The Swamp Fox Page 5
Although a comfortable man as he passed his fortieth year, Francis Marion was also a faceless man, someone destined to appear as a mere line entry in some genealogy compiled centuries later—that is, unless something happened to pluck him from obscurity.
On the morning of April 19, 1775, British redcoats fired upon a group of outnumbered patriot militia at Lexington Commons in Massachusetts. Later that day the Minute Men responded by inflicting major damage on the British at Concord’s North Bridge. Emerson would describe it as the “shot heard round the world.” For Francis Marion, his comfortable days were over.
a Light infantry were agile, highly mobile soldiers used to skirmish with or harass the enemy and provide a screen ahead of the main army.
4
Manning the Ramparts
It was not inevitable that Francis Marion would become a patriot. He was conciliatory, not radical, by nature; he did not hate the English, who had provided asylum to his ancestors, granted land to his grandfather, and fought alongside him against the Cherokees; and he had long attended the Anglican Church. Unlike the Scotch-Irish of the Williamsburg district in the Pee Dee region, the Huguenots of the Santee did not universally align themselves with the Whigs; members of prominent French families who were neighbors or relatives of the Marions sided with and even fought for the Tories during the Revolution. And although the Marions, like their Huguenot neighbors, were generally well-to-do, slaveholding plantation owners, they were not part of the Charleston aristocracy from which the most rabid revolutionary faction of South Carolinians emerged.
Why, then, did Francis Marion so passionately take up the cause of independence? The simplest and best explanation is that he was influenced by his extended family. His older brothers had become respected members of their communities and served variously as church wardens, justices of the peace, and military officers. In December 1774, when the voters of St. John’s Parish elected delegates to South Carolina’s First Provincial Congress, they chose Job and Francis Marion to represent them. At the first session of the new congress, which convened in Charleston on January 11, 1775, Job and Francis were joined by their brother Gabriel, elected as a delegate from St. Stephens Parish.
The wealthy Allstons of Georgetown, heavily connected by intermarriage to the Marions, were staunch patriots; several of the Allston men would later serve in Marion’s Brigade. So, too, would three of Francis’s nephews—Gabriel Marion, the son of brother Gabriel, and Thomas and Edward Mitchell, sons of Francis’s sister by her second husband. Isaac Marion, Francis’s oldest brother, who married an Allston, was a member of the Committee of Correspondence and helped relay the news of Lexington and Concord by courier from his home on the North Carolina border down to Georgetown and Charleston.
In short the Marions were true believers, and it was natural that Francis Marion became one himself. Logically, as propertied slaveholders, they would have preferred maintaining the conservative status quo. And as growers of rice and indigo, they profited greatly by trade with Britain; it was not in their economic interest to sever that tie. But as self-made men in a new land, they placed a higher value on self-rule. They may have discarded their old French customs, but the Huguenots’ historical antipathy toward unchecked monarchy lingered in their bosoms.
Thus, when Parliament, in the years following the French and Indian War, began taxing the colonies to replenish Britain’s coffers and switched from a laissez-faire policy to one of heightened supervision and control, the Lowcountry “Rice Kings,” the Marions included, rebelled. They had come to regard British rule as a form of tyranny. They did not appreciate, of course, the inherent contradiction pointed out by England’s Dr. Johnson when he rhetorically asked, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” But that was the economic and social milieu in which the Marions lived.a
At its initial meeting in January 1775, which began in a Charleston tavern, South Carolina’s Provincial Congress endorsed the Continental Association, a pledge to ban the import from and export to Britain of most goods. The Charleston assembly was largely made up of socially and politically connected Lowcountry citizens, such as the Marions and Allstons, and read like a who’s who of men who would play prominent roles in the Revolution: Henry Laurens, John Rutledge, Christopher Gadsden, Thomas Sumter, Andrew Williamson, and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, among others. They voted to create committees to provide for the common safety and issued a statement that South Carolinians should be “diligently attentive in learning the use of arms.”
It was not long before South Carolina took up those arms. On April 21, 1775, just two days after Lexington and before news of that battle could have reached them, Charleston rebels raided armories and British powder magazines to seize all the guns and ammunition they could. It was the first overt act of war in South Carolina. Within two weeks rumors spread that the British planned to incite Indians and slaves to rise up against the colonists, further inflaming passions. (The rumors were overblown, not that the idea hadn’t occurred to the British: James Grant, Marion’s commander in the 1761 Cherokee campaign, believed that “a few scalps taken by Indians” would do wonders in scaring off the rebels.)
Hastily the Provincial Congress called a second session, and the delegates reconvened in Charleston on June 1. The South Carolinians voted to raise three provincial army regiments—two infantry and one cavalry—of five hundred men each. They created a Council of Safety with supreme power over the defense of the province. Any citizen who refused to sign a pledge of loyalty was deemed an enemy of the state. Some of the unfortunate nonsigners ended up being stripped naked, tarred and feathered, or worse. Thomas Jeremiah, a free black man who had amassed considerable wealth as a harbor pilot, was hanged and then burned on flimsy allegations that he was planning to lead a slave revolt once the Crown’s forces reached South Carolina.
