Chapter IV: The War for Independence (2)

The winter was deeply disheartening, nevertheless, for Washington. Having failed in the mist at Germantown, he withdrew his army to Valley Forge, whence he could watch Howe at Philadelphia, and move as he moved, and yet himself feel safe against attack; but utter demoralization had fallen upon the Congress, sitting in a sort of exile at York, and his army was brought to such straits of privation and suffering in its exposed camp as he had never been obliged to see it endure before. There was plenty of food in the country; plenty even at the disposal of Congress and in the stores of its commissariat. The British had overrun very little of the fertile country; the crops had been abundant and laborers had not been lacking to gather them in,—especially there in thriving Pennsylvania. But the Congress had lost all vigor alike in counsel and in action. Men of initiative had withdrawn from it to serve their states in the reorganization of their several governments and in the command of forces in the field. Sometimes scarcely a dozen members could be got together to take part in its deliberations. It yielded to intrigue,—even to intrigue against Washington; allowed its executive committees, and most of all the commissary department, upon which the army depended, to fall into disorganization; listened to censures and bickerings rather than to plans of action; lost the respect of the states, upon which its authority depended; and left the army almost to shift for itself for sustenance. Fortunately it was a mild winter. Fortunately Washington was masterful and indomitable, and proved equal to checkmating at a single move those who intrigued in the Congress to displace him. Despite every bitter experience of that dark and anxious season, he had when spring came an army stronger and fitter for service than it had been when he took it into winter quarters. The lengthened term of service had given him at last an army which might be drilled, and foreign officers,—notably the capable Steuben,—had taught him how to drill it.

General Howe’s winter passed easily and merrily enough in Philadelphia. The place was full of people of means and influence who hoped as heartily as Mr. Galloway did for the success of the British arms. Some of the leading Quakers of the town, whose influence was all for an accommodation of the quarrel with the mother country, had been arrested the previous summer (1777) and sent south by the patriot leaders; but many more were left who were of their mind, and General Howe met something like a welcome when he came in the autumn. The fashionable young women of the town were delighted to look their best and to use their charms to the utmost at all the balls and social gatherings that marked the gay winter of his stay, and their parents were not displeased to see them shine there. But for the soldiers’ coats one would have thought that peace had come again.

But the minds of the ministers in England were not so much at ease. In February, 1778, Lord North introduced and pressed through Parliament conciliatory measures of the most radical sort, practically retracing every misjudged step taken with regard to the colonies since 1763; and commissioners of peace were sent to America with almost plenipotentiary powers of accommodation. But that very month a formal treaty of alliance was signed between France and the United States; by the time the peace commissioners reached Philadelphia, England had a war with France on her hands as well as a war with the colonies; there was no rejoicing in the camp at Valley Forge over the news of Lord North’s unexpected turn of purpose, but there was very keen rejoicing when news of the French alliance came. The Congress would not treat with the commissioners. Conciliation had come too late; for the colonies the aspect of the war was too hopeful.

When the commissioners reached Philadelphia they found General Clinton about to abandon it. Sir Henry Clinton had succeeded General Howe in chief command in May. His orders were to evacuate Philadelphia and concentrate his forces once more at New York. The town was as full of excitement and dismay at the prospect as it had been but a little more than a year ago at news of the British approach. When the army began to move, three thousand loyalists abandoned the town with it, going with the stores by sea, while Sir Henry took his fifteen thousand men overland through the Jerseys again.

When he moved, Washington moved also; outstripped him; caught him at a disadvantage at Monmouth Court House (June 28, 1778); and would inevitably have beaten him most seriously had not Charles Lee again disobeyed him and spoiled the decisive movement of the day,—Charles Lee, the soldier of fortune whom the Americans had honored and trusted. He had disobeyed before, when Washington was retreating hard pressed from New York. This time he seemed to play the coward. It was not known until afterwards that he had played the traitor, too. Clinton got off, but in a sort of rout, leaving his wounded behind him. “Clinton gained no advantage except to reach New York with the wreck of his army,” was the watchful Frederick’s comment over sea. “America is probably lost for England.”

