FRANCIS

See also:

• MARION
• FRANCIS MARION (1732-1795)
• MARION, HENRI FRANCOIS (1846-1896)

MARION (1732-1795)  , American soldier, was born in 1732, probably at Winyah, near Georgetown, South Carolina, of Huguenot ancestry . In 1759 he settled on Pond Bluff plantation near Eutaw Springs, in St John's parish, Berkeley county . In 1761 he served as a lieutenant under William Moultrie in a campaign against the Cherokees . In 1775 he was a member of the South Carolina Provincial Congress; and on the 21st of June was commissioned captain in the 2nd South Carolina regiment under W . Moultrie, with whom he served in June 1776 in the defence of Fort Sullivan (Fort Moultrie), in Charleston Harbor . In September 1776 the Continental Congress commissioned him a lieutenant-colonel . In the autumn of 1779 he took part in the siege of Savannah, and early in 1780, under General Benjamin Lincoln, was engaged in drilling militia . After the capture of Charleston (May 12, 1780) and the defeats of General Isaac Huger at Monk's Corner (Berkeley county, South Carolina) and Lieut.-Colonel Abraham Buford at the Waxhaws (near the North Carolina line, in what is now Lancaster county), Marion organized a small troop—which usually consisted of between 20 and 70 men—the only force then opposing the British in the state . Governor John Rutledge made him a brigadier-general of state troops, and in August 1780 Marion took command of the scanty militia, ill equipped and ill fed . With this force he was identified for almost all the remainder of the war in a partisan warfare in which he showed himself a singularly able leader of irregular troops . On the 20th of August he captured 150 Maryland prisoners, and about a score of their British guard; and in September and October repeatedly surprised larger bodies of Loyalists or British regulars . Colonel Banastre Tarleton, sent out to capture him, despaired of finding the " old swamp fox," who eluded him by following swamp paths .

When General

Nathanael Greene took command in the south, Marion and Colonel Henry Lee were ordered in January 1781 to attack Georgetown, but they were unsuccessful . In April, however, they took Fort Watson and in May Fort Motte, and they succeeded in breaking communications between the British posts in the Carolinas . On the 31st of August Marion rescued a small American force hemmed in by Major C . Fraser with 500 British; and for this he received the thanks of Congress . He commanded the right wing under General Greene at Eutaw Springs . In 1782, during his absence as state senator at Jacksonborough, his brigade deteriorated and there was a conspiracy to turn him over to the British . In June of the same year he put down a Loyalist uprising on the banks of the Pedee river; and in August he left his brigade and returned to his plantation . He served several terms in the state Senate, and in 1784, in recognition of his services, was made commander of Fort Johnson, practically a courtesy title with a salary of £500 per annum . He died on his estate on the 27th of February 1795 . Marion was small, slight and sickly-looking . As a soldier he was quick, watchful, resourceful and calm, the greatest of partisan leaders in the bitter struggle in the Carolinas . See the Life (New York, 1844) by W .

G .

Simms ; Edward McCrady, South Carolina in the Revolution (New York, 1 o1–1902); and a careful study of Marion's ancestry and early life by " R . Y." in vols. i. and ii. of the Southern and Western Monthly Magazine and Review (Charleston, 1845) .