Intro
It is a kinda picking up pearls of a life scattered across the blogosphere and present it to my family and friends for reading and wonder in awe, bowing head to one and only the Swamp Fox who fought the British colonial oppression in the 18th century AD and inspired generations of Americans through his contribution to the independence movement. The movie Patriot is a tribute to him and other American revolutionaries of South Carolina province who fought a real dirty war in 1780-82 . Here is his life sketch.
A:Facts from History
1.In Brief
Marion, Francis (1732?–1795), an American Revolutionary War army officer. Marion was called “the Swamp Fox” because of his skillful hit-and-run raids as a partisan (guerrilla) leader in the swamps of South Carolina during 1780–82. By capturing several British army posts and harassing the enemy's lines of communication, he did much to drive the British from the state. His exploits were romanticized by Parson Weems, the biographer of George Washington who invented the cherry-tree tale. Towns and counties throughout the United States are named for Marion.
Marion's birthplace was probably in Berkeley County, South Carolina. He inherited a small plantation and served in campaigns against the Cherokees in 1759 and 1761. In 1775, at the opening of the Revolution, he was elected to the South Carolina legislature and was made a captain of state troops. In 1779 he commanded a regiment during an unsuccessful attack on Savannah.
In August, 1780, Marion became a brigadier general of state militia. The invasion of the state by British troops drove him into the lowland swamps and forests. At times Marion had as few as 20 men. The Battle of Eutaw Springs (1781), in which he took part, ended formal warfare in South Carolina, but Marion disarmed at least 500 remaining Loyalists. He disbanded his men in December, 1782.
Due to his irregular methods of warfare, he is considered one of the fathers of modern guerrilla warfare, and is credited in the lineage of the United States Army Rangers. He is known as the Swamp Fox.
2.Early Life
His grandparents were Benjamin and Judith Baluet Marion of French Huguenot origin, and Anthony and Esther Baluet Cordes. His parents Gabriel and Esther had six children: Esther, Isaac, Gabriel, Benjamin, Job and Francis.
The family settled at Winyah, near Georgetown, South Carolina. Probably in 1732, Francis Marion was born on their plantation in Berkeley County, South Carolina. When he was aged five or six, his family moved to a plantation in St. George, a parish on Winyah Bay.Apparently, they wanted to be near the English school in Georgetown. In 1759 he moved to Pond Bluff plantation near Eutaw Springs, in St. John's Parish, Berkeley County, South Carolina
3.Shipwreck Crew
Marion at age 15 went as the sixth crew member of a ship. That ship sank. Two of the crews died on sea due to absence of any food or drinking water. After the shipwreck, Marion decided to stick to land, managing his family's plantation until he joined the South Carolina militia at 25 to fight in the French and Indian War.
4.French and Indian War
Marion began his military career shortly before his 25th birthday. On January 1, 1757, Francis and his brother Job were recruited by Captain John Postell to serve in the French and Indian War and to drive the Cherokee Indians away from the border. In 1761 Marion served as a lieutenant under Captain William Moultrie in acampaign against the Cherokee.
In 1761, after his militia had defeated the area Cherokees, Marion returned to farming. He was successful enough to purchase his own plantation, Pond Bluff, in 1773.
5.American Revolutionary War - Early Service
Turning from military to domestic matters, Marion became a successful planter in St. John’s Parish. He later received a small inheritance and purchased a larger plantation on the Santee River. Increasing prosperity brought him into active participation in public affairs, where he emerged as an advocate for the rights of American colonists in the face of oppressive British policies.
With the outbreak of war in 1775, Francis Marion became increasingly prominent in the Patriot cause.In 1775, Marion was elected to the first South Carolina Provincial Congress, an organization in support of colonial self-determination It is the governing body of the colony following the collapse of royal authority. On June 21, 1775, Marion was commissioned Captain in the 2nd South Carolina Regiment under William Moultrie, with whom he served in June 1776 in the defense of Fort Sullivan (today known as Fort Moultrie), in Charleston harbor He also fought in a number of the early battles in the South, again under Moultrie, in February 1776.
In September 1776 the Continental Congress commissioned Marion as a Lieutenant Colonel.
