The Swamp Fox

by John Oller

  As Marion learned, Ganey was heading south toward him with a force of about 250, including mounted and foot soldiers. Marion had with him just 53 men, all mounted, “which is all I could get,” he later wrote. Outnumbered five to one, Marion decided to strike first. According to one account Marion initially was hesitant to attack, but several brothers persuaded him to try to rescue their father, who had been robbed and taken prisoner by Ganey’s Tories. But sentimental as it may be to imagine Marion, against all odds, risking his brigade for the sake of one elderly man, it would have been out of character for him. If Marion decided to make a preemptive strike against a superior force, it was because he had concluded he had some military advantage, like the element of surprise, working in his favor.

  In any event, at dawn on September 4 Marion set out on horseback from his camp on the east (north) side of the Pee Dee at Port’s Ferry. As was becoming his custom, to prevent security leaks Marion told no one of his plans. Deserters and other volunteers came and went so frequently that one never knew for certain whose side they were on. In addition, loyalist and patriot militia were hard to tell apart because they both wore homespun. So that they might recognize each other in battle, Marion had his men place white feathers in their hats.

  They headed north, along current South Carolina Highway 41, in search of the Tory militia. Later that morning they came upon an advance foraging party of forty-five of Ganey’s horsemen, who were surprised to find their southward route impeded. As the frightened body of Tories broke, Marion’s men killed or wounded all but fifteen of them, who escaped into the swamps.

  Thus emboldened, Marion’s men continued north on horseback for about three miles, where they quickly ran into the main body of Tory infantry in full march toward them near the Blue Savannah. The site was a swampy land indentation named for the bluish color of water that filled it and the bluish-gray mud that stuck to wagon wheels crossing it.b Accounts of the battle differ markedly. According to William Dobein James, whose father was there and who may have been there himself, Marion created a trap. Because he faced superior numbers and the Tories stood resolute in their ranks, he feigned retreat and led them into an ambush he had laid a ways back from the savannah. Marion’s own report on the battle to Gates, however, does not mention any ambush but says he “directly attacked” the main body of Tories and “put them to flight.” Under both versions, after the Tories got off a single volley that did little damage, they fled into a swamp just east of the road. From the swamp’s edge Marion’s men shouted curses and insults at their cowering foes, daring them to come out and fight. With a rare note of scorn, Marion would describe the gooey morass as “impassable . . . to all but Tories.”

  It was another stunning victory. That day, at a cost of four wounded and two dead horses, Marion had killed or wounded thirty Tories and scattered the rest. Ganey and Barefield trundled off to Georgetown. With their militia broken up, many of their men went back home, ending—for the time being—loyalist strength in the area east of the Pee Dee.

  The next day Marion marched back to his camp at Britton’s Neck, where sixty new volunteers from Colonel Hugh Giles’s militia joined him, doubling the size of his yet small force. Two weeks earlier his name was unknown to the British, and now suddenly he was capable of operating behind Cornwallis’s lines and harassing his right (eastern) flank. It was a vexation his Lordship needed to eliminate before he could launch his planned invasion of North Carolina. The success of Marion’s hit-and-run tactics so infuriated the British high command that at least half a dozen death squads, beginning with Wemyss, were dispatched in sequence to go after him.

  While at Britton’s Neck, Marion threw up a small earthen fort on the east bank of the Pee Dee to guard the crossing at Port’s Ferry. He managed to fortify it with two old iron artillery pieces the militia had brought him, which he thought would intimidate any Tories who tried to reassemble and threaten him. Then on September 7 he learned that a contingent of British regulars and Tories, said to number 150, were in the Williamsburg area burning the homes of men who had joined his brigade. He dispatched Major James to reconnoiter them.

  Anxious for another chance to confront the enemy, Marion crossed the Pee Dee and Lynches Creek to the southwest with a hundred men, leaving fifty behind to protect his camp. He camped at Indiantown which, along with neighboring Kingstree, was perhaps the most solidly Whig area in all of South Carolina. At Indiantown he was met by Major James, who brought in a captured Tory straggler. From this prisoner Marion learned that four hundred British redcoats and Tories under Wemyss were gathering that night in Kingstree, twenty miles west, with plans to eradicate Marion’s resistance fighters.

