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This urban legend about Banastre has a rather odd history because it is both very old (created before 1830) and very new (essentially forgotten until 2000, when it was unexpectedly revived).

In an interview with Cynthia Fuchs (7 July 2000), talking about his role as Colonel Tavington in The Patriot Jason Isaacs made the comment,

"He was one of the swaggering young British officers who expected to inherit the new world. He'd ride around with a map in his pocket, and after each victory, carve out a bigger piece for himself, and he also carried around a book on polygamy, because there were going to be new rules in this new world."

He repeated essentially the same thing in a couple of other interviews and magazine articles. Since we first encountered it, this comment has been a source of great curiosity to the group of folks who have contributed to this website. Among us all, we have clocked at least a hundred years' worth of interest in Banastre Tarleton. We thought we knew all the history, the legends, and the outright lies. Yet none of us had ever heard of this one. It obviously wasn't true -- Tarleton would never ever have considered settling in the American wilderness, even if His Majesty's Government would have allowed him to define his own laws, which of course it never would have -- but we just couldn't figure out where Mr. Isaacs might have read it.

It took a bit of luck, but while searching for something else, I stumbled over the polygamy story -- and the source made it obvious why no one was familiar with it. It comes from Parson Weems. Specifically, it comes from a book called The Life of General Francis Marion, A Celebrated Partisan Officer, in the Revolutionary War, against the British and Tories in South Carolina and Georgia by Brig. Gen. P. Horry and Parson M.L. Weems. It was first published in either 1809 or 1824 (the current edition cites these two dates in different places, and I don't know which is correct) and is still (unfortunately) in print. We all knew it existed, but none of us had bothered to read it because it was thoroughly discredited as history within the lifetime of the participants.

Mason Locke Weems (apparently he was not even a real minister) is not well remembered by name, but some of his flights of imagination have endured. The most famous is the legend of George Washington not telling a lie after he chopped down that cherry tree, a tale which first appeared in Weems' A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington (1800). In The Making of the Prefident, Marvin Kitman aptly describes this "biography" as a "seminal work of historical fiction."¹

Weems was quite a notorious liar even in his own lifetime. According to the preface on the 2000 edition of his Life of Marion, Peter Horry (one of Marion's subordinates and lifelong friends) was so incensed when he read what Weems had done to his account that he wrote, "You have carved and mutilated it with so many erroneous statements your embellishments, observation and remarks, must necessarily be erroneous as proceeding from false grounds. ... Can you suppose I can be pleased with reading particulars (though so elevated, by you) of Marion and myself, when I know such never existed."²

If he couldn't even get the information on Marion right, when he had it directly from a first-hand, friendly source, you can well imagine what Weems did to "the enemy" in the persons of Banastre Tarleton and his compatriots.

The harem reference runs:

"Some of them had Dr. Madan's famous book called 'Thylipthora, or a Defence of Polygamy,' with which they were prodigiously taken, and talked very freely of reducing the system to practice. Cornwallis, it seems, was to be a bashaw of three tails -- Rawdon and Tarleton, of two each -- and as a natural appendage of such high rank, they were to have their seraglios and harems filled with the greatest beauties of the country."³

It continues on in similar vein. Quite amusing and quite impossible to take seriously -- by anyone other than Weems. As for where Weems got the idea, when I lucked into a copy of George Hanger's memoirs, I discovered one possible source. Hanger obviously was a fan of "Dr. Madan's famous book called 'Thylipthora, or a Defence of Polygamy,' " so perhaps we must give Weems credit for actually having heard some fifteenth-hand tale of George's silly philosophizing around the campfire at night. Of course, we immediately take that credit away again since he went on to represent it as "fact" in his retelling. More likely, since his book was written no earlier than 1809 (and Hanger's memoirs came out in 1801) he simply saw a copy of the memoirs and made up his own story from there.

Is it possible that Tarleton, Hanger, Rawdon et al. ever said any of the things Weems lays at their door? Oh, certainly. They were young men, far from home, in military service. Spinning wild and improbable tales about women is a soldier's tradition that stretches from Sumer and Egypt to Vietnam and the Gulf War. Is it possible they said it seriously? Within the context of their culture's social rules, they had no more hope of achieving that lifestyle than does the average college frat-boy today.

Since Jason Isaacs has commented that he did all his research electronically, Weems' peculiar little book had to be somewhere on line. (We have the horrible suspicion he may have also read William Dobein James, which definitely is available on-line.) I eventually found it, on a classics authors library. See the links page. If you decide to read it, just remember: this book is fiction. It's not even good fiction.

Notes:

¹ Marvin Kitman, The Making of the Prefident, 1789 (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), p271. [ back ]

² Brig. Gen. P. Horry and Parson M. L. Weems, The Life of General Francis Marion (Winston-Salem, N.C.: John F. Blair Publisher, 2000), n.p. (first page of the "Introduction to the 2000 Edition.") [ back ]

³ Horry and Weems, p65. [ back ]