Chapter IV

THE LAST TURN OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WHEEL; ACCELERATIONS; SLOWINGS; THE
GRIST.

1780–1783.

The different Opening of 1780 for those who pushed and those who
obstructed the Revolutionary Wheel.—The Strain on both Sides.—Hard
Spring in Charleston in Consequence of Leaden Hail Storms.—How these
Storms spread; and how the Crops were saved from Ruin by Marion,
Sumter, and Pickens.—The Carolina Game-Cock, and his sharp Spurs in
the Sides of Cornwallis and Tarleton.—Gates broken down, and the
Presidency lost at Camden.—Greene set up in his Place, proving a good
standing Color.—The Village of St. Louis assailed.—André humiliates
himself, and is exalted.—Arnold gets $50,000, a Brigadier’s
Commission, and is elected by General Contempt into the Order of Judas
Iscariot.—New Year’s Day among the Pennsylvania Troops at
Morristown.—The United States Treasury, made less Celestial, becomes
defiled by filthy Lucre.—The Goring and Tossing of Tarleton by Morgan
at the Cow-Pens.—An Irish-like Fight at Eutaw Springs.—Southern
Hunters around the British Flock at Charleston and Savannah.—The
troublesome Seizure of Virginia Assemblymen.—How the Captors missed
burning their Fingers with Jefferson’s red Hair.—Cornwallis enmeshed
at Yorktown.—What Lord North said.—What the English George threatened
and what the American George did.—“Let there be Peace”; and Peace
was.—What England lost and America gained.—The kind of Grist obtained.

The military revolutionary wheel had now been revolving nearly five years. Seventeen Hundred and Eighty began with very different prospects for the promoters and opposers of its operations. The former were poor, their workmen wretchedly clothed, badly fed, discontented with the small pay promised, and often threatening to strike because that pay was only irregularly and partially paid, and, when given, only afforded in depreciated and depreciating new paper promises. The latter, on the contrary, with that obstinacy which sinks deeper and rises higher with the rising tide of opposition, and possessed of resources to match this dogged pride, made larger preparations to open the coming campaign. Parliament voted to add to its colonial army one hundred and twenty thousand men, and wrought up the sinews to carry this then enormous live weight to twenty million sterling pounds.

It was a hard spring in Charleston; for it hailed heavy iron hail-stones from Sir Henry Clinton’s batteries, from April 1 to May 12, 1780; when the city became so riddled that it gave up. The storm soon spread, bursting over the entire States of North and South Carolina, and beating down for a time, as with iron flails, the growing harvest of patriotism. A good part of the crop was, however, finally saved during the late summer, by Marion, Pickens, and Sumter, who, with their sturdy little bands of reapers, toiled all through the blinding storms with high spirits, and without pay. Sumter was well called “The Carolina Game-cock”; for he often drove his sharp spurs into Corwallis and Tarleton, and roused a very cheery feeling by his crows through those gray mornings of liberty.

Gates, who had so successfully administered Saratoga water to Burgoyne and his men three years before, was despatched in haste to look after the obstinate and severe cases of Clinton, Rawdon, and Cornwallis in South Carolina; but, as it often happens, the remedies successfully applied to one patient often fail with another. At Camden—a name which should have been propitious to American arms—the army of Gates was seized by that frightful epidemic, a panic; and ran away, carrying off with them their general’s sole chance for the next Presidency.

Nathaniel Greene, a Rhode Island Quaker,—the ungloved right hand of Washington, who had served in the army with brilliant and yet solid success since June, 1775,—succeeded the unsuccessful Gates in August, 1780; but the heats of summer melted out all serious campaign attempts on either side, through the South, during that season.

St. Louis, then a village sixteen years old with nine hundred and sixty inhabitants, exalted above the dirty Mississippi on two terraces, or a double platform of earth, was assailed by some Englishmen and Indians from Michilimackinac,—as it has often been since, by people of all nations; but on this first invasion the invaders were as glad to get away as their successors have been to stay.

