A little way off stands a tall, scholarly figure, carefully dressed in the gentlemanly costume of that time, a blue coat faced with yellow, a scarlet waistcoat paragraphing an elaborate shirt-frill, and black broadcloth tights, clasped at the knee, and, like his own round periods, closed by polished silver-tongued buckles. He is thirty-one years old. His brick-colored hair and sanguine complexion betoken his ardent temperament. His faultless dress and stainless linen betray a delicacy and refinement of culture and taste, in which he had few peers in his time on either side the Atlantic. This is Thomas Jefferson. Chairman of a committee to report on the question of the right of the Colonies to be hereafter independent of Great Britain, he holds in his womanly-shaped hands a large manuscript written in neat, careful characters.

Close to him stands the short, firm, square, condensed-looking figure of John Adams, coaxed into a well-ripened fulness. He is ten years older than Jefferson; destined to be his generous rival through an eventful life, and to die only a few hours after him, just fifty years from that time, and on the semi-centennial anniversary of that very day. There is a good-natured frankness in his round, generously blooded face, and full-veined forehead; great firmness in his well-pressed lips; and about his massive head a solid, intellectual strength that have already well earned for him the appellation of “the column of Congress.” A hot purpose shows in his pink-heightening complexion, flushing it with an auroral light which plays and flashes up to the very zenith of his head. Faults he has, like his rival, grievous and many; but among them is not that of being indifferent to his country or her freedom.

A little way off sits one of the most accomplished orators in all that gifted group; a genial companion you may see he is at a glance. He is a ripe scholar, educated in an English university, and yet warm with a loving nature that glows on his face and through his graceful discourse. Wielding a ready pen, whose vigorous strokes have already, in the Memorial of Congress to British America, cleft the unwilling hearts of Canadians, and, in The Address of Congress to the People of Great Britain, have imbedded forever in the English Constitution the principles of representation as the basis of taxation, Richard Henry Lee, from South Carolina, three years older than Adams, sits there in cultured ease and thoughtful dignity, a model legislator. In the preceding month of June he had moved a resolution, asserting the rights of the Colonies to be free, and to dissolve in brine the ligaments which wickedly tied them to the money-making law manufactory at home. This resolution, having of course been well debated when it came up for consideration three days ago,—for American Congresses were never deaf or dumb asylums,—had been adopted, and upon it a committee raised, whose report, drawn by Jefferson, and revised by Franklin and Adams, is to be read in to-day’s session.

A few feet away are Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, who, although only in his twenty-third summer, is laden with the sheaves of a rich harvest of oratorical fame; Charles Carroll of Maryland, who, annexing to the Declaration his address, so that he might not be passed by the state executioner for his treason, was spared by death to be the last of that memorable party on earth; Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, who lived to fill acceptably every honorable office known to our system of government, except that of President; and Robert R. Livingston of New York, who survived the recordership of the city of New York, and became eminent, not only in many fields, but notably on the Hudson River, in connection with Robert Fulton’s efforts to subject water to steam,—not one of them, except Carroll, yet thirty-three years of age.

Leaning forward and near this last group stands the bulky figure of one who was for the first twenty-two years of his life a shoemaker; but who, disregarding the maxim of Horace “to stick to the last,” left the lapstone to attend to the understandings of his suffering countrymen. This, all know, is Roger Sherman of Connecticut, true to independence and well-grounded freedom—to the last.

Across the room stand talking together George Wythe of Virginia, sweet-tempered, frolicsome as a boy, yet resolute of purpose, able in debate, and capable of deep research; Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, born in England, an emigrant to Philadelphia in his thirteenth year, whose nature of sterling British oak, seasoned in the counting-house of Charles Willing, and whose solid aptitudes, hardened into financial wisdom, were now so much needed in the new political partnership of States; and Joseph Reed from the same State, whose sturdy, honest face seems to light up a large space all around him, and whose rebuke two years later to the commissioner of Lord North, who sought to bribe him, that “poor as he was, the king of Great BritainBritain was not rich enough to buy him,” raised American securities as high in Europe as the practical answers of some of his congressional successors to similar attempts on their financial virtue by North or South, East or West, have depressed them.

