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expand1997 (1)
1Author:  Simms William Gilmore 1806-1870Add
 Title:  The partisan  
 Published:  1997 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: Our narrative begins in South Carolina, during the summer of 1780. The arms of the British were at that time triumphant throughout the colony. Their armies overran it. Charlestown, the chief city, had stood a siege, and had fallen, after a protracted and honourable defence. One-half of the military strength of the lower country, then the most populous region, had become prisoners of war by this disaster; and, for the present, were thus incapacitated from giving any assistance to their brethren in arms. Scattered, crushed, and disheartened by repeated failures, the whigs, in numerous instances, hopeless of any better fortune, had given in their adhesion to the enemy, and had received a pledge of British protection. This protection secured them, as it was thought, in their property and persons, and its conditions simply called for their neutrality. Many of the more firm and honourably tenacious, scorning all compromise with invasion, fled for shelter to the swamps and mountains; and, through the former, all Europe could not have traced their footsteps. In the whole state, at this period, the cause of American liberty had no head, and almost as little hope: all was gloomy and unpromising. Marion, afterward styled the “Swamp Fox,” and Sumter, the “Game Cock”—epithets aptly descriptive of their several military attributes—had not yet properly risen in arms, though both of them had been engaged already in active and successful service. Their places of retreat were at this time unknown; and, certainly, they were not then looked to, as at an after period, with that anxious reliance which their valour subsequently taught their countrymen to entertain. Nothing, indeed, could be more deplorably prostrate than were the energies of the colony. Here and there, only, did some little partisan squad make a stand, or offer a show of resistance to the incursive British or the marauding and malignant tory—disbanding, if not defeated, most usually after the temporary object had been obtained, and retreating for security into shelter and inaction. There was no sort of concert, save in feeling, among the many who were still not unwilling for the fight: they doubted or they dreaded one another; they knew not whom to trust. The next-door neighbour of the stanch whig was not unfrequently a furious loyalist—as devoted to George the Third as the other could have been to the intrinsic beauty of human liberty. The contest of the Revolution, so far as it had gone, had confirmed and made tenacious this spirit of hostility and opposition, until, in the end, patriot and loyalist had drawn the sword against one another, and rebel and tory were the degrading epithets by which they severally distinguished the individual whose throat they strove to cut. When the metropolis fell into the hands of the British, and their arms extended through the state, the tories alone were active and formidable. They now took satisfaction for their own previous trials; and crime was never so dreadful a monster as when they ministered to its appetites. Mingled in with the regular troops of the British, or forming separate bodies of their own, and officered from among themselves, they penetrated the well-known recesses which gave shelter to the fugitives. If the rebel resisted, they slew him without quarter; if he submitted, they hung him without benefit of clergy: they spoiled his children of their possessions, and not unfrequently slew them also. But few sections of the low and middle country escaped their search. It was only in the bald regions of North Carolina that the fugitives could find repose; only where the most miserable poverty took from crime all temptation, that the beaten and maltreated patriots dared to give themselves a breathing-space from flight. In the same manner the frontier-colony of Georgia had already been overrun and ravaged by the conquerors; and there, as it was less capable of resistance, all show of opposition had been long since at an end. The invader, deceived by these appearances, declared in swelling language to his monarch, that the two colonies were properly subjugated, and would now return to their obedience. He knew not that,
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