John Oller > Quotes

“ALSO BY JOHN OLLER Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew An All-American Murder American Queen: The Rise and Fall of Kate Chase Sprague—Civil War “Belle of the North” and Gilded Age Woman of Scandal”
― John Oller, The Swamp Fox: How Francis Marion Saved the American Revolution

“grog (rum and water) Moultrie”
― John Oller, The Swamp Fox: How Francis Marion Saved the American Revolution

“ANYONE WRITING ABOUT Francis Marion immediately confronts the task of sifting fact from folklore. The mythmaking began with the first and highly embellished biography of him, written in 1809 by Mason L. “Parson” Weems, the same man who fabricated the famous story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. The romantic tradition continued with the Walt Disney television series that ran from 1959 to 1961, starring Leslie Nielsen as the Swamp Fox, and took another turn in 2000 with the popular film The Patriot, in which Mel Gibson portrayed a Rambo-like action figure loosely, if inaccurately, based on Marion. As stated on an interpretive marker at Marion’s gravesite in Pineville, South Carolina, much about the Swamp Fox remains obscured by legend, even though his achievements are “significant and real.”
― John Oller, The Swamp Fox: How Francis Marion Saved the American Revolution

“More battles, engagements, and skirmishes were fought in South Carolina during the Revolution than in any other colony. Conservative estimates place the number of combat actions in the state at more than two hundred, a third of all that took place in the entire war. No other colony had as many inches of its territory affected by battle; of the state’s forty-six present-day counties, forty-five ended up seeing Revolutionary War actions. Nearly 20 percent of all Americans who died in battle in the Revolution died in South Carolina in the last two years of the war.”
― John Oller, The Swamp Fox: How Francis Marion Saved the American Revolution

“He was whip-smart, detail-oriented, and strong-willed, but given to flippancy and sarcasm.”
― John Oller, White Shoe: How a New Breed of Wall Street Lawyers Changed Big Business and the American Century