Others there are among those twoscore and eleven whom we should be glad to delineate, as we dearly love to look at them gathered in the morning light of that first Fourth of July; but there is such a serious, thoughtful air, such a felt pressure weighting all brows and hearts, that the loaded hour presses down and hushes all such light thoughts. A prayer so simple, earnest, child-like, and trusting,—uttered amid impressive silence by John Adams,—that it seems to bear the great question up to the Great Heart, hushes the assembly to a balanced calm, and opens the business.

Large sealed packages from Washington, brought on horseback all the way from New York, are then read. They speak of his few men,—most of them without arms, clothing, or food,—in presence of 45,000 fresh and well-supplied English and German troops, under the command of Lord Howe, of his brother the Admiral, and of Sir Henry Clinton. Other letters were read from South Carolina, Georgia, Maryland, and New York, urging the wise men to declare the old, unequal partnership with England at an end,—a partnership to which, they felt, that the colonial partners had furnished the capital and labor, and from which the English associates drew all the profits.

In the name of the Profit, they virtually said, war. Then followed a pause in the proceedings, which at length the full, firm voice of John Adams broke. His speech, rising and rising like a freshet over that tall occasion, swept away by its resistless logical momentum the forces of sophism, carried in its strong hurry all the impediments to its march, brimmed over with its swelling forces the whole territory of debate, until at last, the gathered mass, hurled full against the barriers of prejudice, conservatism, doubt, and fear, prostrated forever the props and supports of British usurpation in the Colonies. It is a singular fact that no reporters were present to take down or even outline this speech. Gathered up, however, from tradition and memory by Daniel Webster, about half a century afterwards, it has floated and collected in almost every school-house and college, and there formed eddies, whirlpools, and geysers, which have sucked in and spouted out much gyrating declamation.

Other speakers followed the fiery Adams, most urging, a few deprecating, immediate action. We need not note here their range, fire, or effect.

At last the patriotic battle abates; and the committee of five,—Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Sherman, and Livingston,—forming around the tall, dignified, picturesque figure of their chairman, advance in front of the president’s seat. There is an expectant, oppressive hush, a sudden settling back into seats; and all eyes, like sunflowers, turn towards the scarlet-waistcoated son of the Revolution. The neatly written paper is slowly unrolled, and its weighty truths, crowding up to its very rim, begin at once to discharge themselves.

That large electrical battery has been ever since at work, charging nationalities and peoples, galvanizing the feeble to effort, producing sparks whenever the current has been interrupted, recovering back to vital action sick communities, and arousing to better health from that hopeless despair which a long course of royal quack doctoring had produced, constitutions, systems, or states originally strong, energetic, and vigorous. Without analyzing or dwelling upon the full, electrical streams then and there evolved by that American independence machine, we will only record here that two principal jets, namely, that of the equality of all in their creation, and the other, that all governments rest solely upon the consent of the governed, have poured upon paralyzed and crippled humanity such a current of blessings, that the old Asiatic, African, and European practices of blood-letting for liberal plethora, drugs for congested rights, anodynes for consciences politically discontented, and cathartics for purging away healthy food necessary for civil nutrition, are fast becoming unpopular.

George III. got a terrible peppering from that machine; but as he lived forty-four years afterwards, it is fair to presume that his royal, burly Hanoverian person, rolling over and over in bucolic clover, repaired without difficulty dents and shocks caused by applications administered at such a distance. For seven years following he was in a great state of irritation, and worked hard to prevent the results with which that Declaration concluded, namely, a determination to cut all connection with him and his little island ways.

How this great struggle, thus earnestly begun, was carried on, and its final issue, must be the office of future chapters to tell.

That first Fourth caused a very gunpowdery smell throughout the Colonies for seven succeeding years, and has touched off more fire-crackers since than would fence in China with a wall higher than its present one.

The lever then thrust beneath the corner-stone of civil right, to pry it out of its undisturbed imbedment into its appropriate place, was handled by ungloved hands; but the anniversary of the event itself cannot be now handled by the municipal jollifiers in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, New Orleans, and even Chicago, with less than six pairs of gloves each, while the very common councilmen sometimes get twelve pairs apiece for the occasion.