Even the seas were no longer free for the movements of the British fleets, now that France was America’s ally and French fleets were gathering under orders for the American coast. Every month the war had lasted the English had found their commerce and their movement of stores and transports more and more embarrassed by the American privateersmen. There were bold and experienced seamen at every port of the long coast. The little vessels which were so easily set up and finished by skilful carpenters and riggers in almost any quiet inlet were sure to be fast and deftly handled when they got to sea; kept clear of his Majesty’s fleets and of too closely guarded harbors; cruised whithersoever the wits of their sagacious masters took them; and had generally to be heavily overmatched to be beaten. They had taken more than five hundred British soldiers from the transports before the Congress at Philadelphia had uttered its Declaration of Independence. Their prizes numbered more than four hundred and fifty the year of Saratoga and Brandywine and the fight in the morning’s mist at Germantown, though there were seventy ships of war upon the coast. The very coasts of England herself were not safe against them. Mr. Franklin went to France in the autumn of 1776 with his pocket full of blank letters of marque, and American privateersmen from out the French ports caught prizes enough in English waters to keep the commissioners in Paris well found in money for their plans. In January, 1778, Captain Rathburne, in the _Providence_, actually seized the fort in the harbor of Nassau in New Providence of the Bahamas, and took possession of town and shipping; and in the spring of that same year John Paul Jones performed the same daring feat at Whitehaven by Solway Firth in England itself.

These privateersmen, it turned out, were more to be feared for the present than the fleets of France. The Count d’Estaing was, indeed, despatched to America with twelve ships of the line and six frigates, with four thousand troops aboard; and his fleet appeared off Sandy Hook in midsummer, 1778, while Sir Henry Clinton was still fresh from his fright at Monmouth. But the too cautious admiral came and went, and that was all. He would not attempt an attack upon the English fleet within the bay at New York, though it was of scarcely half his strength. His pilots told him his larger ships could not cross the bar. Newport was the only other harbor the English held; and there he allowed Lord Howe to draw him off. A storm separated the fleets before they could come to terms, and his cruise ended peaceably in Boston harbor. But it was a heavy thing for England to have French fleets to reckon with, and embarrassments thickened very ominously about her. She had absolutely no hold on America, it seemed, outside the lines actually occupied by her armies at Newport and New York; the very sea was beset, for her merchantmen; and France was now kindled into war against her.

And yet the Americans, too, were beset. They had not only their long coasts to watch and British armies to thwart and checkmate, but their western borders also to keep, against Tory and savage. The Iroquois country, in particular, and all the long valleys of the Mohawk, the Unadilla, and the Susquehanna, were filled with the terrors of raid and massacre throughout that disappointing and anxious summer of 1778. The stubborn loyalists of the forest country, with their temper still of the untamed highlands of old Scotland or of the intractable country-sides of old England, had been driven into exile by the uncompromising patriots, their neighbors, who outnumbered them. But they had not gone far. They had made their headquarters, the more dogged and determined of them, at Niagara, until this score should be settled. Sir John Johnson was still their leader, for all he had been so discomfited before Fort Stanwix; and John Butler and Walter Butler, father and son, men touched with the savagery of the redmen, their allies. Joseph Brant, that masterful spirit who was a sort of self-appointed king among the savage Mohawks, did not often willingly forget the precepts of that Christian creed to which good Mr. Wheelock had drawn him in his boyhood, and held the redmen back when he could from every wanton deed of blood; but the Butlers stopped at nothing, and white men and red made common cause against the border settlements. Their cruel strokes were dealt both far and near. Upon a day in July, 1778, never to be forgotten, twelve hundred men fell upon the far-away Wyoming Valley upon the Susquehanna and harried it from end to end until it was black and desolate. In November a like terrible fate fell upon peaceful Cherry Valley, close at hand. There could be no peace or quarter until the hands of these men were stayed.