Marion was not a speech maker, and there is nothing to indicate he took any active part in the Provincial Congress proceedings or other acts of rambunctiousness. But he was eager to serve in some military capacity. When the Provincial Congress took ballots for militia captains on June 12, Marion tied for third out of twenty, with 135 votes, behind only the 140 received by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, a future US presidential candidate, and Barnard Elliot, a former member of the royal governor’s council. The vote was an indication of how highly Marion was regarded even at that point. He was placed in the 2nd Regiment and, based on the prior vote, ranked second captain in that unit (Peter Horry was fifth captain). Marion’s mentor, William Moultrie, was made colonel of the 2nd Regiment, with Isaac Motte as lieutenant colonel. Moultrie ordered his officers to provide themselves with blue cloth coats lined and cuffed in scarlet, with white buttons, waistcoats, and breeches; their black upturned caps would be plumed with a silver crescent insignia sewn in front. In time it would become the uniform of the 2nd Regiment.
Moultrie then directed his junior officers to go into the countryside on a recruiting mission, and Marion came back with sixty men from the Santee and Pee Dee River regions. He trained and disciplined them, seeing to it that they “keep themselves clean decent with their hair combed and dressed in a soldier-like manner.” By September he had his men drilled and all dressed up, just needing a place to go.
His first mission was to capture British-held Fort Johnson, located at the east end of James Island at the entrance to Charleston’s harbor. The Council of Safety suspected that the recently arrived—and decidedly unwelcome—British royal governor, William Campbell, was planning to reinforce the fort, encourage resistance by backcountry loyalists, or, worst of all, foment Indian or slave uprisings against the colonists. Fort Johnson was the principal fortification guarding the city’s harbor, and the council ordered Moultrie to seize it. And so on September 14 a force of 150 men—50 under Marion’s command and 50 each under Pinckney and Elliot—sailed at night from Gadsden’s Wharf in downtown Charleston. They anchored a mile from James Island and prepared to storm the fort.
Fearing for his life, Campbell left his house in Charleston and took refuge in a floating office on the Tamar, where he formally dissolved the moribund Royal Assembly. Never again would South Carolina be governed by a British civil administrator.
In November, Moultrie chose Marion, by now the ranking captain of the 2nd Regiment, for another important mission. Marion was ordered with about ninety men to defend an arsenal at Dorchester, a village twenty miles outside Charleston where the Tories were thought to be planning an attack. But the rumored Tory action failed to materialize, and within a month half of the troops left due to boredom or sickness. Called back to Charleston, Marion thanked the officers who had served under him, “except Capt. Wigfall,” an indication that some friction marked the Dorchester tour of duty. But Marion was right to question his subordinate’s commitment to the cause: a secret loyalist sympathizer, John Wigfall would later switch sides to the Tories and take the field against Marion.
Marion was recalled to help guard Charleston because so many Whig soldiers were away on an expedition to put down a Tory uprising in the backcountry. In November, while Marion was at Dorchester, the Revolution’s first land battle south of New England took place at the trading post of Ninety-Six in the northwestern part of the state, where about nineteen hundred Tories besieged a fort under the command of patriot major Andrew Williamson. Each side had one man killed—the first bloodshed of the war in South Carolina. A siege-ending truce did not hold, and an enraged Council of Safety sent a force of three thousand—which later swelled to nearly five thousand—to go after the Tories. Just before Christmas, in the decisive battle of what would become known as the Snow Campaign due to a thirty-inch snowfall, Colonel Richard Richardson routed the Tories at Great Cane Break near the North Carolina border. The main loyalist leaders were either captured and taken prisoner to Charleston or escaped to Indian Territory. The battle effectively ended Tory resistance in the backcountry and placed the Whigs in control of the province for the next four years.
Back in Charleston, Marion had to be champing at the bit. The war in South Carolina was heating up, and he had yet to witness a single shot fired. Future partisan leaders Andrew Pickens, who had fought the Cherokees with Marion, and Marion’s neighbor, Thomas Sumter, had each seen action in the Snow Campaign against backcountry loyalists, and ironically, unlike Marion, neither of them was a native South Carolinian (Pickens was born in Pennsylvania, Sumter in Virginia). But Marion’s new assignments in Charleston were no more fulfilling: repairing Fort Johnson’s walls and remounting its guns, then building a battery and fortifications across the way at Haddrell’s Point. When the 2nd Regiment was ordered on March 1 to construct a fort on Sullivan’s Island at the southeast entrance to the harbor, it sounded like more of the same. Except this time a sense of urgency and excitement was present: the British were coming to South Carolina.
