the lost cause

I'd like to take our story to the convening of the Continental Congress, featured here in The Patriot.  I watched the film again yesterday, and read several reviews which were harsh on the interpretation and presentation of history.  Yes, it's a movie: movies are entertaining, and tell a story.  You want a more accurate play-by-play?  Try a documentary.  I love documentaries, but they don't reach the entire audience, so a regular movie can be used as a decent teaching tool.  This concept will repeat when I speak of the Civil War, a subject as deeply entrenched in the cause for freedom as that which my Uncle Francis fought for, for both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War were civil wars.  Freedom to be, freedom to be free.  Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, which was signed in early July of 1776: a powerful document whose words laid out what the Colonials believed as truth, and would prove with much bloodshed.  The guarantee by the words "for all," were challenged by circumstance and situation, spearheading when Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860. 

Betsey Ross of Boston would sew this flag, a symbol of an established free nation.  To speak of, write of, such a thing prior to the Declaration of Independence, was treason.  My grandfather, Job Marion, represented St. John's Parish in the Continental Congress in Charleston in 1775, and his brother Francis would take his place in 1776.  I have no doubt, given what happened to the French Huguenots in France, at the hands of the Catholic Church in the Religious Wars and thereafter, that the Marions LOATHED tyranny.  The only reluctance, on behest of both brothers, was in how tired they were of war.  Each had fought in the French and Indian War, and their older brother Gabriel Marion III, a grandfather by this time, enlisted in the local militia in 1774.  Parson Weems, in his sweeping-romance-for-young-adults "biography" of Francis claims that none of the other Marion brothers were interested in fighting but were businessmen and farmers instead.  I believe that they defended their families and homesteads.  Their children witnessed the war "with their own eyes," including Job Marion's son Job de St. Julien Marion. 

Young Job was raised by his father and his uncle Francis because his mother died early, and by his teens he had a stepmother and two new children in the house.  Job Marion's father married a family friend, Elizabeth Gaillard, in middle age.  Charleston was seized by the British in 1780 when Job was my age.  His first cousin Gabriel Marion, son of one of his uncles, was captured and murdered in Georgetown by the Tories.  Remember that the Tories were colonists loyal to England. 

The murder of the above mentioned Gabriel Marion was an act of civil war.

The intial battles and skirmishes of the Revolutionary War were pitiful: the English slaughtered the Americans to the point where freedom was deemed "the lost cause."  And from these doubts arose our hero, an underdog, a fighter hardened and wizened by war.  The Sandwich arrived as quickly as he was needed, but no one could follow him or find him.  He was like a ghost, like a clever fox. 

I am beginning to read the accounts of this man, disseminating him from the school yard rhyme and the fabled sanguine warrior, making him more like the rest of us.  A Francis Marion could very well be among us: the gumption, wherewithal, and courage may very well beat within the heart of a man or woman today.  As Martha Washington said, "It is not the greater or lesser things which happen [to us], but our disposition toward them which matters most."  How will you pick your battles, how will you respond when your life and freedoms are threatened?  You could go along with it, obedient like a dog, or play dead.  Or you could act.  I do not encourage violence, but I do believe that it is a right of every American to defend themselves.

  Francis Marion was called to the meeting of the Continental Congress in 1776, and eventually promoted to the status of Captain and manner of the cannon at Fort Moultrie, the first time the British tried to sack Charleston in 1778.  He was already legend for his service in the French and Indian War, where he'd defeated the French and Cherokee in the Carolina and Georgia backwoods. 

Quiet farmer he was not.

The attack on Fort Moultrie by the British, Sullivan's Island

South Carolina's flag: crescent moon and the color blue symbolize liberty.  The Palmetto tree was used to make walls for Fort Moultrie, a lumber so spongy that a cannon ball cannot pierce it.