The Life of Francis Marion

The life of the South Carolina partisan commander known as the Swamp Fox: a Huguenot planter's son, small and lame, who fought the Cherokee, served at the defence of Fort Sullivan, and after the fall of Charleston in 1780 took to the swamps of the Pee Dee with a handful of men and kept a British army occupied for two years by never standing and fighting. Simms follows the campaign closely — the ambushes, the bridges burned, the prisoners taken and released, the quarrels with Sumter and with Greene — and is unusually good on the civil war within the war, between neighbours.

William Gilmore Simms published the biography in 1844. He was the leading man of letters in the antebellum South, and worked from the memoirs, the surviving correspondence and the recollections of men who had ridden with Marion.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text.