Blessings on all the Fourth of Julys up to 1850! What occasions for tar-barrel eloquence, going off into flaming tropes and figures, have they not been! That has not only been “the birthday of freedom,” but the natal initiation into civic or military renown of many a village tyro. The shoemaker, blacksmith, or carpenter, smothered for three hundred and sixty-four days under his own waxed ends, cindery veneering, or plane modesties, has suddenly, on that prolific day, been so brought out on a prancing horse, or caught such a gleam from his well-scoured sword, resting on his trusty thigh, or left to play loose between his crooked legs, as to aspire to be road-master, town-reeve, supervisor of the county, assemblyman, representative in Congress, and even United States senator.

The civic honor of presiding at the old-time traditional public dinner, which crowned, at the principal tavern, the militia morning cantering and inexplicable twistings of crooked military lines,—lines that snarled up until they broke past all sewing by waxed ends, welding by cindered hands, or splicing by plane people,—has again and again pipped the egg, else ingloriously addling, which enclosed the rudimentary germ of a railroad president, it may be even, of a conductor with diamond pin, gold finger-ring, largely accumulating real estate, and all the other incidents. These glorious dinners have been, also, the nurseries of the legal profession, whose young members have thence sent up whizzing sky-rockets, which, mounting and mounting on the straining enthusiastic eye, have burst into such dissolving showers of golden glory, that, by the unexpected explosion, the national horizon and their own have been widened on all sides, and new stars been stuck into its astonished vault.

We pity the American who has been born into our degenerating times, which neglect those primitive occasions of cheap yet great renown, when a little sulphur, administered to a rural population, went further to cure all the scarlet fever of the neighborhood than all the colic-producing iron pills of actual war. We commiserate the condition of the young American, grown so apoplectic ere he arrives of age, by the prodigal display of bunting, fire-works, and red-faced oratory at our frequent elections, that he disdains the frugal but satisfying cakes of gingerbread, then bought with a well-pressed sixpence from the calico-roofed booth on the side of the bars, through which those undulating militia lines managed to unwind without hanging on the fence or getting into puzzling knots.

Gone now are those molasses-plated cards of cake, pleasant to the taste on the Fourth, and sticking to the teeth, stomach, and memory of the patriotic eater for at least one fifty-second part of a year. Gone now are the pranks of horses bestridden by the colonel or major of the regiment,—his first equestrian performance freely exhibited, and in which he showed feats, entirely his own, which could not, or at least would not, be displayed by first-class circuses or turf-bred racers, who, skimmed over in blue, yellow, or green, glide so stunningly through the admiring and opening air. Vanished now, alas! are the groups of innocent children waiting for the show of animals, not those on parade, but the lively monkeys, the pie-colored horses, and the wonderful clown, whose photographs, loading down the staggering fences, blacksmith-shop, horse-shed, and post-office for a whole long fortnight, were all so well known to them before the originals striped the village with their many-colored glories.

Gone glimmering away from this green-backed epoch are the sable groups that danced on the greensward, away from the tangling military lines apparently just as happy as if the American Wittenagemote, led on by Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Sherman, and Livingston, had not solemnly declared, and thereto pledged all that they had, “that all men are created free and equal.”

English Hawks gather around New York.—Washington watches them.—About an Esquire.—The Way the Germans took Brooklyn the first Time.—How they returned, not to their Mutton, but to Kalbfleisch.—Difficulty of reaching New York from Brooklyn in 1776.—Washington takes a Trip to Harlem.—The British also.—Red Eyes and Disfigured Faces the Consequence.—Lord Howe attempts to get around the American Squire.—The slight Unpleasantness at White Plains.—The different Uses of the Croton Water in 1776 and now.—The Amount of Whiskey it took in 1869 to qualify the Water in New York.—Washington ventures into New Jersey.—Set-to at Fort Lee.—Washington across Rivers.—Philadelphia covered.—Homesickness of Agricultural Lads.—What befell Lee at a Tavern.—Washington crosses the Delaware and drops Christmas Presents into German Stockings.—The Effects of Yankee Doodle on Lafayette, De Kalb, Kosciusko, Pulaski, and others.—Friends of America in England, Fox, Hume, etc.—Friends of England in America.—The Statue and Statutes of George III. repealed.—Battle of Princeton.—The Germans obtain Cider and Sausages at Danbury.—Colonel Meigs tickles the Feet of Long Island, and makes Congress laugh.—Colonel Prescott is obliged to rise very early one Morning at Newport.—Silas Deane and B. Franklin in France.—What followed.—Burgoyne tries to find a back-stair Passage to New York.—Strong Gates in his Way near Saratoga.—Still-Water runs deep.—Brandy-Wine an unpalatable Drink.—French Treaty with America in 1778.—The Wheel moves in Water and turns out French Names.—Crossing New Jersey, Lord Howe collides with Washington at Monmouth.—Count d’Estaing is prevented by an Injunction off the New York Bar from entering New York.—Coquetting, but no Engagement, near Newport.—Buzzard’s Bay and its Roosts.—Little Egg Harbor and its Nests,—what was laid there.—The Benefits of the Wyoming Massacre.—Guerilla War in the South.—Savannah trounced.—Horse-Neck and Putnam’s Home-Stretch down it.—Count d’Estaing’s Yachting.—Spain hankers for Gibraltar.—England as a Pawnbroker.—Paul Jones and his Whip.