But, though very slowly, the end came. The men who mustered in the patriotic ranks knew the forest and were masters of its warfare. They had only to turn to it in earnest to prevail. There were men upon the border, too, who needed but a little aid and countenance to work the work of pioneer statesmen on the western rivers. Most conspicuous among these was George Rogers Clark, the young Saxon giant who, in 1777, left his tasks as pioneer and surveyor on the lands which lay upon the south of the great river Ohio in far Kentucky, Virginia’s huge western county, and made his way back to the tide-water country to propose to Mr. Henry, now governor of the revolutionized commonwealth, an expedition for the conquest of the “Illinois country” which lay to the north of the river. He was but five-and-twenty, but he had got his stalwart stature where men came quickly into their powers, deep in the forests, where he had learned woodcraft and had already shown his mettle among men. Mr. Henry and Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Wythe and Mr. Madison, whom he consulted, approved his purpose very heartily. It was a thing which must be prepared for very quietly, and pushed, when once begun, with secrecy and quick despatch; but the mustering of men and the gathering of munitions and supplies were incidents which made no stir in those days of familiar war. Clark could bring together what force he pleased at Pittsburgh, and excite only the expectation that a new band of armed men were about to set out for the frontiers of Kentucky. In May, 1778, he was ready. He took but one hundred and eighty picked riflemen, a modest flotilla of small boats, and a few light pieces of artillery, but they sufficed. Before the summer was out he had gained easy mastery of the little settlements which lay to the northward upon the Mississippi and within the nearer valley of the Wabash. He had an infinitely pleasing way of winning the friendship of men upon any border, and the Frenchmen of the settlements of the Illinois country relished the change he promised them, liked well enough the prospect of being quit of the English power. There were few Englishmen to deal with.

When winter came Colonel Hamilton, the British commander at Detroit, came south into the forest with a motley force of five hundred men, mixed of regulars, Tories, and Indians, such as St. Leger had taken against Stanwix, and occupied Vincennes again, upon the Wabash; but Clark struck once more, sending his boats up the river and bringing his picked force straight across the frozen forests from Kaskaskia by the Mississippi; and by the end of February, 1779, Colonel Hamilton and all his levy were his prisoners. The Illinois country was added to Virginia, and the grant of her ancient charter, “up into the land, west and northwest,” seemed made good again by the daring of her frontiersmen. He could have taken Detroit itself, Clark declared, with but a few hundred men. While he cleared the northern rivers of the British arms a force like his own descended the Mississippi, seized Natchez, and cleared the southern reaches of the great stream.

That winter had witnessed a sharp shifting of the scene of the war in the east. The British commanders there had turned away from General Washington and the too closely guarded reaches of the Hudson to try for better fortune in the far south. In December, 1778, Clinton sent thirty-five hundred men from New York to the southern coasts by sea, and on the 29th Savannah was taken, with comparative ease, there being but a scant six hundred to defend it. The town once taken, it proved an easy matter, at that great remove from the centre of the American strength, to overrun the country back of it during the early weeks of 1779. But after that came delay again, and inaction, as of those who wait and doubt what next to do. The new year saw nothing else decisive done on either side. In April Spain made common cause with France against England; but Washington waited in vain the year through to see the fighting transferred to America. A few strategic movements about New York, where Clinton lay; a few raids by the British; a few sharp encounters that were not battles, and the year was over. The British made sallies here and there, to pillage and burn, to keep the country in awe and bring off whatever they could lay hands upon, striking sometimes along the coast as far as Connecticut and even the Chesapeake at the south; but armed bands were quick to muster to oppose and harass them wherever they went, and it was never safe for them to linger. Clinton thrust his lines out upon the river and fortified Stony Point; but Anthony Wayne stormed the place of a sudden, with twelve hundred men, and took it, with unshotted guns at the point of the bayonet before dawn on the morning of the 15th of July, and brought more than five hundred prisoners away with him, having come with that quick fury of reckless attack which made men call him Mad Anthony, and having as quickly withdrawn again. Harry Lee stormed Paulus Hook in like fashion, and the British were nowhere very easy within their lines. But, for the rest, there was little to break the monotony of waiting for news of the war at England’s door, where the fleets of the allies threatened her. Privateersmen were as busy as ever, and as much to be feared, almost, as the French cruisers themselves; but the formal operations of the war seemed vaguely postponed. Without the co-operation of a naval force it was impossible for Washington to do anything against Sir Henry at New York.

While he waited, therefore, he despatched General Sullivan with five thousand men into the forest country of the Mohawk and the Susquehanna to make an end of the cruel mischief wrought upon defenceless homes by the bitter Tories and their red allies. The little army, sent forward in divisions, swept through the country it was bidden clear like men who searched stream and valley upon a journey of discovery; converged to meet their hunted foes, but fifteen hundred strong, where they lay at bay within a bend of the Chemung,—the full rally of the forest country, British regulars, Tory rangers, Indian braves, Johnson, the Butlers, Joseph Brant, every leader they acknowledged, united to direct them,—and overwhelmed them; ravaged the seats of Seneca and Cayuga far and near, till neither village nor any growing thing that they could find upon which men could subsist was left this side the Genesee; stopped short only of the final thing they had been bidden attempt, the capture of the stronghold at Niagara itself.