Meanwhile General Greene was detailed to act as president of the court of inquiry upon Major André, that historical romance of our war, as Mary Queen of Scots is the sentiment of the tough annals of Scotland. This handsome, romantic, cultivated, and high-bred Englishman, then in his twenty-ninth year, who had unsuccessfully courted in Ireland the future mother of Maria Edgeworth, the novelist, and then won a better fortune from the golden hands of trade, had afterwards flung himself into the stern arms of war. Lowering himself to the mean business of carrying dangerous, sealed secrets in his boots, outside the mails, contrary to all laws, and caught in the act by three militiamen, who, after playing cards with each other, played a sharper and more patriotic game with him, he was most disagreeably elevated to the rank of a spy, and sent in consequence to find out the great secret on a very lonesome journey.

His principal, Benedict Arnold,—who had suffered the canker of excessive extravagance to eat through his brave and well-shredded military coat,—escaping from our dangling line into the English straighter ones, received fifty thousand dollars and a brigadier-general’s commission. He was subsequently elected by General Contempt into the celebrated order of Judas Iscariot.

The campaign of 1781 was inaugurated New-Year’s day by a good-natured and semi-patriotic insurrection among the Pennsylvanian troops stationed at Morristown, New Jersey; not on account of the Jersey ways, usually deemed so hostile to foreigners, but by reason of the scant fare, clothing, and pocket-money to which they were reduced. Marching to Princeton, they were met by emissaries from General Clinton, with large offers of bounty-money to enlist for King George; but the noble-minded troops, spurning these attempts upon their virtue, delivered up these agents, as spies, to General Wayne. A committee from Congress relieved the just needs of the insurgents, and offered them rewards for their patriotic treatment of the spies; but they refused to accept pay for what, they truly asserted, was but their duty.

With such metal were the new moulds of American life filling up. By such iron bands was the Revolutionary wheel made strong and irreversible.

The attention of Congress was now seriously and effectively drawn to the condition of the army,—the crank of the wheel. Robert Morris was appointed Superintendent of the Treasury; and the treasury—till then a very celestial affair, undefiled by filthy lucre, and having out-goes in the place of in-gots—was tolerably supplied by taxation at home and loans abroad.

Again the scenes of the war lie south of Baltimore. At the Cowpens, in South Carolina, Colonel Tarleton was caught on the horns of Morgan, three hundred of his men tossed fatally, and the rest, with their leader, severely gored and gashed. Cornwallis soon found that the Southern commander was not a Greenehorn. At Guilford Court-House, the English leader, with a superior force, met the American general, with 4,500 men, and after a severe grapple, fell back with the air and conviction of a man disagreeably undeceived. The Americans now seemed to have received an ally in general success; for in April, May, and June they retook, one after another, all the forts, outposts, cities, and military points occupied by Lord Rawdon. On the Catawba, Morgan gave to Tarleton a little more grape, which sent his lines reeling backwards in awkward confusion towards the main body.

As soon as September began to cool the air and make travelling tolerable in a warm climate, General Greene, with an American party, and Colonel Stewart, with an English company, took it into their heads mutually to visit Eutaw Springs, about fifty miles west of Charleston. The meeting was unusually lively; in fact, quite an Irish gathering. Like most Irish fights, too, it was impossible to say, which had the worst of it. Both sides held a funeral wake over about three hundred killed, and claimed the fewest graves and victory.

After this affair, the British flock, which had been scattered more or less over the two Carolinas and Georgia, gathered back and alighted for a long time on two favorite spots, Charleston and Savannah. Near them gradually collected ready American hunters and fowlers, fond of foreign game, vigilant in watching and very desirous of bagging the entire lot.

Meanwhile, Cornwallis had advanced northward through North Carolina into Virginia, where the young French marquis—more fortunate than the almost useless French fleets, first under D’Estaing, and afterwards under Admiral De Ternay—was doing good service. The route of Cornwallis was nearly along the present track of the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad, which fortunately for him was not then in existence, to invite him to use its delaying time-tables and dangerous rails. As it was, he reached Petersburg in the course of time, and in safety.