  Marion also had intelligence that two hundred more redcoats had arrived in Georgetown, a couple days’ march away on the coast. With 600 enemy soldiers, the majority of them experienced redcoats, able to concentrate against his 150, he thought it prudent to fall back to his camp at Britton’s Neck. But first he aired the issue with his officers, who dismounted and retired to consult. During a long and animated conference the rank-and-file sat on their horses and anxiously awaited the verdict. When the order was given to retreat back across Lynches Creek an audible groan could be heard along the line—the men knew their homes in Williamsburg were being left to the mercy of the pillaging enemy. Recognizing their disappointment, upon the brigade’s retreat Marion left behind a number of men, including Major John James, to gather intelligence in the Williamsburg area and do what they could to comfort the distressed.

  Back at camp on September 8 Marion received more distressing news: he was in danger of being surrounded on three sides. Wemyss had moved from Kingstree through Indiantown, crossed Lynches Creek at Witherspoon’s Ferry, and was only a few miles away, coming up on him from the west. Tory militia out of the garrison at Georgetown, led by Colonels John Coming Ball and John Wigfall, had crossed the Black River to attack him from the south. And Ganey’s Tories, who had just been dispersed, were collecting to the east of him. He had only one escape route, directly to the north, along the same road, unblocked for the time being, where he had defeated Ganey and Barefield. By now, too, he had released most of his men to go check on their families and homes. And so, at sunset on September 8 he took off with his remaining sixty men and the two field pieces and began retreating to North Carolina.

  Marching day and night, he arrived at Ami’s Mill on Drowning Creek near the North Carolina state line. Along the way he dumped the two field pieces into a swamp, finding that they impeded his progress. By mid-September he was camped at the Great White Marsh in eastern North Carolina, another thirty miles past the border. He would remain there, he wrote Gates on September 15, “until I hear from you or I have an oppertunity of doing something.”

  Wemyss, whose men had been suffering from malaria, pursued Marion for a day or two but broke off the chase to continue his other assignment from Cornwallis—to destroy rebel property. Upon his arrival in Indiantown around September 7 Wemyss burned the Presbyterian church there, calling it a “sedition shop.” (Ironically, Wemyss was himself a Presbyterian.) Over the next few days he put the torch to several more homes, including that of Major James, allegedly because James’s wife refused to provide information as to her husband’s whereabouts.c He also hanged Adam Cusack, a local ferryman, in front of his wife and children as they pleaded for his life. According to American accounts, Cusack was executed either for refusing to ferry Wemyss’s officers across a creek or because he fired a shot across the creek at a slave of Tory militia captain John Brockinton. When Dr. James Wilson tried to intercede on Cusack’s behalf, Wemyss burned his house too.

  Weems described Wemyss as “by birth, a Scotsman, but in principle and practice a Mohawk.” In reality he was to emulate the malevolent Cherokee campaign of British colonel James Grant. On his march north from Kingstree to the town of Cheraw, Wemyss cut a path of destruction seventy miles long and five miles wide on both sides of the Pee Dee River, burning fifty houses and plantations along the w
ay. He claimed that these “mostly” belonged to people who had broken their paroles or oaths of allegiance and were now in arms against the British. (He offered no justification for burning the others.) Wemyss also ordered his men to destroy blacksmith shops, looms, and mills and to shoot or bayonet any milk cows and sheep not taken by the British for themselves. The residents thus lost not only their shelter but also their means of livelihood, food, and clothing. Wemyss’s scorched-earth policy would have echoes in Sherman’s famous march through the South in the Civil War.