While the wise men at Philadelphia were making the Fourth of July a precedent for the future by their very readable and taking Declaration of Independence, the English kites were gathering from the north, south, and east around New York. Lord Howe, from Halifax; Sir Henry Clinton, from Charleston; and Admiral Howe, from England, drawn together by focalizing orders, settled down with their separate flocks on Staten Island,—one of the lintels of the gateway to the metropolis,—numbering together twenty-four thousand old hawks which had often whetted their beaks before in Spanish, German, and Dutch blood.

Washington had about seventeen thousand agricultural lads, armed with every possible and impossible accoutrement, contrivance, and weapon, to watch the well-trained brood. Lord Howe, being a royal commissioner as well as a general, understood letter-writing well; and his first care was to pen an epistle to the American commander. Upon its composition he bestowed as much care as a young man upon his first letter to the coy damsel whom he would conciliate; but upon the address he spent far greater pains. As despatched, it read “George Washington, Esquire.” Carried to the General, he declined to receive it. Not that he was not an “Esq.,” for all Americans are born such of course; but being a Squire in a military court whose proceedings were likely to be recorded, he conceived himself to be entitled to different honors.

Defeated in his pen addresses, the British general tried another stroke. On the 22d of August, 1776, landing on Long Island, he commenced a march by three separate detachments towards Brooklyn, which, after a severe battle on the 27th of August, he took. It was the first invasion by the Germans of that quiet, pleasant, New York dormitory. Then the inhabitants took it very hard. Now, however, they have become so much accustomed to the German irruptions, that they have ceased to be astonished at their own frequent captures. We may add that the Hessians did not at that time elect Herr Martin Kalbfleisch mayor of Brooklyn. They waited nearly ninety years, and then returned, not to their mutton, but to their veal.

The gathering in of one thousand dead and wounded from the Long Island hills was not the kind of harvesting that the agricultural lads expected; and as they had only engaged for a short job, many of them went back on the 28th to their own farms. Washington not liking to be sandwiched with the rest of his forces, numbering some fourteen thousand, between Howe’s Germans and the East River, contrived during the misty night of the 29th of August to get over the river to New York,—an exploit much vaunted then among military men, but rendered very easy in our time by the Union Ferry Company’s boats. The country recruits who are now transported every Sunday across the same river to Beecher’s church, when there again transported, and after the service transported back again, show what changes have occurred in the facilities for moving large bodies of men over the East River since the battle of Long Island.

Howe’s Hessians threatening to emigrate en masse to New York, General Washington, on the 10th of September, made room for them by taking his young army to the upper part of Manhattan Island, giving them an opportunity to see the rustic beauties of Harlem and the country around the present High Bridge. As it sometimes happens in war, as well as in peace, that different gentlemen take a fancy to the same piece of ground, whose possession and value are enhanced thereby, General Howe’s desire to become possessed of the same real estate in the actual occupation of Washington, reached such a pitch that he sent a large party of military friends to seize it, even if by so doing they were obliged to dispossess its occupant. The friends of the Squire, however, resented this violent attempt so spiritedly that, as it has often fallen out since, the visitors to Harlem went back to New York with very red eyes and faces unkindly disfigured.