A detachment sent to Charlottesville, where the Legislature of Virginia was in session, seized several of those most unmanageable specimens of the human race, members of assembly, troublesome enough when let alone, but as prisoners wholly incapable of definition, exchange, or valuation. The squad came near burning their fingers by taking the red-haired and red-vested Jefferson, whose term as Governor had expired only two days before, but around whose head there yet lingered enough of the aureola of official dignity to make him worth several cart-loads of assemblymen.

For Cornwallis himself the three military fates—Washington, Rochambeau, and Lafayette—were securely and steadily spinning lines for his entanglement. At last they enmeshed him at Yorktown. Nine thousand Americans and seven thousand Frenchmen held the netting which, gathered in fold after fold, finally, October 19, 1781, caught the whole shoal,—Cornwallis, that voracious old pike which had devoured scores of American armored fish, and 7,000 others. In this splendid haul were found 235 cannon, 8,000 small arms, and regimental colors enough to supply all the state-houses for the next sixty-five years.

When Lord George Germain hastened with the disagreeable and accelerating news to Lord North, the premier raised his hands wildly in the air, and exclaimed, with an oath too big to fit our Comic History, “It is all over.”

For the first time, during the last six years, Lord North was right.

George III. stormed loudly, and, at a hint that American independence must follow, threatened to freight a large boat with his ponderous heaviness, and be transported to Hanover; but he soon concluded to take another bucolic roll in the rich English clover, and to postpone turning himself out into the thin grazing lands along the Weser.

The American George rejoiced with temperate joy, thanked God for the crowning mercy, ordered divine service to be performed throughout the camps, and thanksgiving turkeys to be rendered to, and thanksgiving by, the troops. And so ended 1781, as all years should end, with thanksgiving and turkey.

Christmas dinners, or something else in America, had the effect of turning the English stomach against the war ministry of Lord North. “Let us have peace,” piped the English House of Commons to the watch on the deck of the still fine, but somewhat battered, Royal George. “Ay! ay!” responded the first mate. So the ship was hove to, and a gentleman stepped down the ladder let down her sides, was rowed to the French shore, and at Paris met four American ex-rebels,—Adams, Franklin, Jay, and Henry Laurens.

These five gentlemen, on the 30th of November, 1782, sitting at a round table covered with green baize, signed a preliminary agreement for peace, which was joyfully attested by many millions of witnesses.

This agreement was dressed up with new ribbons ten months after, and then became a fixed, resolute treaty,—a gay, laughing, sunny break in our history,—but in the English chronicles a flinty, hard, jagged fact, against which the waves of national pride long broke sullenly and hoarsely. England had sent one hundred and twelve thousand five hundred and eighty four soldiers and twenty-two thousand seamen to this unjust, successless war; had lost many thousands out of their ranks; had lost much solid, precious money; lost credit and honor, more precious still; and now at last lost the colonial empires themselves.

She had thus millions of reasons for not being jolly.

NEW YORK EVACUATED, NOVEMBER 25, 1783.
(p. 304)
]

The Revolutionary wheel, which had begun to slow after the battle of Yorktown, now of course wholly stopped. The grist was ground. In it, it is true, were some hard colonels, some badly ground, dyspeptical grains, some dark specks; but, on the whole, the yield was good, unbolted American family flour. Of course the miller took toll. This came out in the shape of debts for soldiers’ wages, for money borrowed, for stores used, powder exploded, and pensions in the near distance; but still there was a broad country to gather it from, reaching westward to the Mississippi, northward to the Lakes, southward to the Gulf and Florida, and eastward to the Atlantic. There were independence achieved by obstinate bravery, right of government right to tax one’s self, and, above all, the right to spend one’s own taxes, even on useless officials and handsomely printed laws. And so, on the whole, the customer was well satisfied with his large, healthy, unbolted grist.