Late in the summer of 1780, as Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates led a Continental army toward South Carolina to try to roll back the British conquest of the province and prepared to meet the British at Camden, he sent Col. Francis Marion south toward the Santee River to gather local militia forces and prevent a British retreat. Marion, a Continental officer who had escaped the fall of Charleston only because of a broken ankle, arrived at Witherspoon’s Ferry on August 17, 1780, leading a ragtag band of fewer than twenty men, “some white, some black, and all mounted, but most of them miserably equipped,” and took command of the Williamsburg Militia. William Dobein James, then a fifteen-year-old militiaman, later recalled Marion as below middle stature, well set in body but badly formed in the knees and ankles, still limping on one leg, with a remarkably steady countenance, an aquiline nose, a projecting chin, a large high forehead, and black, piercing eyes; he wore a close round-bodied crimson jacket of coarse texture and a leather cap, part of the uniform of the second regiment, with a silver crescent in front inscribed “Liberty or Death.”