BY THE SUMMER of 1776 William Campbell had not gotten over the humiliation of being driven from his office as South Carolina’s royal governor a year earlier. Ever since, he and North Carolina’s ex-royal governor, who likewise had been deposed, had been lobbying Parliament to support an assault on their respective provinces. Commander William Howe was planning major operations against New York for that summer, but in the meantime he agreed to support a “mini” southern strategy less ambitious than the one that would be undertaken four years later. Henry Clinton and his second in command, Lord Cornwallis, together with naval squadron commander Commodore Sir Peter Parker, were to establish a temporary base of operations in the South from which loyalists could operate.
After forgoing their original objective of Cape Fear, North Carolina, due to a strong Whig presence there, the British set their sights on Sullivan’s Island, at the mouth of Charleston Harbor. Clinton intended only to take the island as a base, with no plans to assault the city itself. But Charleston’s residents did not know that. When word of the approach of fifty enemy warships and a landing force of three thousand troops reached the town, civilians began fleeing to the countryside. Men wrote letters to their wives asking them to kiss their young children good-bye for them. Charlestonians braced for a defense as best they could, leveling stores and warehouses along the waterfront to give their cannon a clear shot at hostile vessels. Slaves were directed to strip lead ornaments from buildings for melting down into bullets and were stationed around the town to fight anticipated fires.
John Rutledge, the recently elected chief executive and commander in chief under a new state constitution adopted in March, summoned the militia to the defense of the town. Soon they came flocking in. The defenders’ morale was boosted with the arrival from the north of hundreds of Continentals under Major General Charles Lee, the first commander of the Southern Department, bringing the total patriot forces to more than six thousand. Lee assumed overall responsibility for the safety of Charleston, while Colonel Moultrie and the 2nd Regiment, including Major Francis Marion (recently promoted from captain), were in charge of defending Sullivan’s Island.
By early June, with the British armada in sight off the entrance to Charleston Harbor, Fort Sullivan was only about half-finished. (In part this was because the white soldiers objected to working alongside slaves.) The walls were being constructed of palmetto logs and sand—not based on engineering advice but because no stone or other masonry was available and those were the only materials that could be gathered. Of the fort’s four sides only the two facing the sea were built up; the ones in back, guarding land, were exposed to attack.
When Lee, an experienced and brusque former British army officer, inspected the stronghold, he became convinced the enemy would destroy it in short order. Declaring it a “slaughter pen” for the men inside, he urged it be abandoned. He also sized up Moultrie as too easy of a commander to put up much of a fight. But Moultrie insisted it could be held, and Rutledge backed him up. “General Lee . . . wishes you to evacuate the fort,” Rutledge wrote to Moultrie. “You will not, without [an] order from me; I would sooner cut off my hand than write one.” Clinton issued an ultimatum calling for the rebels to surrender, but Rutledge promptly rejected it, leaving the fate of Charleston to Moultrie and his garrison of four hundred, including Marion, who were manning the ramparts.
The genial, forty-five-year-old Moultrie may have been an easygoing leader, but his St. John’s Berkeley plantation neighbor, Francis Marion, was not. Never one to tolerate any nonsense, Marion had kept the enlistees busy toiling on the fort, whether they liked working with slaves or not. He ordered that no one sell beer or liquor without specific permission. He did not hesitate to court-martial disobeyers. He conducted surprise alarms in the middle of the night to keep the soldiers on their toes. But Marion showed solicitude for his men: per his order, no oak trees, which provided them shelter from the intense summer sun, were to be cut down.
On June 28, 1776, the British moved several of their frigates into the harbor and attacked the fort. It was no contest—but not in the way anyone could have predicted. Palmetto logs turned out to be the perfect material for the fort’s walls, for the British cannonballs were absorbed into the spongy logs and did little damage. The only real strike the warships scored was to shred the fort’s blue Moultrie flag—the same one hoisted above Fort Johnson a few months earlier. But an intrepid sergeant n
amed William Jasper grabbed it, attached it to an improvised shaft, and waved it above to resounding cheers from his comrades. They were doubly inspired by the grog (rum and water) Moultrie served to them in buckets, which he drank from along with them, to alleviate the summer heat.
By contrast, nothing went right for the invaders. In their effort to get close to the fort, two of Peter Parker’s warships ran into each other and then, along with another, became stuck in shallow water, where the defenders’ eighteen-pounders blasted them with surprising accuracy.b One of the grounded British ships was abandoned and set on fire by her crew before blowing up.
Meanwhile an infantry force of twenty-two hundred under Clinton and Cornwallis ended up watching the action as spectators. They had camped on Long Island (now Isle of Palms), separated from the northeastern tip of Sullivan’s Island only by a narrow marshy inlet, known as the Breach. In what was to be a land attack coordinated with Parker’s naval assault, the infantry planned to wade across the inlet at low tide and swoop down upon the open backside of the fort. But instead of the eighteen-inch depth that intelligence reports had indicated, the Breach was actually seven feet deep and unfordable. Clinton’s force then tried an amphibious landing in boats, but riflemen and artillery rushed to the scene and barraged their small flotilla, and the British were repelled with heavy losses. Among those driven back was a young volunteer officer and law school dropout named Banastre Tarleton, then on his first mission in America.