That was a summer’s reckoning which redmen far and near were not likely to forget. In April a little army of frontiersmen under Colonel Evan Shelby, that stout pioneer out of Maryland who brought hot Welsh blood to the task, swept suddenly along the northward reaches of the Tennessee and harried the country of the Chickamaugas, among whom Tories and British alike had been stirring war. In August, Colonel Brodhead, ordered to co-operate with General Sullivan, had taken six hundred men from his post at Fort Pitt, whence Clark had made his exit into the west, and had destroyed the Indian settlements by the Alleghany and upon French Creek, the old routes of the French from the lakes to the Ohio. Such work was never finished. The Indians were for a little dislodged, disconcerted, and put to sad straits to live; but they were not conquered. The terror bred a deeper thirst for vengeance among them, and a short respite of peace was sure to be followed when a new year came in with fresh flashes of war on the border, as lurid and ominous as ever. The danger was lessened, nevertheless. The final conquest of the Indian country was at least begun. The backwoodsmen were within sight of ultimate mastery when once peace should bring settlers crowding westward again.

The fighting at sea that memorable year of doubt was of a like import,—full of daring and stubborn courage, planned and carried through with singular initiative and genius, quick with adventure, bright with every individual achievement, but of necessity without permanent consequence. Late in July, 1779, Captain Paul Jones had sailed from a port of France in command of a little squadron, half American, half French, with which the energy of Mr. Franklin had supplied him. His flag-ship, the _Bon Homme Richard_, was a worn-out French East Indiaman, fitted with forty guns, many of which were unserviceable; his French consorts were light craft, lightly armed; only one ship of the squadron was fully fit for the adventures he promised himself, having come fresh from the stocks in America, and she was intrusted to the command of a French captain who obeyed orders or not, as he pleased. But Jones was a man to work with what he had, and made even that improvised fleet suffice. With it he cruised the whole length of the western coast of Ireland and circled Scotland. Off Flamborough Head he fell in with the _Serapis_, 44, and the _Countess of Scarborough_, 20, the convoy of a fleet of merchantmen, and himself took the larger ship almost unassisted in a desperate fight after sunset, in the first watch of the night of the 23d of September. Neither ship survived the encounter forty-eight hours, so completely had they shot each other to pieces, and no man who followed the sea was likely to forget what he heard of that close grapple in the gathering night in the North Sea. “If I fall in with him again, I will make a lord of him,” Jones exclaimed, when he heard that the King had knighted Captain Pearson, of the _Serapis_, for the gallant fight.

For a little, in the autumn, it looked as if the naval aid for which General Washington waited had come at last. The Count d’Estaing was in the West Indies with a strong fleet, from an encounter with which the English commander in those waters had drawn off to port again to refit. The count was willing, while his hands were free, to co-operate in an attack upon the southern coast at Savannah. A portion of Washington’s army was sent south to join General Lincoln in South Carolina for the attempt. Count d’Estaing put six thousand troops aboard his fleet, and by the 16th of September was within the harbor. But he did not strike quickly or boldly enough, took the slow way of siege to reduce the place, suffered the English commander to make good both the rally of his scattered force and the fortification of his position, and had done nothing when it was high time for him to be back in the Indies to guard the possessions of his own king against the English. A last assault (October 9th) failed and he withdrew.

The next year a like disappointment was added. In midsummer a French fleet arrived upon the northern coast, but it proved impossible to use it. On the 10th of July a French squadron put in at Newport and landed a force of six thousand men under the Comte de Rochambeau; but a powerful British fleet presently blockaded the port, and Rochambeau could not prudently withdraw while the fleet was threatened. He had been ordered to put himself at General Washington’s disposal; but he could not do so till the blockade was raised. Meanwhile not only Georgia but the entire South seemed lost and given over to British control. In the spring, Clinton had concentrated all his forces once more at New York; and then, leaving that all-important place strong enough to keep Washington where he was, he had himself taken eight thousand men by sea to Charleston. Two thousand more troops, already in the South, joined him there, and by the 12th of May (1780) he had taken not only the place itself, but General Lincoln and three thousand men besides. South Carolina teemed with loyalists. Partisan bands, some serving one side, some the other, swept and harried the region from end to end. Wherever the British moved in force, they moved as they pleased, and were masters of the country. In June General Clinton deemed it already safe to take half his force back to New York, and Cornwallis was left to complete the work of subjugation.

