Towards the South the war now turns. The French and English fleets, having sailed for the West Indies, thus relieving Sir Henry Clinton of a natural anxiety about New York, he despatched thence, in November of the same year, a force of two thousand men against Georgia. Savannah, just then preparing to receive her first bran-new city charter, and feeling like a boy who is promised his first pair of long pantaloons to cover his lengthening proportions, was taken in hand by Clinton’s military schoolmaster and humiliated by a gentle spanking. Her sandy bottom, however, stood the trouncing well. She had the hardihood even to look right pleased and content when it was soon after told her that an expedition sent out against Port Royal, South Carolina, had been soundly ferruled.
The year 1779 opened with, and shut upon, a lively guerrila war, carried on through Georgia and South Carolina by small bodies of troops, so light as almost to seem feathered, led by Moultrie, Pickens, and other partisan officers, who teased and worried the enemy by incessant scratches and irritating stings, especially annoying in the summer-time and amid a warm climate.
Putnam’s Home-Stretch down Horse-Neck.
(p. 293)
At the North the British forces spent themselves on small excursions out of New York, very much as many people still do, and with the same result,—exhausting their own means and boring the people up the Sound and Hudson River. On one of these excursions under Governor Tryon, an attack by fifteen hundred men was made in March, 1779, upon Horse-Neck, one of Putnam’s outposts, a high, steep hill defended by one hundred and fifty men and two old rusty field-pieces. The powder failing, these loud-talking mouthpieces of the little party were almost silenced, when a cavalry charge was ordered upon the small band at the top of the hill. Putnam’s troops were directed to withdraw behind a morass inaccessible to cavalry, when Putnam himself, staying behind to serve the hard old swivels with the few grains of powder freshly discovered, and, finding himself closely pressed by assailants, leaped upon his horse and launched himself down the precipitous ledge amid a tempest of bullets and stones. It was neck or nothing; and he won by a neck,—his own,—which, had the horse given out, would probably have been stretched.
In September of this year Count d’Estaing returned from the West Indies with his fleet; and having in vain tried to recapture Savannah, took French leave of it and of America, having had a yachting trip in American waters with the usual yachting experience,—a good deal of getting up, a deal of getting down, large consumption of provisions and liquors, high hopes in idle state-rooms, and low performances on deck.
Spain, now conceiving a violent taste for Gibraltar, Jamaica, and the two Floridas,—for the taking of which by England aforetime she was of course very critical upon Albion,—seized the opportunity of Britain’s multiplying engagements with America and France, to let her know that she desired an immediate return of these forced loans. England of course insisted that, if she was an international pawnbroker, she was not obliged to surrender articles taken in until she chose to give them up, or until payment was made with shot and shell. She resented and resisted the demand; resisted it when Spain stepped up to her coast with a large fleet, resisted it successfully for three years at the Gibraltar Rock itself, and resisted it wherever Spanish gentlemen appeared to assert it, either on sea or land.
Meanwhile, on the 23d of September, 1779, Paul Jones, a Scotchman by birth, and who, like his apostolic namesake, had been “in shipwrecks often” and “in perils in the sea,” the first who ever displayed the American flag, now sailing the good ship “Bon Homme Richard,”—an old Indiaman converted into a war vessel,—after capturing with this old lugger twenty-three merchantmen, at last fell in with two heavy English frigates. Lashing his own ship to the larger one, he so laid on other strings that at the end of two hours he had thoroughly whipped both,—a whipping whose stinging recollections brought the color for a long time into even the ruddy cheek of Mr. Bull.
CHAPTER IV.
THE LAST TURN OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WHEEL; ACCELERATIONS; SLOWINGS; THE GRIST.
1780–1783.
The different Opening of 1780 for those who pushed and those who obstructed the Revolutionary Wheel.—The Strain on both Sides.—Hard Spring in Charleston in Consequence of Leaden Hail Storms.—How these Storms spread; and how the Crops were saved from Ruin by Marion, Sumter, and Pickens.—The Carolina Game-Cock, and his sharp Spurs in the Sides of Cornwallis and Tarleton.—Gates broken down, and the Presidency lost at Camden.—Greene set up in his Place, proving a good standing Color.—The Village of St. Louis assailed.—André humiliates himself, and is exalted.—Arnold gets $50,000, a Brigadier’s Commission, and is elected by General Contempt into the Order of Judas Iscariot.—New Year’s Day among the Pennsylvania Troops at Morristown.—The United States Treasury, made less Celestial, becomes defiled by filthy Lucre.—The Goring and Tossing of Tarleton by Morgan at the Cow-Pens.—An Irish-like Fight at Eutaw Springs.—Southern Hunters around the British Flock at Charleston and Savannah.—The troublesome Seizure of Virginia Assemblymen.—How the Captors missed burning their Fingers with Jefferson’s red Hair.—Cornwallis enmeshed at Yorktown.—What Lord North said.—What the English George threatened and what the American George did.—“Let there be Peace”; and Peace was.—What England lost and America gained.—The kind of Grist obtained.