The Provincial Congress voted to raise three regiments, commissioning Marion a captain in the second. His first assignments involved guarding artillery and building Fort Sullivan, in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. When he saw combat during the Battle of Fort Sullivan in June 1776, Marion acted valiantly. But for much of the next three years, he remained at the fort, occupying the time by trying to discipline his troops, whom he found to be a disorderly, drunken bunch insistent on showing up to roll call barefoot.
In the autumn of 1779 he took part in the siege of Savannah, a failed Franco-American attempt to capture the Georgia city.
In September 1778, Marion was commissioned as the commander of the South Carolina Second State Regiment and in the following year, he fought under Benjamin Lincoln at the second Battle of Savannah.
In early 1780 Greene was placed under Benjamin Lincoln and engaged in drilling militia.
Marion's role in the war changed course after an odd accident in March of 1780. Attending a dinner party at the Charleston home of a fellow officer, Marion found that the host, in accordance with 18th-century custom, had locked all the doors while he toasted the American cause. The toasts went on and on, and Marion, who was not a drinking man, felt trapped. He escaped by jumping out a second story window, but broke his ankle in the fall. Marion left town to recuperate in the country, with the fortunate result that he was not captured when the British took Charleston that May.
6.Fall of Charleston
A British expedition under Henry Clinton moved into South Carolina in the early Spring of 1780 and laid siege to Charleston. Marion was not captured with the rest of the garrison when Charleston fell on May 12, 1780, because he had broken an ankle in an accident and had left the city to recuperate. Clinton took part of the British army that had captured Charleston back to New York but a significant number stayed for operations under Lord Cornwallis in the Carolinas.
7.Guerrilla war - the Swamp Fox
Elusive and crafty, Francis Marion outwitted British troops many times.Marion and his irregulars often defeated larger bodies of British troops by the surprise and rapidity of their movement over swampy terrain. For a daring rescue of Americans surrounded by the British at Parkers Ferry, South Carolina (August 1781), Marion received the thanks of Congress.
Francis Marion responded to the British victory at Camden in August 1780 by leading a series of successful nighttime guerilla-style raids against the British supply and communication lines, and against small concentrations of British or Loyalist soldiers. Frustrated opponents, including Benastre Tarleton, failed to track down the elusive “Swamp Fox” as Marion had become known. In December 1780, he was promoted to brigadier general under Nathanael Greene.
In 1781, Marion participated in the protracted fighting in the Carolinas that culminated at Eutaw Springs in September. The Americans were forced from the field, but British losses compelled them to pull back to Charleston and their war plan deteriorated rapidly in the following weeks.
8.Post War Activities
After the war, Francis Marion served in the South Carolina Senate( 1782-90) and sponsored legislative measures designed to provide fair treatment for the remaining Loyalists. In 1790, he was a delegate to the state constitutional convention and was a supporter of the new federal governing document.
.
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. Marion applied these tactics against the British.
He died on his estate on February 27, 1795 while drawing state pension of five hundred US dollar annually.
B: Portrayal in International Mel Gibson acted and directed movie "The Patriot"
"Benjamin Martin is a composite character made up of Thomas Sumter, Daniel Morgan, Andrew Pickens, and Francis Marion, and a few bits and pieces from a number of other characters". The film was harshly criticized in the British press in part because of its connection to Francis Marion, a militia leader in South Carolina known as the "Swamp Fox." After the release of The Patriot, the British newspaper The Guardian denounced Francis Marion as "a serial rapist who hunted Red Indians for fun
The 2000 movie The Patriot exaggerated the Swamp Fox legend for a whole new generation. "One of the silliest things the movie did," says Sean Busick, a professor of American history at Athens State University in Alabama, "was to make Marion into an 18th century Rambo."
C: The British Media and Critic Vs US Historians
1. The British Media and Critic Opine
Historian Christopher Hibbert said of Marion,
"The truth is that people like Marion committed atrocities as bad, if not worse, than those perpetrated by the British.
The Patriot does not depict the American character Benjamin Martin as innocent of atrocities; in fact, Martin describes slowly mutilating and killing prisoners during the French and Indian War. In Hibbert's book Redcoats and Rebels: The American Revolution Through British Eyes, written before "The Patriot" was released, Hibbert included no criticism of Marion. Conservative radio host Michael Graham rejected Hibbert's criticism of Marion in a commentary published inNational Review:
The antagonist, the fictional Colonel William Tavington, is "loosely based on Colonel Banastre Tarleton, who was particularly known for his brutal acts", said the film's screenwriter Robert Rodat.