That same month the Congress conferred the chief command in the South upon General Horatio Gates, who had been in command of the army to which Burgoyne had surrendered at Saratoga,—the army which Schuyler had made ready and which Morgan and Arnold had victoriously handled. Intriguers had sought, while Washington lay at Valley Forge, to substitute Gates for the commander-in-chief; now he was to show how happy a circumstance it was that that selfish intrigue had failed. He met Cornwallis at Camden, in South Carolina, his own force three thousand men, Cornwallis’s but two thousand, and was utterly, even shamefully, defeated (August 16, 1780). “We look on America as at our feet,” said Horace Walpole, complacently, when the news had made its way over sea.

And certainly it seemed as if that dark year brought nothing but disaster upon the Americans. It was now more evident than ever that they had no government worthy of the name. The Congress had no more authority now than it had had in 1774, when it was admitted to be nothing but a “Congress of the Committees of Correspondence”; and it was not now made up, as it had then been, of the first characters in America, the men of the greatest force and initiative in the patriotic party. It could advise, but it could not command; and the states, making their own expenditures, which seemed heavy enough, maintaining their own militia, guarding their own interests in the war, following their own leaders, often with open selfishness and indifference to the common cause, paid less and less heed to what it asked them to do. It could not raise money by taxation; it could raise very little by loan, having no legal power to make good its promises of repayment. Beaumarchais found to his heavy cost that it was next to impossible to recover the private moneys advanced through “Roderigue Hortalez et Cie.” The troops upon whom Washington and his generals depended were paid in “continental” paper money, which, by 1780, had grown so worthless that a bushel of wheat could scarcely be had for a month’s pay. Wholesale desertion began. Enlisted men by the score quit the demoralized camps. It was reckoned that as many as a full hundred a month went over to the enemy, if only to get food and shelter and clothing. Those who remained in the depleted ranks took what they needed from the farms about them, and grew sullen and mutinous. Promises of money and supplies proved as fruitless as promises of reinforcements from France.

Even deliberate treason was added. Benedict Arnold, whom every soldier in the continental ranks deemed a hero because of the gallant things he had done at Quebec and Saratoga, and whom Washington had specially loved and trusted, entered into correspondence with the enemy, and plotted to give West Point and the posts dependent upon it into the hands of the British. Congress had been deeply unjust to him, promoting his juniors and inferiors and passing him over; a thousand slights had cut him; a thousand subtle forces of discouragement and of social temptation had been at work upon him, and he had yielded,—to pique, to bitter disappointment, to the disorders of a mind unstable, irritable, without nobility. His treason was discovered in time to be foiled, but the heart-breaking fact of it cut Washington to the quick, like a last and wellnigh fatal stroke of bitter dismay. Who could be trusted now? and where was strength to be got wherewith to carry the languishing work to a worthy finish?

It was the worst of all the bad signs of the times that no government could be agreed upon that would give the young states a real union, or assure them of harmony and co-operation in the exercise of the independence for which they were struggling. Definitive articles of confederation had been suggested as of course at the time the Declaration of Independence was adopted; and the next year (November 15, 1777) the Congress had adopted the plan which Mr. Dickinson had drawn up and which its committee had reported July 12, 1776. But the states did not all accept it, and without unanimous adoption it could not go into operation. All except Delaware and Maryland accepted it before the close of 1778, and Delaware added her ratification in 1779; but Maryland still held out,—waiting until the great states, like Virginia, should forego some part of their too great preponderance and advantage in the prospective partnership by transferring their claims to the great northwestern territories to the proposed government of the confederation; and her statesmanlike scruples still kept the country without a government throughout that all but hopeless year 1780.

But the autumn showed a sudden turning of the tide. Cornwallis had ventured too far from his base of operations on the southern coast. He had gone deep into the country of the Carolinas, north of him, and was being beset almost as Burgoyne had been when he sought to cross the forests which lay about the upper waters of the Hudson. Gates had been promptly superseded after his disgraceful discomfiture and rout at Camden, and the most capable officers the long war had bred were now set to accomplish the task of forcing Cornwallis to a checkmate: Nathanael Greene, whose quality Washington had seen abundantly tested at Trenton and Princeton, at the Brandywine, at Germantown, and at Monmouth; the dashing Henry Lee, whom nature and the hard school of war had made a master of cavalry; the veteran and systematic Steuben; Morgan, who had won with Arnold in the fighting about Saratoga, and had kept his name unstained; and William Washington, a distant kinsman of the commander-in-chief, whom English soldiers were to remember with Lee as a master of light horsemen. The wide forests were full, too, of partisan bands, under leaders whom the British had found good reason to dread.

