He was elected to the South Carolina Provincial Congress which commissioned Marion as captain of his own regiment after battles of Lexington and Concord. His first assignment was building Fort Sullivan in Charleston, SC where he and his regiment were posted. During a dinner party, Marion, who was not a heavy drinker, felt the drinking was getting out of control, and to get away, jumped out of a second story window, breaking his ankle. He had to leave town for medical attention.
In the spring of while Marion was still gone getting his ankle tended to, the British invaded and overthrew Charleston. Although his injury left him unable to even walk, Francis Marion formed a unit of 50 men who opposed the British in the city of Charlestown and attacked an encampment. They were able to free Americans. His sneaky, guerrilla style of warfare was so effective, The Marion Militia were soon hated and feared by the British troops.
Finally, the British troops in the area could take no more and sent Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton to track down Francis and his men.
However, he despaired after chasing the militia 26 miles through swampy paths to no avail. Marion, unlike Thomas Sumter, coordinated effectively in the field with the Continental Army, led by Maj. Nathanael Greene. Marion commanded South Carolina militia in advance lines along with Brig. Andrew Pickens at the Battle of Eutaw Springs in September , the last major battle in the Carolinas, in which the British suffered so many casualties they ceased further inland campaigning.
Following victory over the British, Marion returned to his plantation and pursued a career in politics. Many of the legends that surround the life and exploits of Brigadier General Francis Marion were introduced by M.
Marion into the garb and dress of a military romance," Weems wrote in to Peter Horry, the South Carolina officer on whose memoir the book was based. Weems had also authored an extremely popular biography of George Washington in , and it was he who invented the apocryphal cherry tree story.
Marion's life received similar embellishment. Fortunately, the real Francis Marion has not been entirely obscured by his legend—historians including William Gilmore Simms and Hugh Rankin have written accurate biographies. Based on the facts alone, "Marion deserves to be remembered as one of the heroes of the War for Independence," says Busick, who has written the introduction to a new edition of Simms' The Life of Francis Marion , out in June Marion was born at his family's plantation in Berkeley County, South Carolina, probably in The family's youngest son, Francis was a small boy with malformed legs, but he was restless, and at about 15 years old he joined the crew of a ship and sailed to the West Indies.
During Marion's first voyage, the ship sank, supposedly after a whale rammed it. The seven-man crew escaped in a lifeboat and spent a week at sea before they drifted ashore. After the shipwreck, Marion decided to stick to land, managing his family's plantation until he joined the South Carolina militia at 25 to fight in the French and Indian War. Most heroes of the Revolution were not the saints that biographers like Parson Weems would have them be, and Francis Marion was a man of his times: he owned slaves, and he fought in a brutal campaign against the Cherokee Indians.
While not noble by today's standards, Marion's experience in the French and Indian War prepared him for more admirable service. The Cherokee used the landscape to their advantage, Marion found; they concealed themselves in the Carolina backwoods and mounted devastating ambushes.
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