After the crushing defeat of Gates at Camden Marion’s little band was the only patriot force in South Carolina, but he harassed the British so effectively that he soon became genuinely feared.  No one ever knew where he would attack, for the swiftness of his movements seemed almost superhuman.  No hardship disturbed him; he endured heat and cold with indifference; his food was of the simplest.  Every school-boy knows the story of how, inviting a British officer to dinner, he sat down tranquilly before a log on which were a few baked potatoes, which formed the whole meal, and how the Englishman went away with the conviction that such a foe as that could never be conquered.  No instance of rapacity or cruelty was ever charged against him, nor did he ever injure any woman or child.

As a partisan leader, Sumter was second only to Marion, and for two years the patriot fortunes in the South were in their hands.  Together they joined Greene when he took charge of the southern army, and proved invaluable allies.  Sumter lived to the great age of ninety-eight, and was the last surviving general officer of the Revolution.  He was, too, the last survivor of the Braddock expedition, which he had accompanied at the age of twenty-one, and which had been cut to pieces on the Monongahela twenty years before the battle of Lexington was fought.

“Light Horse Harry” Lee, whose “Legion” won such fame in the early years of the Revolution and whose services with Greene in the South were of the most brilliant character, also lived well into the nineteenth century.  It was he who, in 1799, appointed by Congress to deliver an address in commemoration of Washington, uttered the famous phrase, “First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.”  His son, Robert Edward Lee, was destined to become perhaps the greatest general in our history.

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So passed the era of the Revolution, and for thirty years the new country was called upon to face no foreign foe; but pressing upon her frontier was an enemy strong and cruel, who knew not the meaning of the word “peace.”  Set on by the British during the Revolution, the Indians continued their warfare long after peace had been declared.  In the wilderness north of the Ohio they had their villages, from which they issued time after time to attack the white settlements to the south and east.  No one knew when or where they would strike, and every village and hamlet along the frontier was liable to attack at any time.  The farmer tilling his fields was shot from ambush; the hunter found himself hunted; children were carried away to captivity, and women, looking up from their household work, found an Indian on the threshold.