Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 23.djvu/775

1777-1783.] Greene followed, and at Eutaw Springs (September 8) fought the last pitched battle in the South. He was beaten again, but Rawdon again fell back, and thereafter did all that man could do in holding the two cities of Charleston and Savannah. Greene had won no battle, but he had saved the South.

83. Arnold, now a general in the British service (§ 80), had been sent, early in the year, to make a lodgment in Virginia. It seems to have been believed by the British authorities that the three southernmost States were then secure, and that Virginia could be carved out next. La Fayette was sent to oppose Arnold, but the latter was soon relieved, and in June Cornwallis himself entered the State. He had not been willing to serve with Arnold. Directed to select a suitable position for a permanent post on the Chesapeake, he had chosen Yorktown, where, with the troops already in Virginia, he fortified his army. The general ground was that of M‘Clellan's campaign of 1862 (§ 285) and Grant's of 1864-65 (§ 296).

84. Washington, reinforced by a lately arrived force of 6000 excellent French troops (July 1780) under Rochambeau, was still watching Clinton at New York. The news that De Grasse's French fleet, on its way to the American coast, would enter the Chesapeake, where Cornwallis had left himself open to the chances of such an event, led Washington to conceive the campaign which captured Cornwallis and ended the war. He began elaborate preparations for an attack on New York, so that Clinton actually called upon Cornwallis for aid. Moving down the Hudson, he kept Clinton in ignorance of any movement to the south as long as possible, and then changed the line of march to one through New Jersey. The allied armies passed through Philadelphia, were hurried down the Chesapeake, and drove Cornwallis within his entrenchments at Yorktown. De Grasse had arrived August 30, had defeated the British fleet, and was master of the Chesapeake waters. After three weeks siege Cornwallis, having exhausted a soldier's resources, surrendered his army of 8000 men (October 19, 1781).

85. The country at large had really been at peace for a long time. Everywhere, except in the immediate neighbourhood of the British forces, the people were working almost with forgetfulness that they had ever been English colonists; and, where the enemy had to be reckoned with, they were looked upon much as the early settlers looked on bears or Indians, as an unpleasant but inevitable item in the debit side of their accounts. Their legislatures were making their laws; their governors, or “presidents,” were the representatives whom their States acknowledged; nothing but an American court had the power to touch a particle of the judicial interests of the American people; the American flag was recognized on the ocean; independence was a fact, and the ministry received from the English people so emphatic a call to acknowledge it that it yielded so far as to propose a defensive war. The House of Commons (March 4, 1782) voted to regard as enemies to the king and country all who should advise the further prosecution of the war; the Rockingham ministry succeeded to power, to be followed shortly by the Shelburne ministry; and Rodney's victory over De Grasse gave the new ministries very much the same cover for an unsuccessful peace as Jackson's victory at New Orleans afforded the United States in 1815 (§ 181). Franklin, John Adams, and Jay, the American negotiators, concluded the preliminary treaty of peace, by which Great Britain acknowledged the independence of the United States (Nov. 30, 1782); hostilities ceased; and the definitive

treaty of peace was concluded (Sept. 3, 1783). A number of American loyalists (usually called Tories) accompanied the departing armies.

86. In the winter of 1778-79 George Rogers Clark, a Kentucky leader, acting under the authority of the State of Virginia, had led a force of backwoodsmen into the country north of the Ohio river, captured the British posts in it, and made the soil American up to the latitude of Detroit. The treaty of peace acknowledged the conquest, and even more than this. It settled the northern boundary of the United States, so far as the longitude of the Mississippi river, nearly as it now runs; the Mississippi as the western boundary down to 31° N. lat., thence east on that line to the present northern boundary of Florida, and east on that to the Atlantic. Great Britain restored the Floridas to Spain, so that the new nation had Great Britain as a neighbour on the north, and Spain on the south and west. Some disposition had been shown to exclude the Americans from the fishing ground off Newfoundland, but it was abandoned. The United States by the treaty entered the family of nations with recognized boundaries, and all the territory within these boundaries could be recognized by other nations only as the property of the United States. But, so far as internal arrangements were concerned, a great question remained to be settled. There were thirteen organized States, covering but a part of this territory; a part of them claimed to be sole proprietors of the western territory outside of the present State limits; and it remained to be seen whether they would make good their claim, or the other States would compel them to divide, or the new national power would compel as clear an internal as an international recognition of its claim (§ 89).

87. The American army was now disbanded, its officers receiving a grudging recognition of their claims and the privates hardly anything. Poverty was to blame for much of this, and the popular suspicion of military power for the rest. Washington's influence was strong enough to keep the dissatisfied army from any open revolt, though that step was seriously proposed. The organization of the

hereditary order of the Cincinnati by the officers brought about a more emphatic expression of public dislike, and the hereditary feature was abandoned. But, wherever the officers and men went, they carried a personal disgust with the existing frame of government which could not but produce its effect in time. Their miseries had been largely due to it. The politicians who controlled the State legislatures had managed to seize the reins of government and reduce Congress, the only body with pretensions to a national character, to the position of a purely advisory body. The soldiery knew instinctively that the lack of power to feed them and clothe them, the payment of their scanty wages in paper worth two per cent. of its face value, were due to the impotence of Congress and the too great power of the States, that the nation presented the “awful spectacle,” as Hamilton called it, of “a nation without a national government”; and the commonest toast in the army was “Here's a hoop to the barrel,”—a stronger national government to bind the States together.

The struggle for the establishment of this national government is the next step in the development of the United States, but to reach it naturally it will be necessary to go back into the midst of the struggle for independence.

88. The fact that the Continental Congress was really a revolutionary body, not limited in its powers by any fundamental law imposed by the underlying popular sovereignty, but answering most closely to the British parliament, has already been noted (§ 64). This state of affairs was repugnant to all the instincts and prejudices XXIII. — 94