After the release of The Patriot, several British voices criticized the movie for its depiction of the fictional villain Tavington and defended the historical character of Banastre Tarleton. Ben Fenton, commenting in the British Daily Telegraph, wrote:
"there is no evidence that Tarleton, called 'Bloody Ban' or 'The Butcher' in rebel pamphlets, ever broke the rules of war and certainly not that he ever shot a child in cold blood
Although Tarleton gained the reputation among Americans as a butcher for his involvement in the Waxhaw massacre in South Carolina, he was a hero in Liverpool.Liverpool City Council, led by Mayor Edwin Clein, called for a public apology for what they viewed as the film’s "character assassination" of Tarleton. What happened during the Battle of The Waxhaws, known to the Americans as the Buford Massacre or as the Waxhaw massacre, is the subject of debate. According to American field surgeon named Robert Brownfield who witnessed the events, the Continental Army Col. Buford raised a white flag of surrender, "expecting the usual treatment sanctioned by civilized warfare". While Buford was calling for quarter, Tarleton's horse was struck by a musket ball and fell. This gave the Loyalist cavalrymen the impression that the Continentals had shot at their commander while asking for mercy. Enraged, the Loyalist troops charged at the Virginians. According to Brownfield, the Loyalists attacked, carrying out "indiscriminate carnage never surpassed by the most ruthless atrocities of the most barbarous savages".
Whereas Tavington is depicted as aristocratic but penniless, Tarleton came from a wealthy Liverpool merchant family. Tarleton did not die in battle or from impalement, as Tavington did in the film. Tarleton died on January 16, 1833 in Leintwardine, Shropshire, England, at the age of 78, nearly 50 years after the war ended. He outlived Col. Francis Marion who died in 1795, by 38 years. Before his death, Tarleton had achieved the military rank of General, equal to that held by the overall British Commanders during the American Revolution, and became a baronet and a member of the British Parliament. There he was, unfortunately for his legacy, a fierce defender of the African slave trade upon which his family fortune was based.
2. US Historians Views
Fortunately, the real Francis Marion has not been entirely obscured by his legend—historians including William Gilmore Simms and Hugh Rankin have written accurate biographies. Based on the facts alone, "Marion deserves to be remembered as one of the heroes of the War for Independence," says Busick, who has written the introduction to a new edition of Simms' The Life of Francis Marion, out in June 2007.
"Was Francis Marion a slave owner? Was he a determined and dangerous warrior? Did he commit acts in an 18th century war that we would consider atrocious in the current world of peace and political correctness? As another great American film hero might say: 'You're damn right.' "That's what made him a hero, 200 years ago and today
Graham also refers to what he describes as "the unchallenged work of South Carolina's premier historian Dr. Walter Edgar, who pointed out in his 1998 South Carolina: A History that Marion's partisans were "a ragged band of both black and white volunteers"
Amy Crawford, in Smithsonian Magazine, stated that modern historians such as William Gilmore Simms and Hugh Rankin have written accurate biographies of Marion, including Simms’ “The Life of Francis Marion.” The introduction to the 2007 edition of Simms' book was written by Sean Busick, a professor of American history at Athens State University in Alabama, who wrote,
"Marion deserves to be remembered as one of the heroes of the War for Independence." “Francis Marion was a man of his times: he owned slaves, and he fought in a brutal campaign against the Cherokee Indians...Marion's experience in the French and Indian War prepared him for more admirable service."
Some reviewers claimed the film to be generally accurate in its depiction of the war in the Carolinas as exceptionally brutal. For example, Kirkus Reviews quoted South Carolina historian Dr. Walter Edgar on the subject:
Though critics faulted The Patriot for attributing actions to the hated British Legion that were in fact those of the SS in WWII, Edgar (History/Univ. of South Carolina) writes that atrocities were many in the South Carolina backcountry: women and children slaughtered, prisoners executed without trial, whole towns put to the torch... "in the 1990s instead of the 1780s, [officers] such as Banastre Tarleton and James Wemyss would have been indicted by the International Tribunal at the Hague as war criminals."
