Been reading about Francis Marion . . .

     It was not inevitable that Francis Marion would become a patriot.  He was conciliatory, not radical, by nature;  he did not hate the English, who had provided asylum to his ancestors, granted land to his grandfather, and fought alongside him against the Cherokees; and he had long attended the Anglican Church.  Unlike the Scotch-Irish of the Williamsburg district in the Pee Dee region, the Huguenots of the Santee did not universally align themselves with the Whigs;  members of the prominent French families who were neighbors or relatives of the Marions sided with and even fought for the Tories during the Revolution.  And although the Marions, and their Huguenot neighbors, were generally well-to-do, slaveholding plantation owners, they were not part of the Charleston aristocracy from which the most rabid revolutionary faction of South Carolina emerged.
     Why, then, did Francis Marion so passionately take up the cause of independence?  The simplest and best explanation is that he was influenced by his extended family. . . .
      In short the Marions were true believers, and it was natural that Francis Marion became one himself.  Logically, as propertied slaveholders, they would have preferred maintaining the conservative status quo.  And as growers of rice and indigo, they profited greatly by trade with Britain;  it was not in their economic interest to sever that tie.  But as self-made men in a new land, they placed a higher value on self-rule.  They may have discarded their old French customs, but the Huguenots' historical antipathy toward unchecked monarchy lingered in their bosoms.

-John Oller,  The Swamp Fox:  How Francis Marion Saved The American Revolution