7. In the following year (1781) our arms were generally victorious. Morgan won the battle of the Cowpens; Greene outgeneraled Cornwallis and then reconquered South Carolina. At the end of the year Charleston and Savannah were the only Southern towns held by the British.
8. Cornwallis marched into Virginia, and fortified himself at Yorktown. There Washington, aided by a French army and fleet, forced him to surrender (1781).
9. Peace was made next year, our independence was acknowledged, and by the end of 1783 the last British soldiers had left the country.
[Illustration: WASHINGTON AND LAFAYETTE AT MOUNT VERNON.]
FOOTNOTES
[1] About this time the settlers on the upper Ohio River (in what is now West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania) became eager for statehood. Both Virginia and Pennsylvania claimed their allegiance. They asked Congress, therefore, for recognition as the state of Westsylvania, the fourteenth province of the American Confederacy. Congress did not grant their prayer.
[2] Read Thompson's Alice of Old Vincennes.
[3] Farther east, meantime, a band of savages led by Colonel John Butler swept down from Fort Niagara, entered Wyoming Valley in northeastern Pennsylvania, near the site of Wilkes-Barre, and perpetrated one of the most awful massacres in history (July 4, 1778). (Read Campbell's poem Gertrude of Wyoming). A little later another band, led by a son of Butler, burned the village of Cherry Valley in New York, and murdered many of the inhabitants—men, women, and children. Cruelties of this sort could not go unpunished. In the summer of 1779, therefore, General Sullivan with an army invaded the Indian country in central New York, burned forty Indian villages, destroyed their crops, cut down their fruit trees, and brought the Indians to the verge of famine.
[4] Congress now put Lincoln in command in the South; but when he marched into Georgia, the British set off to attack Charleston, sacking houses and slaughtering cattle as they went. This move forced Lincoln to follow them, and having been joined by Pulaski, he compelled the British to retreat.
[5] Four novels by Simms,—The Partisan, Mellichampe, Katharine Walton, and The Scout,—and Horseshoe Robinson, by Kennedy, are famous stories relating to the Revolution in the South. Read Bryant's Song of Marion's Men.