The Swamp Fox: How Francis Marion Saved the American Revolution

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. 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. 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 of1780 and 1781 in the Southern Theatre of the American Revolutionary War (6 vols.; East Sussex, Eng., 2010), which were not available to previous biographers.