XLI. CHAPTER after conveying their commander to a place of safety, his men disbanded and dispersed. 1780. Oct. Considerable efforts, meanwhile, had been making to reorganize the southern army. To supply the place of their captured regiments, the Assembly of Virginia voted three thousand men, apportioned among the counties. A tax was laid of two per cent. on all property, to raise means for paying bounties. Besides $12,000 in the depreciated paper, worth two or three hundred in specie, promised at once to all voluntary recruits, they were to receive at the end of the war three hundred acres of land, and a "healthy, sound negro," or $200 in gold or silver. To make up the deficit of voluntary enlistments, men to serve for eighteen months were to be drafted from the militia. Supplies of clothing, provisions, and wagons were also levied on the counties. The seizure of provisions was authorized at certain stipulated prices; and to supply the empty treasury, ten millions of pounds in state bills of credit were issued, redeemable at the rate of forty for one, equivalent to $850,000. The North Carolina Legislature, at their recent session, had constituted a Board of War, and were exerting the feeble resources at their command to re-establish their Continental regiments. Drafts and recruits, and one or two entire battalions, came forward; and, as Cornwallis retired, Gates advanced, first to Salisbury, and then to Charlotte. Dec. 2. It was at Charlotte that Greene joined the army and assumed the command. He found the troops without pay, and their clothing in tatters. There was hardly a dollar in the military chest. Subsistence was obtained entirely by impressment. Greene entered at once on active operations. Morgan, with the Maryland regiment and Washington's dragoons of Lee's corps, was sent across the Broad River to operate on the British left and rear, XLI. while the main body encamped on the Peedee to cover CHAPTER the fertile district to the northward, and to threaten the British communication with Charleston. Not, however, by the armies alone were hostilities carried on. All the scattered settlements bristled in hostile array. Whigs and Tories pursued each other with little less than savage fury. Small parties, every where under arms, some on one side, some on the other, with very little reference to greater operations, were desperately bent on plunder and blood. : The Legislature of North Carolina passed a law to put a stop to the robbery of poor people under pretense that they were Tories-a practice carried even to the plunder of their clothes and household furniture. They imposed penalties, also, on the still more outrageous practice of expeditions into South Carolina for indiscriminate robbery, the spoils being brought into North Carolina for sale. The first offense was to be punished with thirtynine lashes on the bare back, the second with death. 1780. In spite of Sullivan's expedition the year before, the frontier of New York continued to be harassed by Indians and Tories. Sir John Johnson ascended Lake Champlain October. with a force of eight hundred men, took Fort George and Fort Anne, held at that time by very small garrisons, and sent forward plundering parties as far as Saratoga. Another body of Indians and Tories, advancing from Niagara, expelled the Oneidas, the friends of the Americans, and compelled them to seek refuge and food in the neighborhood of Albany. Fort Schuyler was repeatedly threatened; the fertile district of Schoharie was ravaged, and a large quantity of wheat destroyed, sorely needed by Washington's starving army. Colonel Brown, with a party from Berkshire, marching up the Mohawk to relieve the New York frontier, XLI. CHAPTER Was seduced into an ambush, and slain with forty-five of his men; but the same Indian and Tory party was de1780. feated the same day, at Fox Mills, by General Van RensOct. 19. selaer. To protect this frontier, the New York line was stationed for the winter at Albany. Washington's headquarters were established at New Windsor, above West Point. The Eastern troops were hutted in the Highlands, the New Jersey regiments at Pompton, and the Pennsylvania line near Morristown. The French army, which still remained at Newport, by paying for all their supplies in hard money, proved a great comfort to the farmers of New England, and helped to restore the exhausted currency of specie. Specie was also derived from New York by means of an active trade with the adjacent country, which it was vainly attempted to suppress. Hard money and ready payment proved a temptation too strong to be resisted. Whigs and Tories alike joined in it. The bills of exchange, the sale of which had been resorted to by Congress as a means of raising money, proved a very serious embarrasment to the ministers abroad. April. Jay, on arriving at Madrid, found Cumberland, the dramatist, already there, sent from England to counteract his negotiations, and to arrange a separate peace with Spain. The Spanish court declined to advance money to take up the bills drawn on Jay except on a relinquishment by the United States of all pretensions to navigate the Missis sippi, and to the country on the lower banks of that river. Jay was not authorized to make any such concession, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that he obtained a loan of $150,000, payable in three years. This was by no means enough to cover his acceptances, and Franklin was obliged to take up the balance, as well as the bills drawn on himself and Laurens, out of a loan of four XLI. million livres ($740,740), granted by the French court CHAPTER -a fund very insufficient, however, to meet the numerous demands upon it. Exclusive of these sums obtained abroad, the debts contracted by arrears of army pay and commissary certificates at home, and such specific supplies as had been received, the expenditures from the federal treasury for the year 1780 amounted to $83,000,000 in old tenor, and $900,000 in new, the whole valued in specie at about $3,000,000, a great falling off from the expenditures even of the last year, and an indication of the rapidly declining resources of Congress. So far, indeed, as related to America, Great Britain. had good reason to be satisfied with the late campaign. Georgia was entirely subdued, and the royal government re-established. The possession of Charleston, Augusta, Ninety-six, and Camden, supported by an army in the field, secured entire control over all the wealthy and populous parts of South Carolina. North Carolina was full of Tories, anxiously awaiting the approach of Cornwallis. The three Southern states were incapable of helping themselves, and those further north, exhausted and penniless, were little able to send assistance. It seemed as if the promises so often made by Lord George Germaine's American correspondents were now about to be fulfilled, and the rebel colonies to sink beneath the accumulated pressure of this long-protracted struggle. Yet the pressure of the war was not felt in America alone. The rebellion, begun in Massachusetts, threatened, in its consequences, to involve Great Britain in a struggle with the whole maritime world. The British had claimed, and in the last war had rigorously exercised, the belligerent right of placing great restrictions on the trade of neutral nations. This same policy, known as 1780. XLI. CHAPTER "the Rule of 1756," had been adopted in the present war, greatly to the annoyance of the Baltic states, pre1780. vented under it from sending to France and Spain their timber and naval stores, for which the pending naval hostilities created a great demand. To resist interference with their traffic, Russia, Denmark, and Sweden, early in the year, had formed a combination, called the "Armed Neutrality," proclaiming, as the principle of their association, that "free ships make free goods;" in other words, that neutrals might carry what goods they pleased, without liability to search or seizure. However little they might relish this declaration, the British ministry were cautious how they added the Baltic fleets to a naval combination against them, already sufficiently formidable. British commerce was suffering severely. A convoy, July. bound to Quebec, fell into the hands of American privateers; another, more valuable, composed of East and Aug. West India ships, was captured by the Spanish fleet, and carried into Cadiz. Oct. The combined French and Spanish fleets in the West Indies far outnumbered the British ships, and, but for a deadly sickness among the crews, would have undertaken some capital enterprise. It was this sickness which had prevented any response to the urgent request of Washington and Rochambeau for naval co-operation. De Guichen, the French admiral, in consequence of it, proceeded directly to France in convoy of the French merchantmen, instead of stopping, as had been asked and hoped by Washington and Rochambeau, to give a French naval superiority on the North American coast. What the rage of war spared, the fury of the elements threatened to devour. The West Indies were visited by a series of hurricanes unparalleled in violence. The British islands were great sufferers, and many ships of war |