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Francis Marion: Swamp Fox
of South Carolina
(Forgotten Heroes of the American Revolution)
Written by Scott Kaufman
Kaufman is associate professor of History at Francis Marion
University where he teaches classes on U.S. History. He is the
author of Confronting Communism: U.S. and British Policies
toward China (University of Missouri Press, 2001), and The Pig
War: The United States, Britain, and the Balance of Power in
the Pacific Northwest, 1846-72 (Lexington Books, 2004), and
co-author of the revised edition of The Presidency of James Earl
Carter, Jr. (University Press of Kansas, 2006). His most recent
work is the biography of Rosalynn Carter.
4 - F R A N C I S M A R I O N VIEW
There are projects that
sometimes come out of
nowhere, and the book on
Francis Marion is one of
them. OTTN Publishing,
which specializes in
children’s books, had Kaufman
written my department
head, Dr. Larry Nelson, about writing a biography of General
Francis Marion for a series OTTN is putting together on
heroes of the American Revolution. As I am the military
historian in the department, Dr. Nelson forwarded the project
to me. I was pleased to receive the offer, as it would not
only allow me to learn about our university’s namesake, but,
being a children’s book, it would offer me a new kind of
challenge.
And a new kind of challenge it was! Having written for
an academic audience, putting together a book for children
was simultaneously difficult and fun. My first step, of course,
was to read about Francis Marion. As our university has, I
believe, every book written on him, I had a lot of material to
which to turn.
One of the things that I had to do in the process of my
research was to separate fact from fiction. Some of the
books, especially some of the children’s books, as well as
Mel Gibson’s film, The Patriot, have misled readers and
viewers on some matters. First, numerous published works
have pictures of Francis Marion. The truth is that there are no
contemporary pictures of him; all the illustrations are based
upon physical descriptions by those who knew Marion.
Francis Marion had not always wanted to marry his future
wife, Mary Videau. Rather, he wed Mary, who also happened
to have been a first cousin of his, because his siblings were
getting married, and he had heard that Mary had a crush on
him. Nor was Mary a beautiful woman as suggested by some
of the literature; she was a spinster who by various accounts
looked a lot like Marion himself. According to The Patriot,
Marion had at least two children. In fact, he never had any
children; both he and Mary wed late in their lives. There
was no instance, as suggested otherwise by the movie, of
the British burning down a church with numerous patriots
in it. Marion would have been unable to run into battle as
depicted in the film. In 1780, Marion, who abhorred alcohol,
had jumped out of a window to escape a party. He broke his
ankle upon landing and, for the rest of his life, walked with