Many of the legends that surround the life and exploits of Brigadier General Francis Marion were introduced by M. L. "Parson" Weems, coauthor of the first Marion biography, The Life of General Francis Marion. "I have endeavored to throw some ideas and facts about Genl. Marion into the garb and dress of a military romance," Weems wrote in 1807 to Peter Horry, the South Carolina officer on whose memoir the book was based. Weems had also authored an extremely popular biography of George Washington in 1800,
Francis Marion's Oil Painting at U.S.Senate
[ John Blake White's oil-on-canvas, "General Marion Inviting a British Officer to Share His Meal," hangs in a third floor hallway on the Senate side of the U.S. Capitol. White painted the Revolutionary War hero (in hat and blue jacket) from memory—the artist's boyhood home was next door to Marion's South Carolina plantation, Pond Bluff.]
The oil painting describes a special event : In early 1781, Revolutionary War militia leader Francis Marion and his men were camping on Snow's Island, South Carolina, when a British officer arrived to discuss a prisoner exchange. As one militiaman recalled years later, a breakfast of sweet potatoes was roasting in the fire, and after the negotiations Marion, known as the "Swamp Fox," invited the British soldier to share breakfast. According to a legend that grew out of the much-repeated anecdote, the British officer was so inspired by the Americans' resourcefulness and dedication to the cause—despite their lack of adequate provisions, supplies or proper uniforms—that he promptly switched sides and supported American independence. Around 1820, John Blake White depicted the scene in an oil painting that now hangs in the United States Capitol. In his version, the primly attired Redcoat seems uncomfortable with Marion's ragtag band, who glare at him suspiciously from the shadows of a South Carolina swamp.
Bill passed in both Houses in 2007 and 2008 for erecting a special statue of Francis Marion at Washinton D.C.
Here is a the Swamp Fox Murals Trail on Historic 301: Summerton, Manning, Paxville, Turbeville, SC - for interested visitors.
It is a kinda picking up pearls of a life scattered across the blogosphere and present it to my family and friends for reading and wonder in awe, bowing head to one and only the Swamp Fox who fought the British colonial oppression in the 18th century AD and inspired generations of Americans through his contribution to the independence movement. The movie Patriot is a tribute to him and other American revolutionaries of South Carolina province who fought a real dirty war in 1780-82 . Here is his life sketch.
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| Army Officer Francis Marion |
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| "The Swamp Fox" |
A:Facts from History
1.In Brief
Marion, Francis (1732?–1795), an American Revolutionary War army officer. Marion was called “the Swamp Fox” because of his skillful hit-and-run raids as a partisan (guerrilla) leader in the swamps of South Carolina during 1780–82. By capturing several British army posts and harassing the enemy's lines of communication, he did much to drive the British from the state. His exploits were romanticized by Parson Weems, the biographer of George Washington who invented the cherry-tree tale. Towns and counties throughout the United States are named for Marion.
Marion's birthplace was probably in Berkeley County, South Carolina. He inherited a small plantation and served in campaigns against the Cherokees in 1759 and 1761. In 1775, at the opening of the Revolution, he was elected to the South Carolina legislature and was made a captain of state troops. In 1779 he commanded a regiment during an unsuccessful attack on Savannah.
In August, 1780, Marion became a brigadier general of state militia. The invasion of the state by British troops drove him into the lowland swamps and forests. At times Marion had as few as 20 men. The Battle of Eutaw Springs (1781), in which he took part, ended formal warfare in South Carolina, but Marion disarmed at least 500 remaining Loyalists. He disbanded his men in December, 1782.
Due to his irregular methods of warfare, he is considered one of the fathers of modern guerrilla warfare, and is credited in the lineage of the United States Army Rangers. He is known as the Swamp Fox.
2.Early Life
His grandparents were Benjamin and Judith Baluet Marion of French Huguenot origin, and Anthony and Esther Baluet Cordes. His parents Gabriel and Esther had six children: Esther, Isaac, Gabriel, Benjamin, Job and Francis.
