Partisan/Irregular Warfare
The means and ways to wage war have evolved over centuries of human conflict. During the Revolutionary War, armies typically engaged in linear warfare, where soldiers formed a line of battle and stood side by side while delivering massive volleys of musket fire. Noted military strategy author William Lind refers to this as the “first generation” of warfare, which took hold during the seventeenth century. After countless years of internecine conflicts in Europe, the major powers signed the Peace of Westphalia (1648). Besides bringing the bloody Thirty Years’ War to a close, the treaty aimed to eliminate unregulated factional conflict.
Fast forward to the late eighteenth century and imagine thousands of well-armed Redcoats and Hessian mercenaries piling off boats into New York and Boston. All the Crown’s crack troops, along with their soldiers for hire, were highly-trained, well-armed, and intimately familiar with the deadliest aspects of linear warfare. On the open field of battle, with muskets and cannons blazing, the British Army was an almost unstoppable juggernaut. The Colonial Army occasionally held its own in battle and frequently inflicted grave casualties on the British. Nevertheless, it didn’t take very long for key Northern cities to fall at the outset of the war.

All of this changed, however, when irregular militias entered the fray. The impact of partisan tactics was particularly felt in the South, where dense swamps and heavily forested highlands prevented the linear deployment of British forces. One of the best knows guerrilla fighters during this period was South Carolina’s Francis Marion, otherwise known as the “Swamp Fox” for his deadly cunning and ability to disappear into the shadows. The late, great military historian Jac Weller even went as far to note that, “The Southern patriot militia or partizan [sic] forces, acting alone or in combination with Continentals, were the salvation of the American cause.”
Marion and the Southern militias have long been the objects of American Revolutionary War scholars for decades, but infrequently covered in many textbooks. Of equal interest to military history, enthusiasts were the specific tactics of partisan warfighters, which eventually ushered out William Lind’s “first generation” of warfare. Weller notes, for instance, that Marion was a master of conducting ambushes on unsuspecting British columns in the South Carolina low country. He instructed sharpshooters, armed with accurate rifles, to cause chaos by targeting British officers from concealed positions. Militiamen armed with smoothbore muskets, meanwhile, loaded their weapons with improvised shot. Close quarter blasts from these weapons mutilated and horrified the Redcoats.