Mike Church

This Day In Founders History – 13 August

On this day in 1781 (also noted by some as August 31), Brigadier General Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion, along with Colonel William Harden, led Patriot forces to lure British Major Thomas Fraser and his 450 soldiers into Parker’s Ferry for an ambush. Mel Gibson’s character in the movie The Patriot was loosely based on Marion.

On or about August 13, 1608, John Smith’s story of Jamestown’s first days as well as an early map, were sent to England on a supply ship to be submitted for publication. His accounts were published as A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Happened in Virginia.

One notable birthday on this day in history in 1814, that of William Lowndes Yancey, the “Patrick Henry of the Confederacy.” Lowndes declared, during the popularly elected Alabama secession convention in January 1861, that, “We propose to do as the Israelites did of old, under Divine direction—to withdraw our people from under the power that oppresses them, and, in doing so, like them, to take with us the Ark of the Covenant of our liberties.”