  In a letter to Cornwallis on September 20 the thirty-two-year-old Wemyss wrote that he had done everything in his power to nab Marion and Colonel Hugh Giles but lamented that “I never could come up with them.” Nonetheless he boasted that he had broken up their band and forced their retreat into North Carolina. The rest of his report was, in Cornwallis’s view, “not so agreeable.” Wemyss had discovered that every inhabitant in that part of the country was deeply caught up in the rebel spirit, whereas the Tories were dispirited and apathetic. “It is impossible for me to give your Lordship an idea of the disaffection of this country,” Wemyss wrote, ignoring that his house burnings had only fueled anti-British sentiment. Ten days later he repeated to Cornwallis his opinion that the Tory militia, without support from the main British army, were too weak to hold the countryside. In part, he said, they were intimidated by men like Marion and Giles, whom he accused, without a trace of irony, of “burning houses and distressing the well affected in a most severe manner.”

  Some men under Marion had indeed taken to house burning in retaliation for Wemyss’s demolition policy. One of the homes Wemyss burned was that of Moses Murphy, a relation of Maurice Murphy, then a captain in Marion’s brigade. Maurice Murphy needed little impetus to seek revenge; he was a patriot of “ungovernable passion, which was often inflamed by strong drink.” He was the man who had stolen Micajah Ganey’s horses, causing Ganey to become a Tory. Murphy had also shot to death his own cousin for chastising him for his harsh whipping of a Tory prisoner.

  Realizing he would likely be blamed for Murphy’s ravages, Marion sought to distance himself from his rogue officer. “I am sorry to acquaint you that Capt. Murphy’s party have burnt a great number of houses on Little Peedee, and intend to go on in that abominable work—which I am apprehensive may be laid to me,” Marion wrote to Gates. “But I assure you,” he added, “there is not one house burnt by my orders, or by any of my people. It is what I detest to distress poor women and children.”

  Not long after, Marion wrote apologetically to Gates to say that Murphy was still burning houses and that another of Marion’s top men, Lieutenant Colonel John Ervin, had adopted the practice as well. A staunch Presbyterian, Ervin may have been retaliating for Wemyss’s torching of churches. But Marion would have none of it. Depredations of that sort, he told Gates, “will be the greatest hurt to our interest.”

  Miffed when Marion would not permit him to burn any more houses, Ervin left the brigade. Suitably chastised, he would return within a few months and serve capably for the rest of the war without further blemish. Murphy was allowed to stay, presumably with a stern warning by Marion, as there were no more reports of house burnings by him. Later promoted to militia major and then to colonel in Marion’s brigade, he performed a valuable function by frequently engaging Ganey and Barefield in the Little Pee Dee region, keeping them occupied while Marion was attending to more urgent matters.

  That two of Marion’s officers committed what, today, would be considered war crimes goes to show that few commanders could claim a spotless record for their soldiers’ atrocious conduct during South Carolina’s civil war. No officer could completely control his men in that setting; the question is how hard one tried. Marion disclosed his men’s transgressions to his superior, Horatio Gates, when it would have been easy to stay quiet about them. Lacking any legal authority over his volunteers, he nonetheless was anguished by their behavior, did what he could to change it, and for the most part succeeded.

  By contrast, Cornwallis said not a discouraging word when Wemyss boasted of having laid waste to fifty houses and plantations; indeed, Wemyss had acted completely in accordance with Cornwallis’s wishes. Cornwallis defended any brutalities committed on his watch as justified retaliation for rebel cruelties or punishment of parole breakers. “I have always endeavored to soften the horrors of war,” his Lordship insisted just a few months after ordering the “total demolition” of private plantations and the immediate hanging of rebels formerly in British arms.

  Back at Great White Marsh, camp life had turned grim for Marion’s men. Food was scarce, mosquitoes prevalent, the mood downcast. Among those present was young William Dobein James, whose father and brother were still in Williamsburg Township assessing the situation there. The fifteen-year-old James found himself invited to dine with Colonel Marion and sat down to a spread set before them by Marion’s manservant, partly on a pine log and partly on the ground. It consisted of lean beef, without salt, and sweet potatoes. James asked permission to send for a pot of boiled hominy (dried corn soaked in lye and wood ash), which had salt in it and provided them “a most acceptable repast.” Marion said little beyond praising James’s father, which gratified the boy. They had nothing to drink but bad water, and as James recalled, “all the company appeared to be rather grave.”

