EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN SUCCESS
In one way the Americans were too successful. Beginning with raw militia, ill-equipped, worse disciplined, the Americans made an army that beat the British. General Washington never ceased to implore Congress and the states to give him a better system for a real national army. Half the men and a fourth of the money expended would have done the job just as well, if the advice of Washington and other experts had been followed.
SURRENDER OF CORNWALLIS
The British general, Lord Cornwallis, surrendered to Washington at Yorktown, Virginia, on October 19, 1781. The victory virtually decided the Revolution in favor of the Americans.
On the sea also the Americans began a great career of naval success; or, rather, they repeated the methods of earlier wars by sending out a hornets’ nest of privateers, christened with such gallant and suggestive names as The Charming Peggy, The Fair Lady, The American Revenue, The Black Joke, The Fair America, The Scotch Irish, The Skunk, The Nimble Shilling, and The King Tamer. If they did not tame George III, they did tame the British merchant and his representatives in Parliament; for American privateers in the course of the war captured about seven hundred British merchantmen.
SURRENDER MONUMENT YORKTOWN, VIRGINIA
GENERAL LORD CORNWALLIS
And then there was the American navy; or rather John Paul Jones, for in him the navy was concentrated. It was a painful surprise to the British to have the royal frigate Serapis taken in 1779 by the Bonhomme (Bo-nom) Richard, a condemned merchant ship hastily fitted out in France. Jones is already a sort of mythical figure, partly because of Buell’s imaginary so-called biography; but he is the naval father of Hull and Porter, and the grandfather of Farragut and another Porter, and the great-grandfather of Sampson and Dewey.