American Political History
With American Political History I'm committed to bringing you bite-sized, digestible episodes that make history approachable for everyone, not just the history buffs. My goal is to engage you, to make you feel connected with the past, and to understand how it shapes our present and future.
So, sit back, or better yet, take a walk or a drive, and let's journey through history together, one bite, at a time."
American Political History
Independence - The Swamp Fox
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In August 1780, the “Hero of Saratoga,” General Horatio Gates, marched the last American army in the South to Camden — and lost it in a single morning, his militia breaking at the first bayonet charge while he galloped 180 miles to safety and the Baron de Kalb stood and died with the men he left behind. It was the second American army destroyed in three months, and on the map the British conquest of the South looked complete. But the war did not stop when the army did. This is the story of Camden, the worst-run battle of the war, and of what rose up behind it: the partisan war of Francis Marion, the small, quiet planter who escaped the fall of Charleston, raised a band of backcountry men in the swamps, and gave the British a war they were not built to win — striking from ambush, vanishing into country no regular column could follow, until even Banastre Tarleton gave up the chase and a legend named him the Swamp Fox. Cornwallis had won every battle. He was about to learn he did not own the country.