo. The next decade or so are his “lost” years, with little he did being recorded. He shows up on the grand jury and petit jury lists in St. Stephens Parish in 1767, the same year he acquired 350 acres of land in Berkeley County adjoining that of his brother Job. The following year he was granted and immediately conveyed another 450-acre plat in the Santee River Swamp. In his mid-thirties he seemed to be someone who had yet to find his place in the world. By this time, too, Francis was the only one of his siblings not to have married—and married well.
But Francis continued to acquire land and gradually prospered, with help from his brother Gabriel, who seemed to have the magic touch when it came to making money. (Gabriel would acquire 140 slaves and die with an estate worth 78,000 pounds.) By 1773 Francis was able to purchase a Santee River plantation of his own, called Pond Bluff, a relatively small, two-hundred-acre tract farther upriver in St. John’s Parish. Now at the bottom of Lake Marion, it was located on the west bank of the Santee, about four miles east of present-day Eutawville and not far from Thomas Sumter’s plantation. Marion’s plantation manager was the man June, one of the slaves given to him at birth by his uncle Francis and the father of Francis’s childhood slave companion and later manservant, Buddy.
Probably around 1773 as well Francis Marion felt sufficiently propertied that he made out a will. A curious document, it liberates and makes generous provision for certain favorite slaves—but not others—and leaves property to the children of his brother Gabriel, including one born out of wedlock, but not to any of his other nieces or nephews. Nonetheless it provides one of the best insights into Marion’s character and is one of the few significant nonmilitary writings of his to be found. With original spellings and capitalizations maintained, the signed but undated will provides:
1st. I order all my Lawfull Debts paid out of the profits arising from my plantation.
2nd. I order my Negroes to be kept and not sold or disposed of till my Godson Robert Marion [a son of Gabriel] comes of the age of twenty-one years. . . . I give and bequeath to my niece Charlotte Marion [daughter of Gabriel] one negroe wench named Venus and her child Rachel and their increase, to her and her Hairs for ever.
2nd. I Enfrenchise and make free my faithfull Negroe man Named June, and my good old nurse Willoughby, I also make free the mustee Girl Peggy (the daughter of Phebey) these three slaves I declare are free from all bondage and slavery whatever.
3d. I give to my Enfrenchised slave June twenty pounds [sterling] per annum as long as he lives.
4th. I give and Bequeath to my Enfrenchised slave Willoughby one suit cloaths and twenty pounds per annum as long as she lives.
5th. I give and Bequeath to my Enfrenchised slave Peggy (the Daughter of Phebey) suitable cloathing, that is to say one Winters suite and one Summers suite of Cloathing Each to consist of one Gown, one petticoat and a shift, this Donation to be annuelly till she comes to the age of fifteen years—and I order that she shall be learned to Read and Wright to be paid out of my Estate, and that
she shall have a living on my Plantation till she arrives at the age of fifteen.
6th. I give and Bequeath to my Godson William Marion [the “natural son” of Gabriel] my Plantation on Santee, one Negro boy named tobey, and two thousand pounds currency, when he comes to the age of twenty-one years, after which period I give it to him and his hairs forever.
I also order and tis my will he should have Cloathing and Living, and be Educated, at charge of my Estate till he arrives to the age of twenty one years.
7th. I give and Bequeath to my Nephew Gabriel Marion my English horse.
Thus, the will frees the African American slave June but not his wife, Chloe, nor their son, Buddy. Buddy’s sister, Phoebe, also remains a slave, but her daughter Peggy, the “mustee,” is made free. The endowment for her education was in fact contrary to South Carolina law at the time, which made it a crime to teach slaves to write.
Why Marion made bequests to the children of Gabriel but not to those of any other siblings is unknown. Francis probably felt indebted to Gabriel, who lived nearby, for the financial help he had given him over the years. Another mystery is why Francis left the bulk of his estate to William Marion, the illegitimate son of Gabriel. In his own will Gabriel made no provision for and did not even acknowledge William, whose birth mother was another member of the Marion family. Yet Francis Marion favored William as his godson.
As master of Pond Bluff, life had become good for Francis Marion. Being a Lowcountry planter, he was mercifully uninvolved in the backcountry quarrels among outlaws, Regulators, and Moderators. He had served ably in the Cherokee War, and the Native American threat to South Carolinians had abated. Other masters may have feared slave uprisings, but Marion’s relations with his twenty slaves, from all that can be gathered, were stable. (A British newspaper’s claim in 2000 that he was guilty of “regularly raping his female slaves” is totally fabricated.) He lacked a wife, but he was close to and derived satisfaction from his extended family, and given his improving financial lot, he might have looked forward to marrying at some point.