Opening paragraphs................

     The South Carolina that Francis Marion set out to liberate from British control in August 1780 was the key theater of operation in the American Revolution at that point.  It was also in turmoil—a society riven by war and rooted in lawlessness, fear, violence, and oppression.
      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