The ‘Swamp Fox’ Who Put the British Lion on the Run and Changed War for a Century
George Caldwell /
A quarter of a millennium ago, a “Swamp Fox” and his rag-tag group of compatriots put the lion of the British Empire on the run—and changed how wars were fought on the North American continent for a century.
This Swamp Fox was Francis Marion. Marion was born in Berkeley County, South Carolina, during the 1730s. The South Carolinian, like many in the area, was the descendant of Huguenots—French Protestants forced out of their country after they lost the right to practice their religion.
Although Marion’s war-fighting experience predated the American Revolution—he was a veteran of the French and Indian War—Marion earned his nickname and his notoriety for his service in the American Revolution.
After the fall of Charleston to the British in May of 1780, Marion would become a principal leader of the resistance in South Carolina. The disastrous surrender essentially left the colony in the hands of the British.
In the name of reclaiming South Carolina for the Americans, Marion would pioneer a style of guerrilla warfare
He galvanized and organized groups of rag-tag part-time soldiers to destroy British boats and disrupt British supply lines.
Marion’s war against British and loyalist forces would play a major role in keeping the revolution alive in South Carolina.
However, his irregular militia was not the most dependable fighting force.
Gen. Nathanael Greene wrote in a letter that Marion and fellow South Carolinian Thomas Sumter were “brave and good officers, but the people with them just come and go as they please.”
Greene, however, was tasked with reinforcing the mission to reclaim South Carolina. His arrival in late 1780 turned the tide of the war in the Americans’ favor.
Marion’s forces fought alongside Henry Lee III, better known as “Light Horse Harry,” the father of future Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. In April and May of 1781, the Swamp Fox’s militia and the Virginian patrician’s Continental Army troops carried out successful sieges on Fort Watson and Fort Motte, which hastened the withdrawal of the British from the state.
At Watson, Marion’s men constructed a tower, from which they fired rifles into the fort, forcing its surrender.
After the siege, Greene thanked the war-worn swamp fox for his years of service against all odds.
“History affords no instance wherein an officer has kept possession of a country under so many disadvantages as you have; surrounded on every side with a superior force; hunted from every quarter with veteran troops, you have found means to elude all their attempts, and to keep alive the expiring hopes of an oppressed Militia, when all succour seems to be cut off,” the April 1781 letter read.
At Fort Motte, a plantation mansion repurposed as a British fortress, Lee and Marion made use of flaming arrows to set the fort ablaze and force the British out. Lee did get permission from the owner, Rebecca Motte, to burn down the house. Motte not only assented, but, according to Lee’s memoirs, personally supplied her own bow and arrows imported from India to set on fire and burn down the house.
In the final major battle of the Carolinas theater, Marion fought in September of 1781 alongside Lee at the Battel of Eutaw Spring, which occurred during the lead-up to America’s decisive victory in Yorktown, Virginia.
With American independence secure, Marion returned to his plantation only to find it destroyed. Though he did not sign the Declaration of Independence, to that cause he too had pledged his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor. He died in 1795.
According to the writings of his comrade William James, an epitaph placed above Marion’s gravestone read, “This tribute of veneration and gratitude is erected in commemoration of the noble and disinterested virtues of the citizen; and the gallant exploits of the soldier; Who lived without fear, and died without reproach.”
When a different question of independence plunged America into a war that pitted brother against brother, both the Union and Confederacy found inspiration in Marion’s successes during the revolution.
The inspiration drawn from the South Carolinian was especially felt in the south.
Marion was a strong influence on John Mosby, the “gray ghost” of the Confederacy who waged a similar style of warfare to great effect against Union troops in Northern Virginia, assisting the strategy of Light Horse Harry Lee’s son Robert E. Lee.
Mosby’s praise of Marion shows the swamp fox’s importance in the development of a style of guerrilla warfare that would continue into the Civil War.
“I remember how I shouted when I read aloud in the nursery of the way the great partisan hid in the swamp and outwitted the British,” Mosby writes in his memoirs of reading a biography of Marion as a child. “I did not then expect that the time would ever come when I would … take part in adventures that have been compared with Marion’s.”