as a gallant Captain of Cavalry, the eye and the wing
of the southern liberating army under Greene; Marion is proverbially
the great master of strategy -- the wily fox of the swamps --
never to be caught, never to be followed, -- yet always at hand,
with unconjectured promptness, at the moment when he is least feared
and is least to be expected. His pre-eminence in this peculiar
and most difficult of all kinds of warfare, is not to be disputed.
In his native region he has no competitor, and it is scarcely possible
to compute the vast influence which he possessed and exercised
over the minds and feelings of the people of Carolina,
simply through his own resources, at a period most adverse to their fortunes,
and when the cause of their liberties, everywhere endangered,
was almost everywhere considered hopeless. His name was the great
rallying cry of the yeoman in battle -- the word that promised hope --
that cheered the desponding patriot -- that startled, and made to pause
in his career of recklessness and blood, the cruel and sanguinary tory.
Unprovided with the means of warfare, no less than of comfort --
wanting equally in food and weapons -- we find him supplying
the one deficiency with a cheerful courage that never failed;
the other with the resources of a genius that seemed to wish
for nothing from without. With a force constantly fluctuating and feeble
in consequence of the most ordinary necessities -- half naked men,
feeding upon unsalted pottage, -- forced to fight the enemy by day,
and look after their little families, concealed in swamp or thicket,
by night -- he still contrived, -- one knows not well how, --
to keep alive and bright the sacred fire of his country's liberties,
at moments when they seemed to have no other champion.
In this toil and watch, taken cheerfully and with spirits
that never appeared to lose their tone and elasticity,
tradition ascribes to him a series of achievements, which,