The military revolutionary wheel had now been revolving nearly five years. Seventeen Hundred and Eighty began with very different prospects for the promoters and opposers of its operations. The former were poor, their workmen wretchedly clothed, badly fed, discontented with the small pay promised, and often threatening to strike because that pay was only irregularly and partially paid, and, when given, only afforded in depreciated and depreciating new paper promises. The latter, on the contrary, with that obstinacy which sinks deeper and rises higher with the rising tide of opposition, and possessed of resources to match this dogged pride, made larger preparations to open the coming campaign. Parliament voted to add to its colonial army one hundred and twenty thousand men, and wrought up the sinews to carry this then enormous live weight to twenty million sterling pounds.
It was a hard spring in Charleston; for it hailed heavy iron hail-stones from Sir Henry Clinton’s batteries, from April 1 to May 12, 1780; when the city became so riddled that it gave up. The storm soon spread, bursting over the entire States of North and South Carolina, and beating down for a time, as with iron flails, the growing harvest of patriotism. A good part of the crop was, however, finally saved during the late summer, by Marion, Pickens, and Sumter, who, with their sturdy little bands of reapers, toiled all through the blinding storms with high spirits, and without pay. Sumter was well called “The Carolina Game-cock”; for he often drove his sharp spurs into Corwallis and Tarleton, and roused a very cheery feeling by his crows through those gray mornings of liberty.
Gates, who had so successfully administered Saratoga water to Burgoyne and his men three years before, was despatched in haste to look after the obstinate and severe cases of Clinton, Rawdon, and Cornwallis in South Carolina; but, as it often happens, the remedies successfully applied to one patient often fail with another. At Camden—a name which should have been propitious to American arms—the army of Gates was seized by that frightful epidemic, a panic; and ran away, carrying off with them their general’s sole chance for the next Presidency.
Nathaniel Greene, a Rhode Island Quaker,—the ungloved right hand of Washington, who had served in the army with brilliant and yet solid success since June, 1775,—succeeded the unsuccessful Gates in August, 1780; but the heats of summer melted out all serious campaign attempts on either side, through the South, during that season.
St. Louis, then a village sixteen years old with nine hundred and sixty inhabitants, exalted above the dirty Mississippi on two terraces, or a double platform of earth, was assailed by some Englishmen and Indians from Michilimackinac,—as it has often been since, by people of all nations; but on this first invasion the invaders were as glad to get away as their successors have been to stay.
Meanwhile General Greene was detailed to act as president of the court of inquiry upon Major André, that historical romance of our war, as Mary Queen of Scots is the sentiment of the tough annals of Scotland. This handsome, romantic, cultivated, and high-bred Englishman, then in his twenty-ninth year, who had unsuccessfully courted in Ireland the future mother of Maria Edgeworth, the novelist, and then won a better fortune from the golden hands of trade, had afterwards flung himself into the stern arms of war. Lowering himself to the mean business of carrying dangerous, sealed secrets in his boots, outside the mails, contrary to all laws, and caught in the act by three militiamen, who, after playing cards with each other, played a sharper and more patriotic game with him, he was most disagreeably elevated to the rank of a spy, and sent in consequence to find out the great secret on a very lonesome journey.
His principal, Benedict Arnold,—who had suffered the canker of excessive extravagance to eat through his brave and well-shredded military coat,—escaping from our dangling line into the English straighter ones, received fifty thousand dollars and a brigadier-general’s commission. He was subsequently elected by General Contempt into the celebrated order of Judas Iscariot.
The campaign of 1781 was inaugurated New-Year’s day by a good-natured and semi-patriotic insurrection among the Pennsylvanian troops stationed at Morristown, New Jersey; not on account of the Jersey ways, usually deemed so hostile to foreigners, but by reason of the scant fare, clothing, and pocket-money to which they were reduced. Marching to Princeton, they were met by emissaries from General Clinton, with large offers of bounty-money to enlist for King George; but the noble-minded troops, spurning these attempts upon their virtue, delivered up these agents, as spies, to General Wayne. A committee from Congress relieved the just needs of the insurgents, and offered them rewards for their patriotic treatment of the spies; but they refused to accept pay for what, they truly asserted, was but their duty.
With such metal were the new moulds of American life filling up. By such iron bands was the Revolutionary wheel made strong and irreversible.
The attention of Congress was now seriously and effectively drawn to the condition of the army,—the crank of the wheel. Robert Morris was appointed Superintendent of the Treasury; and the treasury—till then a very celestial affair, undefiled by filthy lucre, and having out-goes in the place of in-gots—was tolerably supplied by taxation at home and loans abroad.