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204 stronger fleet than the French. D'Estaing was obliged to draw off to meet him; a great storm sent both fleets into port to refit instead of to fight; and the disgusted militia-men and continentals, who had come to take the town with the French, withdrew in high choler to see the fleet, without which they could do nothing, taken off to Boston. When the autumn came Clinton felt free to send thirty-five hundred men to the Southern coast, and Savannah was taken (December 29th, 1778). Only in the far West, at the depths of the great wilderness beyond the mountains, was anything done that promised decisive advantage. George Rogers Clark, that daring Saxon frontiersman, who moved so like a king through the far forests, swept the whole country of the Illinois free from British soldiers and British authority that winter of 1778-9, annexing it to the states that meant to be independent; and a steady stream of immigration began to pour into the opened country, as if to prepare a still deeper task of conquest for the British at far New York.

But few noted in the East what gallant men were doing in the valley of the Mississippi. They saw only that the British, foiled in New England and the middle colonies, had changed their plans, and were now minded to try what could be done in the South. There at last their campaigns seemed about to yield them something. Savannah taken, they had little trouble in overrunning Georgia, and every effort to dislodge them failed; for Washington could not withdraw his army from before Clinton at New York. Spain joined France in offensive alliance in April, 1779; in August a combined French and Spanish fleet attempted an invasion of England; all Europe seemed about to turn upon the stout little king-