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The Life of General Francis Marion: A…
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The Life of General Francis Marion: A Celebrated Partisan Officer, in the Revolutionary War, Against the British and Tories in South Carolina and Geo (edition 2000)

by Peter Horry (Author)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingConversations
581446,355 (3.13)None
Picked up after reading several accounts of the Revolutionary War in South Carolina. Principal author and first person voice is Peter Horry, a colonel in Marion’s “regiment” (although nominally a brigadier general, Francis Marion never seems to have commanded a unit of more than 300 troops); second author is Mason “Parson” Weems, famous as a collector of George Washington apocrypha. The work is typical Early American hagiography; the valiant patriots fight bravely and honorably against the craven and cruel British and Tories. (Hoory/Weems do cite a couple of cases where Marion’s troops looted or killed prisoners – but they always repented abjectly when admonished by Marion – and a case of a British major who prevented his troops from looting a widow – but making clear that this was the exception and not the rule). The language is breathtakingly florid; here’s Horry’s account of a meeting with Marion, while building a fort in Charleston harbor:


“Friendship was gay within my heart, and thenceforth all nature put on her loveliest aspects. The island of sand no longer seemed a dreary waste. Brighter rolled the blue waves of ocean beneath the golden beam, and sweeter murmured the billows on their sandy beach. My heart rejoiced with the playful fishes, as they leaped with high wantoning in the air, or with sudden flounce, returned again, wild darting through their lucid element.”


Well, I suppose you had to be there.


Underneath the exuberant prose, however, it a fairly decent manual on how to conduct partisan, or guerilla, or asymmetric warfare. As discussed in Partisans and Redcoats (reviewed earlier), the British essentially had the war won after the capture of Charleston in 1780; there were no Continental troops in South Carolina, all militia had been paroled, and every town had a British garrison. Horry/Weems concede if the British had behaved with moderate indulgence from the point there would have been no further American resistance in South Carolina. Not bad for both the actual history and for an example of hero-worship in the early US. ( )
  setnahkt | Dec 26, 2017 |
Picked up after reading several accounts of the Revolutionary War in South Carolina. Principal author and first person voice is Peter Horry, a colonel in Marion’s “regiment” (although nominally a brigadier general, Francis Marion never seems to have commanded a unit of more than 300 troops); second author is Mason “Parson” Weems, famous as a collector of George Washington apocrypha. The work is typical Early American hagiography; the valiant patriots fight bravely and honorably against the craven and cruel British and Tories. (Hoory/Weems do cite a couple of cases where Marion’s troops looted or killed prisoners – but they always repented abjectly when admonished by Marion – and a case of a British major who prevented his troops from looting a widow – but making clear that this was the exception and not the rule). The language is breathtakingly florid; here’s Horry’s account of a meeting with Marion, while building a fort in Charleston harbor:


“Friendship was gay within my heart, and thenceforth all nature put on her loveliest aspects. The island of sand no longer seemed a dreary waste. Brighter rolled the blue waves of ocean beneath the golden beam, and sweeter murmured the billows on their sandy beach. My heart rejoiced with the playful fishes, as they leaped with high wantoning in the air, or with sudden flounce, returned again, wild darting through their lucid element.”


Well, I suppose you had to be there.


Underneath the exuberant prose, however, it a fairly decent manual on how to conduct partisan, or guerilla, or asymmetric warfare. As discussed in Partisans and Redcoats (reviewed earlier), the British essentially had the war won after the capture of Charleston in 1780; there were no Continental troops in South Carolina, all militia had been paroled, and every town had a British garrison. Horry/Weems concede if the British had behaved with moderate indulgence from the point there would have been no further American resistance in South Carolina. Not bad for both the actual history and for an example of hero-worship in the early US. ( )
  setnahkt | Dec 26, 2017 |

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