*Includes pictures
*Includes accounts of Marion's life and career
*Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading
"As for this damned old fox, the Devil himself could not catch him." - Colonel Banastre Tarleton
"Well, now, this is exactly my case. I am in love; and my sweetheart is Liberty. Be that heavenly nymph my companion, and these wilds and Woods shall have charms beyond London and Paris in slavery. To have no proud monarch driving over me with his gilt coaches; nor his host of excise-men and tax-gatherers insulting and robbing me; but to be my own master, my own prince and sovereign, gloriously preserving my national dignity, and pursuing my true happiness; planting my vineyards, and eating their luscious fruits; and sowing my fields, and reaping the golden grain: and seeing millions of brothers all around me, equally free and happy as myself. 'This, sir, is What I long for." - A quote attributed to Francis Marion
In 2000, The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson, captured the nation's attention with the highly dramatized story of an American patriot fighting the British in South Carolina during the American Revolution. As viewers learned that Gibson's character was loosely based on General Francis Marion, nicknamed the "Swamp Fox" by his enemies, people took a new interest in this often forgotten soldier.
Those who had seen the movie may have envisioned Marion as a family man, a widower with enlightened, 21st century views, but those who dug deeper would find a man that Hugh Rankin, one of Marion's biographers, described as "something like a sandwich-a highly spiced center between two slabs of rather dry bread." In fact, Marion was a bachelor most of his life, and he likely only married so that he might have someone to care for him in his old age. Amy Crawford, writing in Smithsonian Magazine, reminded her readers, "Most heroes of the Revolution were not the saints that biographers like Parson Weems would have them be, and Francis Marion was a man of his times: he owned slaves, and he fought in a brutal campaign against the Cherokee Indians. While not noble by today's standards, Marion's experience in the French and Indian War prepared him for more admirable service. The Cherokee used the landscape to their advantage, Marion found; they concealed themselves in the Carolina backwoods and mounted devastating ambushes. Two decades later, Marion would apply these tactics against the British."
After fight