The conquest of the back country of the Carolinas was always doing and to be done. The scattered settlements and lonely plantations were, indeed, full of men who cared little for the quarrel with the mother country and held to their old allegiance as of course, giving to the King’s troops ready aid and welcome; and there were men there, as everywhere, who loved pillage and all lawless adventure, upon whom the stronger army could always count to go in its ranks upon an errand of subjugation; but there were also men who took their spirit and their principles from the new days that had come since the passage of the Stamp Act, and, though they were driven from their homes and left to shift for themselves for mere subsistence when the King’s forces were afield, they came back again when the King’s men were gone, and played the part, albeit without Indian allies, that the ousted Tories played in the forest country of New York. The English commanders at Savannah and Charleston had hit at last, nevertheless, upon effective means of holding, not their seaports merely, but the country itself. The forces they sent into the interior were made up, for the most part, of men recruited in America, and were under the command of officers fitted by school and temperament for their irregular duty of keeping a whole country-side in fearful discipline of submission. Many a formidable band of “Whigs” took the field against them, but were without a base of supplies, moved among men who spied upon them, and were no match in the long run for Tarleton and Ferguson,—Tarleton with his reckless, sudden onset and savage thoroughness of conquest, and Ferguson with his subtile gifts at once of mastery and of quiet judgment that made him capable of succeeding either as a soldier who compelled or as a gentleman who won men to go his way and do his will. South Carolina seemed once and again to lie almost quiet under these men.

But Ferguson, for all he had the gifts of a soldier statesman, had gone too far. He had carried his persuasion of arms to the very foothills of the western mountains, and had sent his threats forward into the western country that lay beyond the passes of the mountains, where hardy frontiersmen of whom he knew almost nothing had so far kept their homes against the redmen without thought of turning to the east. His threats had angered and aroused them. They had put their riflemen from the back country of Carolina and Virginia into the saddle hundreds strong, had pushed league upon league through the passes of the mountains, from the far-off waters of the Holston, and had surrounded and utterly overwhelmed him at King’s Mountain (October 7, 1780). There he lost a thousand men and his own life. “A numerous army appeared on the frontier,” reported Lord Rawdon, “drawn from Nolachucky and other settlements beyond the mountains, whose very names had been unknown to us.” The hold of the British upon the inland settlements was of a sudden loosened, and Cornwallis had reason to know at once what a difference that made to him.

BORMAY & CO., N. Y.]

Early in December came General Greene to take the place of Gates, and new difficulties faced the English commander. Greene kept no single force afield, to be met and checkmated, but sent one part of his little army towards the coast to cut Cornwallis’s communications, and another southward against the inland posts and settlements where scattered garrisons lay between the commander-in-chief and his base at Charleston in the south. With the first detachment went Francis Marion, a man as formidable in strategy and sudden action as Ferguson, and the men who had attached themselves to him as if to a modern Robin Hood. With the second went Daniel Morgan, a man made after the fashion of the redoubtable frontiersmen who had brought Ferguson his day of doom at King’s Mountain. Tarleton was sent after Morgan with eleven hundred men, found him at the Cowpens (January 17, 1781), just within the border upon which King’s Mountain lay, and came back a fugitive, with only two hundred and seventy men. Greene drew his forces together again, and at Guilford Court House Cornwallis beat him, outnumbered though he was (March 15th). But to beat Greene, it seemed, was of no more avail than to beat General Washington. The country was no safer, the communications of the army were as seriously threatened, the defeated army was as steady and as well in hand after the battle as before; and the English withdrew to Wilmington, on the coast.

It seemed a hazardous thing to take an army thence southward again, with supplies, through the forests where Greene moved; news came that General Arnold was in Virginia with a considerable body of Clinton’s troops from New York, to anticipate what the southern commander had planned to do for the conquest of the Old Dominion when the Carolinas should have been “pacified” from end to end; and Cornwallis determined to move northward instead of southward, and join Arnold in Virginia. Greene moved a little way in his track, and then turned southward again against the garrisons of the inland posts. Lord Rawdon beat him at Hobkirk’s Hill (April 25th) and held him off at Eutaw Springs (September 8th); but both times the English withdrew to save their communications; and, though the work was slow in the doing, before winter came again they were shut within the fortifications of Charleston and the country-sides were once more in American possession, to be purged of loyalist bands at leisure.

