The Swamp Fox: How Francis Marion Saved the American Revolution by John Oller (review)

John Oller begins his biography of Francis Marion in 1780, when Great Britain was at war with the American colonies, France, and Spain. With the war in New England stagnating and the British public losing patience with the fighting, British leadership sought a quick end. Seeking to salvage something, the generals shifted the war effort to the southern colonies. The southern strategy was a bold move. Success depended almost completely on the support of Loyalist southerners, whose numbers were vastly overestimated. At first, things looked good for the British. Georgia was subdued shortly after the Patriot defeat at Savannah, and thousands of South Carolinians swore allegiance to the Crown with the capture of Charleston. The British believed that if Charles Cornwallis could maintain control in Georgia and the Carolinas, they could draw George Washington and the Continental army south and into a trap.

But maintaining control of Georgia and the Carolinas proved much more difficult than Cornwallis and the British expected. Oller argues, as the book's subtitle implies, that this difficulty was largely due to Francis Marion and his ragtag band of guerrilla fighters. Since Marion was a small and rather plain-looking forty-eight-year-old whose physique came closer to that of a young boy than an adult, it is hard to believe he was dangerous enough to stop the British. Yet those who looked past that first glance quickly noticed his striking intelligence and fierce devotion to the cause. He was the perfect foil to the British strategy, raising havoc in the British rear and keeping the superior-sized forces continually off-balance. Since Marion actually only engaged the British in two dozen skirmishes and missed most of the major battles that occurred in the southern campaign, Oller correctly focuses much of the book on Nathanael Greene's activities in the southern theater, which makes sense because scholars commonly credit Greene with confounding British strategy and salvaging the American cause in the South. Marion was key to Greene's success, and Oller places Marion's value to that end well.

Oller uses newly completed document collections like The Papers of General Nathanael Greene (13 vols.; Chapel Hill, 1976–2005) and Ian Saberton's The Cornwallis Papers: The Campaigns of 1780 and 1781 in the Southern Theatre of the American Revolutionary War (6 vols.; East Sussex, Eng., 2010), which were not available to previous biographers. While Oller uncovers some interesting new information concerning Marion's years before the war, he adds little to what is already known about Marion. Oller's biography is a good read, and it would be of interest to students and those unfamiliar with Marion and the southern theater during the war. But there are also some problems that scholars will find difficult to overlook. For one, Oller makes some errors concerning prevailing facts about some historical events. For example, he misattributes the cause of the Cherokee War and perpetuates a previously destroyed myth about Horatio Gates's intentions at the battle of Camden. But neither of these errors undermine the book's value. A far more serious problem does: the format of the eighty-one pages of citations. The book does not employ a standard footnote or endnote system. Instead, endnotes list page numbers with brief quotations from the text and the sources used for that particular section of text. It is both confusing and clumsy to follow, but worse, it makes it nearly impossible to keep track of sourcing. When there are multiple quotations on a page, it is difficult to ascertain what is being referenced. Diligent readers seeking to identify the source for a quotation or statement must jump back and forth between the text and notes to find the portion of the text in question, and some things are not clearly cited. The fault for this awkward system probably...