belteshazzar

In 1781 ..... a BESSENT helped amputate the City of London's tentacles that were strangling a brand new nation... The United States of America. Today... We are witnessing another BESSENT a descendant of the first... Finishing the job. “As for this damned old fox, the Devil himself could not catch him.” Those were the words Banastre Tarleton spat after chasing Francis Marion twenty-six miles through the swamps and still losing him. Two centuries later, the man now running the U.S. Treasury deliberately took the same name. This is a message to those he means to defeat.... Scott Bessent, born in Conway and long rooted in Charleston, chose “Swamp Fox” as his Secret Service codename. One of his own ancestors, John Bessent, rode as a private in Marion’s brigade in 1781. Both families carry French Huguenot blood; Bessent is active in Charleston’s historic Huguenot Church, the same community that helped shape the Lowcountry Marion defended. Marion was the original—a slight, wiry Huguenot planter’s son from Berkeley County who first learned war against the Cherokee. After Charleston fell in 1780 and Gates’s army was wrecked at Camden, conventional resistance in South Carolina collapsed. Marion didn’t. He gathered a handful of volunteer horsemen, based them on places like Snow’s Island, and turned the unnavigable cypress swamps and blackwater creeks into a weapon. They struck at dawn or from dense cover, then vanished. Bessent later joked he hadn’t fully clocked the second meaning of the nickname: "...a fox loose inside Washington’s political swamp." The hedge-fund macro strategist and government outsider has leaned into the metaphor—someone who prefers asymmetric, terrain-smart moves over frontal assaults. The parallel is deliberate. Marion kept the Revolution alive in the South when it looked finished. Bessent carries the same family story and the same name into a very different fight. The swamps have changed; the fox hasn’t.