  Gravity—seriousness of purpose—was what gave Marion the intangible, almost mystical power he held over his men. Although he lacked physical presence or a magnetic personality, they regarded him with awe. Part of their reverence was due to his success, which naturally bred respect. But it was his steady, equable character that most caused them to follow where he led. “He had no uproarious humor,” wrote one man who spoke with surviving members of Marion’s Brigade. “At most a quiet smile lighted up his features.” Although capable of sarcasm and sharp retorts and even playfulness among friends and military intimates, his demeanor was quiet and subdued. “He was singularly considerate of the sensibilities of others, and had his temper under rare control,” the same chronicler wrote. “He yielded to few excitements, was seldom elevated by successes to imprudence—as seldom depressed by disappointments to despondency.”

  Conditions at White Marsh were nonetheless testing Marion’s equanimity. Men started coming down with malaria from the unusually wet summer and the insects it had bred. Among those felled by the fever were young William James and Peter Horry. The others were starting to complain and become restless. Marion, who may have regretted going there in the first place, was looking for an excuse to return to South Carolina. He soon got one.

  a The High Hills of Santee is a narrow range of sand hills north of the Santee and running east along the Wateree, where the current town of Stateburg sits. It was a haven for escaping the insufferable heat and malaria of the Lowcountry during the summer.

  b The Blue Savannah was one of many inland South Carolina “bays”—swampy, sandy-rimmed depressions, elliptical or oval in shape, likely caused by ancient meteors. They are named for the bays (pine shrubs) frequently found in them, not for the water that collects in them.

  c Before burning the house Wemyss supposedly locked Mrs. James and her children in a bedroom for two days, during which they were given no food other than what a sympathetic British officer slipped to them through a window. This particular tale is probably an embellishment.

  8

  “My Little Excursions”

  Not long after young William James’s dinner with Marion, James’s father, the major, arrived back in camp with infuriating news. He confirmed what Marion had suspected: Wemyss had stopped at nothing in pursuing his whirlwind of destruction. It was Major James who brought word that Wemyss had torched the major’s house as well as the Indiantown Presbyterian Church, where James was an elder and many of Marion’s men regularly worshiped. Other churches were either burned or turned into British army depots, and those that were not were closed by their congregations, as the people felt it was unsafe to gather in public
. The men of Williamsburg, aroused as never before, were anxious to take the field again. And so on September 24, after two weeks at Great White Marsh, Marion decided to head back to South Carolina.

  With his sixty men, Marion covered about fifty miles in two days before camping on the east side of the Little Pee Dee River on the afternoon of September 26. The next morning, seeking a suitable river crossing, they were guided through three miles of surrounding swamp by the Jenkins boys, Samuel and Britton, locals who had joined Marion’s band in late August. Those who could swam across the Little Pee Dee; others, like Marion, floated across on their horses. By the night of September 27 they had made it to Port’s Ferry, camping on the east side of the Pee Dee to keep the river between them and the British on the west side. With them now was Captain George Logan, who had stayed behind at Great White Marsh because he was too sick. Having recovered enough to travel, he rode sixty miles to catch up with Marion’s party.

  On September 28 Marion’s men crossed the Pee Dee on flatboats, then rode several miles to Witherspoon’s Ferry on Lynches Creek, arriving around sunset. On the far side of the creek they were met by Captain John James and about ten militiamen and, a little later, Captain Henry Mouzon and some additional volunteers. The arrivals had exciting news: a group of Tories under loyalist colonel John Coming Ball was camped about fifteen miles away at Patrick Dollard’s Red Tavern on the bank of Black Mingo Creek near Sheppard’s Ferry. His men in the mood for a fight, Marion decided they would attack Ball’s unit that same night.

  Marion knew these Tories. They were from St. James and St. Stephens Parishes, the French Santee and English Santee of Marion’s family. John Coming Ball, a local rice planter, was a half-brother of Elias Ball, the Tory whose tip had helped Banastre Tarleton defeat the rebels at Lenud’s Ferry in May. A Whig militiaman who switched sides after Charleston fell, Elias Ball was married to a Gaillard, whose sister married Marion’s brother Job (his second marriage), with Marion serving as best man.