The family settled at Winyah, near Georgetown, South Carolina. Probably in 1732, Francis Marion was born on their plantation in Berkeley County, South Carolina. When he was aged five or six, his family moved to a plantation in St. George, a parish on Winyah Bay.Apparently, they wanted to be near the English school in Georgetown. In 1759 he moved to Pond Bluff plantation near Eutaw Springs, in St. John's Parish, Berkeley County, South Carolina
3.Shipwreck Crew
Marion at age 15 went as the sixth crew member of a ship. That ship sank. Two of the crews died on sea due to absence of any food or drinking water. After the shipwreck, Marion decided to stick to land, managing his family's plantation until he joined the South Carolina militia at 25 to fight in the French and Indian War.
4.French and Indian War
Marion began his military career shortly before his 25th birthday. On January 1, 1757, Francis and his brother Job were recruited by Captain John Postell to serve in the French and Indian War and to drive the Cherokee Indians away from the border. In 1761 Marion served as a lieutenant under Captain William Moultrie in acampaign against the Cherokee.
In 1761, after his militia had defeated the area Cherokees, Marion returned to farming. He was successful enough to purchase his own plantation, Pond Bluff, in 1773.
5.American Revolutionary War - Early Service
Turning from military to domestic matters, Marion became a successful planter in St. John’s Parish. He later received a small inheritance and purchased a larger plantation on the Santee River. Increasing prosperity brought him into active participation in public affairs, where he emerged as an advocate for the rights of American colonists in the face of oppressive British policies.
With the outbreak of war in 1775, Francis Marion became increasingly prominent in the Patriot cause.In 1775, Marion was elected to the first South Carolina Provincial Congress, an organization in support of colonial self-determination It is the governing body of the colony following the collapse of royal authority. On June 21, 1775, Marion was commissioned Captain in the 2nd South Carolina Regiment under William Moultrie, with whom he served in June 1776 in the defense of Fort Sullivan (today known as Fort Moultrie), in Charleston harbor He also fought in a number of the early battles in the South, again under Moultrie, in February 1776.
In September 1776 the Continental Congress commissioned Marion as a Lieutenant Colonel.
The Provincial Congress voted to raise three regiments, commissioning Marion a captain in the second. His first assignments involved guarding artillery and building Fort Sullivan, in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. When he saw combat during the Battle of Fort Sullivan in June 1776, Marion acted valiantly. But for much of the next three years, he remained at the fort, occupying the time by trying to discipline his troops, whom he found to be a disorderly, drunken bunch insistent on showing up to roll call barefoot.
In the autumn of 1779 he took part in the siege of Savannah, a failed Franco-American attempt to capture the Georgia city.
In September 1778, Marion was commissioned as the commander of the South Carolina Second State Regiment and in the following year, he fought under Benjamin Lincoln at the second Battle of Savannah.
In early 1780 Greene was placed under Benjamin Lincoln and engaged in drilling militia.
Marion's role in the war changed course after an odd accident in March of 1780. Attending a dinner party at the Charleston home of a fellow officer, Marion found that the host, in accordance with 18th-century custom, had locked all the doors while he toasted the American cause. The toasts went on and on, and Marion, who was not a drinking man, felt trapped. He escaped by jumping out a second story window, but broke his ankle in the fall. Marion left town to recuperate in the country, with the fortunate result that he was not captured when the British took Charleston that May.
6.Fall of Charleston
A British expedition under Henry Clinton moved into South Carolina in the early Spring of 1780 and laid siege to Charleston. Marion was not captured with the rest of the garrison when Charleston fell on May 12, 1780, because he had broken an ankle in an accident and had left the city to recuperate. Clinton took part of the British army that had captured Charleston back to New York but a significant number stayed for operations under Lord Cornwallis in the Carolinas.
7.Guerrilla war - the Swamp Fox
Elusive and crafty, Francis Marion outwitted British troops many times.Marion and his irregulars often defeated larger bodies of British troops by the surprise and rapidity of their movement over swampy terrain. For a daring rescue of Americans surrounded by the British at Parkers Ferry, South Carolina (August 1781), Marion received the thanks of Congress.
Francis Marion responded to the British victory at Camden in August 1780 by leading a series of successful nighttime guerilla-style raids against the British supply and communication lines, and against small concentrations of British or Loyalist soldiers. Frustrated opponents, including Benastre Tarleton, failed to track down the elusive “Swamp Fox” as Marion had become known. In December 1780, he was promoted to brigadier general under Nathanael Greene.