In Virginia, Lord Cornwallis moved for a little while freely and safely enough; but only for a little while. Baron Steuben had been busy, winter and spring, raising recruits there for an army of defence; General Washington hurried the Marquis de Lafayette southward with twelve hundred light infantry from his own command; and by midsummer, 1781, Lafayette was at the British front with a force strong enough to make it prudent that Cornwallis should concentrate his strength and once more make sure of his base of supplies at the coast. His watchful opponents out-manœuvred him, caught his forces once and again in detail, and made his outposts unsafe. By the first week in August he had withdrawn to the sea and had taken post behind intrenchments at Yorktown, something more than seven thousand strong.

There, upon the peninsula which he deemed his safest coign of vantage, he was trapped and taken. At last the French were at hand. The Comte de Grasse, with twenty-eight ships of the line, six frigates, and twenty thousand men, was in the West Indies. Washington had begged him to come at once either to New York or to the Chesapeake. In August he sent word that he would come to the Chesapeake. Thereupon Washington once again moved with the sudden directness he had shown at Trenton and Princeton. Rochambeau was free now to lend him aid. With four thousand Frenchmen and two thousand of his own continentals, Washington marched all the long four hundred miles straightway to the York River, in Virginia. There he found Cornwallis, as he had hoped and expected, already penned between Grasse’s fleet in the bay and Lafayette’s trenches across the peninsula. His six thousand men, added to Lafayette’s five thousand and the three thousand put ashore from the fleet, made short work enough of the siege, drawn closer and closer about the British; and by the 19th of October (1781) they accepted the inevitable and surrendered. The gallant Cornwallis himself could not withhold an expression of his admiration for the quick, consummate execution of the plans which had undone him, and avowed it with manly frankness to Washington. “But, after all,” he cried, “your Excellency’s achievements in New Jersey were such that nothing could surpass them.” He liked the mastery by which he had been outplayed and taken.

Here our general _authorities_ are the same as for the period
covered by the last chapter. But to these we now add Edward
J. Lowell’s _The United States of America, 1775-1782_, in the
seventh volume of Winsor’s _Narrative and Critical History
of America_; John Jay’s _Peace Negotiations, 1782-1783_, in
the same volume of Winsor; G. W. Greene’s _Historical View
of the American Revolution_; the second volume of W. B.
Weeden’s _Economic and Social History of New England_; P. O.
Hutchinson’s _Life and Letters of Thomas Revolution_; Lorenzo
Sabine’s _Biographical Sketches of Adherents to the British
Crown_; George E. Ellis’s _The Loyalists and their Fortunes_,
in the seventh volume of Winsor; Edward E. Hale’s _Franklin
in France_; George Ticknor Curtis’s _Constitutional History
of the United States_; and William H. Trescot’s _Diplomacy of
the American Revolution_. Abundant references to authorities
on the several campaigns of the revolutionary war may be found
in Albert B. Hart and Edward Channing’s _Guide to American
History_, an invaluable manual.

The _sources_ for the period may be found in the contemporary
pamphlets, speeches, and letters published at the time
and since, among which may be mentioned, as of unusual
individuality, Thomas Paine’s celebrated pamphlet entitled
_Common Sense_, the writings of Joseph Galloway, some of which
are reproduced in Stedman and Hutchinson’s _Library of American
Literature_, and St. John de Crevecœur’s _Letters from an
American Farmer_. Here again we rely, too, on the _Journals of
Congress_ and the _Secret Journals of Congress_; the _Debates
of Parliament_; Peter Force’s _American Archives_; Hezekiah
Niles’s _Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America_;
_The Annual Register_; Jared Sparks’s _Correspondence of the
American Revolution_ and _Diplomatic Correspondence of the
American Revolution_; Francis Wharton’s _The Revolutionary
Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States_; Thomas
Anburey’s _Travels through the Interior Parts of America
(1776-1781)_; the Marquis de Chastellux’s _Travels in North
America in the Years 1780, 1781, and 1782_; and the _Memoirs_
and _Collections_ of the Historical Societies of the several
original states.