As a man and a patriot, bright is the example we have in the career of Francis Marion. As a soldier, his name, more than any other, is identified with the strategic wisdom, heroic exploits and military successes of the partizan war in the Carolinas, during the Revolution; a war in which he and his brigade were distinguished.
In 1845, Horatio Newton Moore (1814-1859) published "The Life and Times of General Francis Marion."
Francis Marion (c. 1732 – 1795) was a military officer who served in the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783). Acting with the Continental Army and South Carolina militia commissions, he was a persistent adversary of the British in their occupation of South Carolina and Charleston in 1780 and 1781, even after the Continental Army was driven out of the state in the Battle of Camden.
Marion used irregular methods of warfare and is considered one of the fathers of modern guerrilla warfare and maneuver warfare, and is credited in the lineage of the United States Army Rangers and the other American military Special Forces such as the "Green Berets". He was known as The Swamp Fox.
As to the importance of Marion to the cause of independence, Moore writes:
"Francis Marion, in the trying times of the Revolution, occupied one of the most difficult situations in which a man can be placed. The scene of his exertions was (as we have seen) in a country where the inhabitants were by no means unanimous in their opposition to the British government; but, surrounded as he was by loyalists, and at the head of a soldiery unaccustomed to subordination, he encountered and surmounted difficulties in situations that probability rendered hopeless, and "with a steady hand he steered the vessel amid the terrors of the storm, and through fearful breakers safe into port." To General Marion, as a military chieftain, our country is deeply indebted, and, though for many years he did not receive the approbation his valor had earned, public conviction has of late become sensible of the obligations that she owes him; and it is now conceded, that we are indebted as much to his untiring perseverance in subduing the Tories, as to the prowess of Gen. Greene against the British Armies, in bringing the Southern war to a successful termination."