In 1781, Marion participated in the protracted fighting in the Carolinas that culminated at Eutaw Springs in September. The Americans were forced from the field, but British losses compelled them to pull back to Charleston and their war plan deteriorated rapidly in the following weeks.
8.Post War Activities
After the war, Francis Marion served in the South Carolina Senate( 1782-90) and sponsored legislative measures designed to provide fair treatment for the remaining Loyalists. In 1790, he was a delegate to the state constitutional convention and was a supporter of the new federal governing document.
.
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. Marion applied these tactics against the British.
He died on his estate on February 27, 1795 while drawing state pension of five hundred US dollar annually.
B: Portrayal in International Mel Gibson acted and directed movie "The Patriot"
"Benjamin Martin is a composite character made up of Thomas Sumter, Daniel Morgan, Andrew Pickens, and Francis Marion, and a few bits and pieces from a number of other characters". The film was harshly criticized in the British press in part because of its connection to Francis Marion, a militia leader in South Carolina known as the "Swamp Fox." After the release of The Patriot, the British newspaper The Guardian denounced Francis Marion as "a serial rapist who hunted Red Indians for fun
The 2000 movie The Patriot exaggerated the Swamp Fox legend for a whole new generation. "One of the silliest things the movie did," says Sean Busick, a professor of American history at Athens State University in Alabama, "was to make Marion into an 18th century Rambo."
C: The British Media and Critic Vs US Historians
1. The British Media and Critic Opine
Historian Christopher Hibbert said of Marion,
"The truth is that people like Marion committed atrocities as bad, if not worse, than those perpetrated by the British.
The Patriot does not depict the American character Benjamin Martin as innocent of atrocities; in fact, Martin describes slowly mutilating and killing prisoners during the French and Indian War. In Hibbert's book Redcoats and Rebels: The American Revolution Through British Eyes, written before "The Patriot" was released, Hibbert included no criticism of Marion. Conservative radio host Michael Graham rejected Hibbert's criticism of Marion in a commentary published inNational Review:
The antagonist, the fictional Colonel William Tavington, is "loosely based on Colonel Banastre Tarleton, who was particularly known for his brutal acts", said the film's screenwriter Robert Rodat.
After the release of The Patriot, several British voices criticized the movie for its depiction of the fictional villain Tavington and defended the historical character of Banastre Tarleton. Ben Fenton, commenting in the British Daily Telegraph, wrote:
"there is no evidence that Tarleton, called 'Bloody Ban' or 'The Butcher' in rebel pamphlets, ever broke the rules of war and certainly not that he ever shot a child in cold blood
Although Tarleton gained the reputation among Americans as a butcher for his involvement in the Waxhaw massacre in South Carolina, he was a hero in Liverpool.Liverpool City Council, led by Mayor Edwin Clein, called for a public apology for what they viewed as the film’s "character assassination" of Tarleton. What happened during the Battle of The Waxhaws, known to the Americans as the Buford Massacre or as the Waxhaw massacre, is the subject of debate. According to American field surgeon named Robert Brownfield who witnessed the events, the Continental Army Col. Buford raised a white flag of surrender, "expecting the usual treatment sanctioned by civilized warfare". While Buford was calling for quarter, Tarleton's horse was struck by a musket ball and fell. This gave the Loyalist cavalrymen the impression that the Continentals had shot at their commander while asking for mercy. Enraged, the Loyalist troops charged at the Virginians. According to Brownfield, the Loyalists attacked, carrying out "indiscriminate carnage never surpassed by the most ruthless atrocities of the most barbarous savages".
Whereas Tavington is depicted as aristocratic but penniless, Tarleton came from a wealthy Liverpool merchant family. Tarleton did not die in battle or from impalement, as Tavington did in the film. Tarleton died on January 16, 1833 in Leintwardine, Shropshire, England, at the age of 78, nearly 50 years after the war ended. He outlived Col. Francis Marion who died in 1795, by 38 years. Before his death, Tarleton had achieved the military rank of General, equal to that held by the overall British Commanders during the American Revolution, and became a baronet and a member of the British Parliament. There he was, unfortunately for his legacy, a fierce defender of the African slave trade upon which his family fortune was based.
