The Swamp Fox: How Francis Marion
Saved the American Revolution. By John Oller. Da Capo. $26.99.
The American Revolution was
not won by any individual, but the search for “big man” heroes is an ongoing
one that started with George Washington, still a prime candidate, and has
continued through the years with focuses on this or that indispensable person
without whom the colonies would have failed to establish the United States. The
whole premise is nonsense, especially when the American Revolution is seen in
the geopolitical terms in which Great Britain largely viewed it (the New World
was in large part a new location for ongoing Old World balance-of-powers
conflicts between the British on the one hand and the French and Spanish on the
other). Still, there are always new candidates for the mantle of “indispensable
man,” the latest of whom has duly emerged in a well-researched biography by
John Oller – a book that shows its academic seriousness by having 250 pages of
narrative and more than 100 of notes, bibliography and index. Oller’s subject
is Francis Marion (c. 1732-1795), a South Carolinian of French Huguenot descent
who joined the fight against the British in 1780, at the age of 48. Marion
weighed 110 pounds, stood five-feet-two-inches tall, and was knock-kneed – not
the physical portrait of a fighter of any repute. He was a plantation owner and,
scarcely surprisingly in his time and place, a slaveholder. More to the point
for the American Revolution, he proved to be a master of what we now deem
guerrilla tactics, disrupting the regular British army in more than two dozen
engagements – which is a better word than “battles,” because Marion was a
master of harassment, of worrying the enemy from its fringes, of avoiding
direct confrontation in favor of attacks that would keep the larger,
far-better-equipped British army of General Charles Cornwallis off balance and
prevent it from marching north from South Carolina to join General Henry
Clinton’s troops in New York and trap Washington’s army between the two forces.
Oller writes something just
short of hagiography where Marion is concerned, although he is uncomfortable
acknowledging the quite ordinary fact of Marion owning slaves – Oller
eventually declares that Marion does not appear to have been a cruel master,
which sounds like damning with faint praise. But this foray into political correctness
and imposition of the values of the 21st century on the 18th
is only a small part of The Swamp Fox.
Most of it is about the facts and fiction surrounding Marion and the difficulty
of separating them. Certainly Marion’s use of guerrilla tactics was notable,
but it was scarcely new: Marion himself said he learned it from the Cherokee
during the French and Indian War, in which Marion served as a lieutenant.
Certainly Marion had more-moderate views of the rapine of warfare than other
combatants did: a strict disciplinarian, he specifically forbade his men to
plunder and commit other punitive acts after victories. In fact, defeated
Tories who swore allegiance to the new nation were given full pardons and
allowed to keep their property. And certainly Marion did have many victories:
almost all his engagements against the British were successful, including one
notable direct battle – an exception to Marion’s usual method of fighting – in
which Marion’s forces ambushed a British column on a bridge near Charleston,
killing 25 soldiers and wounding more than 80 while suffering only one dead and
three wounded themselves.
Few except dedicated
students of American history will realize how serious the war in South Carolina
was in Marion’s time: Oller, whose research is nothing if not meticulous, notes
that of the thousand colonists killed in battles in 1780, 66% died in South
Carolina – and of the 2,000 wounded, 90% were injured there. So Marion’s
contribution surely came at a crucial time for the Revolution. But there were
so many crucial times, so many crucial places – as is only to be expected in a
war that dragged on for six years – that highlighting Marion’s role as the one
that “saved” the Revolution is at the least an overstatement. Still, Oller’s
book is packed with fascinating tidbits for those who cannot get enough of
military histories and/or accounts of the American Revolution. For example,
Marion’s sobriquet, “Swamp Fox,” was given to him by an admirer, but in fact he
kept out of swamps if at all possible, avoiding insects and diseases by
maintaining encampments on high, dry land whenever he could. In truth, it is
arguable whether Oller’s book is rich in detail or overloaded with it – the
descriptive decision will depend on the extent to which a reader is gripped by
Oller’s narrative. And that in turn will depend on the reader’s response to the
rather effusive praise that Oller heaps on Marion and the substantial credit he
gives Marion for derailing a potential death blow to the American Revolution. Marion
has not gone wholly unnoticed in recent times: a Mel Gibson film from 2000, The Patriot, was loosely based on
Marion’s activities, and there was even a Disney TV series based (again
loosely) on Marion (1959-1961). The Swamp
Fox is, however, the first full-scale biography of Marion in more than 40
years, and is intriguing for the way it sheds considerable light on a man whose
name now adorns 29 American cities and towns, 17 counties, a university, a
national forest, and a park on Capitol Hill – more locations, Oller notes, than
have been named for any Revolutionary War figure except George Washington.
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