2. US Historians Views
Fortunately, the real Francis Marion has not been entirely obscured by his legend—historians including William Gilmore Simms and Hugh Rankin have written accurate biographies. Based on the facts alone, "Marion deserves to be remembered as one of the heroes of the War for Independence," says Busick, who has written the introduction to a new edition of Simms' The Life of Francis Marion, out in June 2007.
"Was Francis Marion a slave owner? Was he a determined and dangerous warrior? Did he commit acts in an 18th century war that we would consider atrocious in the current world of peace and political correctness? As another great American film hero might say: 'You're damn right.' "That's what made him a hero, 200 years ago and today
Graham also refers to what he describes as "the unchallenged work of South Carolina's premier historian Dr. Walter Edgar, who pointed out in his 1998 South Carolina: A History that Marion's partisans were "a ragged band of both black and white volunteers"
Amy Crawford, in Smithsonian Magazine, stated that modern historians such as William Gilmore Simms and Hugh Rankin have written accurate biographies of Marion, including Simms’ “The Life of Francis Marion.” The introduction to the 2007 edition of Simms' book was written by Sean Busick, a professor of American history at Athens State University in Alabama, who wrote,
"Marion deserves to be remembered as one of the heroes of the War for Independence." “Francis Marion was a man of his times: he owned slaves, and he fought in a brutal campaign against the Cherokee Indians...Marion's experience in the French and Indian War prepared him for more admirable service."
Some reviewers claimed the film to be generally accurate in its depiction of the war in the Carolinas as exceptionally brutal. For example, Kirkus Reviews quoted South Carolina historian Dr. Walter Edgar on the subject:
Though critics faulted The Patriot for attributing actions to the hated British Legion that were in fact those of the SS in WWII, Edgar (History/Univ. of South Carolina) writes that atrocities were many in the South Carolina backcountry: women and children slaughtered, prisoners executed without trial, whole towns put to the torch... "in the 1990s instead of the 1780s, [officers] such as Banastre Tarleton and James Wemyss would have been indicted by the International Tribunal at the Hague as war criminals."
Many of the legends that surround the life and exploits of Brigadier General Francis Marion were introduced by M. L. "Parson" Weems, coauthor of the first Marion biography, The Life of General Francis Marion. "I have endeavored to throw some ideas and facts about Genl. Marion into the garb and dress of a military romance," Weems wrote in 1807 to Peter Horry, the South Carolina officer on whose memoir the book was based. Weems had also authored an extremely popular biography of George Washington in 1800,
 |
| The Oil Painting at U.S. Senate |
Francis Marion's Oil Painting at U.S.Senate
[ John Blake White's oil-on-canvas, "General Marion Inviting a British Officer to Share His Meal," hangs in a third floor hallway on the Senate side of the U.S. Capitol. White painted the Revolutionary War hero (in hat and blue jacket) from memory—the artist's boyhood home was next door to Marion's South Carolina plantation, Pond Bluff.]
The oil painting describes a special event : In early 1781, Revolutionary War militia leader Francis Marion and his men were camping on Snow's Island, South Carolina, when a British officer arrived to discuss a prisoner exchange. As one militiaman recalled years later, a breakfast of sweet potatoes was roasting in the fire, and after the negotiations Marion, known as the "Swamp Fox," invited the British soldier to share breakfast. According to a legend that grew out of the much-repeated anecdote, the British officer was so inspired by the Americans' resourcefulness and dedication to the cause—despite their lack of adequate provisions, supplies or proper uniforms—that he promptly switched sides and supported American independence. Around 1820, John Blake White depicted the scene in an oil painting that now hangs in the United States Capitol. In his version, the primly attired Redcoat seems uncomfortable with Marion's ragtag band, who glare at him suspiciously from the shadows of a South Carolina swamp.
Bill passed in both Houses in 2007 and 2008 for erecting a special statue of Francis Marion at Washinton D.C.
Here is a the Swamp Fox Murals Trail on Historic 301: Summerton, Manning, Paxville, Turbeville, SC - for interested visitors.
D: Reference and Sources:
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