Lord Howe next attempted to get around the Squire by sending a part of his force, now increased to thirty-five thousand men, into the lower district of Westchester to see how Harlem and the Continentals looked from the rear, and the other part on a lively picnic up the Hudson River; but the wary leader of the Americans had seen, when surveying or hunting in Virginia and Ohio, too many traps set by Indians and white trappers to be caught between the steel jaws of this English one. So he pulled his men away from the cautiously planted contrivance and took them several miles to the northeast, on the Bronx River. He allowed several of them, however, to go up to White Plains, where, to his chagrin, they were set upon by a large British party and very disagreeably handled.

General Washington now scattered his force all along the Hudson River from the city of New York up as high as Peekskill, his camp soups giving off a flavor into Anthony’s nose. Some of the water used in cooking and drinking was dipped from the Croton River. Thus early was the Croton put into American service. At that time, we may add, the fluid was employed to qualify and reduce the whiskey; now the whiskey is thought to be weak enough to qualify and reduce the water. Ninety-three years have thus united to furnish the same number of reasons as the composing elements, contrary as they may seem to each other, for mixing the fire and water. One may judge of the extent to which the Croton is now used from the fact that during 1868, the amount of liquors retailed at the opening throat of the aqueduct cost over $150,000,000. We need not add how, during all this period, fusil-oil went down.

General Washington in November following ventured over into New Jersey, and, like so many from the New York side since, was having a good time at Fort Lee, when a body of Englishmen and Handeckers came down towards them in a very rough way, and the excursionists thought it prudent to retire, leaving their provender behind them. But for these little surprises, war would lose some of its briskest features. Washington was now compelled to retreat, with numbers daily diminishing, before foes superior in numbers and constantly augmenting as they pursued. In fact, he was obliged to bridge or ford the principal rivers or streams in Northern New Jersey; thus furnishing the best precedent which the Camden and Amboy Railroad engineers have ever had for carrying people across New Jersey soil and waters in a bad temper. Newark, New Brunswick, and Princeton fell into the hands of the enemy. Some people assert that they are in them still.

December 8, 1776, Washington passed over the Delaware River to cover Philadelphia, which now had much need of a lid, for it was in a terrible stew. The country lads, as these reverses pressed upon them, took a homesickness which nothing but their mothers and their own homes could cure. Only about three thousand remained, shivering and tentless, and lying near the inhospitable track of the New York and Philadelphia Railroad. Lord Cornwallis but waited for a cold night to bridge over the Delaware to enable him to take the Squire and his dwindling posse of men.

Trenton was the knife-balance of American fate. Upon a nicely poised point it swung tremblingly for a weary, anxious fortnight.

General Sullivan, having succeeded the waspish Lee, who was one night captured at a tavern in Baskingridge by a party more spirit-ed than his own, led, through the gloomy days of mid-December, a force of four thousand men, provided with ammunition, across the country to Washington. Timely indeed was the reinforcement; for Washington, although just made by a Congressional decree supreme manager of the war, had more need of powder than power.

Christmas eve, 1776, was a very jolly one in the British camp. The commander, officers, and men, all thought that the American fiddle was broken and about to be hung up forever; and so, in their Saxon and Teutonic joy, they hung up their stockings. The shrewd American Squire, borrowing old Santa Claus’s coach and horses, and filling the former with bullets and powder, crossed the Delaware about midnight and suddenly dropped his presents through the camp of his foreign visitors. Never were the Hessians so taken by Christmas gifts. In fact, fourteen hundred of them were so overcome by the novel presence of Washington, that they gave themselves up to American hospitality and followed their new friends across the river to their now merry quarters.

The American fiddle was mended again; and its strains of Yankee Doodle were heard across the Atlantic by a young French marquis, only nineteen years of age, of a very old family, with a very young wife, and an income of $40,000 a year,—an income in those pre-Erie and pre-petroleum times highly respectable. Other Frenchmen also listened to, and, like Lafayette, were moved by, the touching airs of freedom, which passed the Rhine also, and were drunk in with his hock by the Prussian Steuben, a military martinet and schoolmaster, much needed in our militia schoolhouse. The Baron was then generalissimo of his serene, discomposable highness, the Prince of Hohenzollern-Hechingen, whose magnificent titles would, if printed on a straight strip of paper, have easily reached across his principality; but sounding as they were, they did not fill the ear of Steuben like the notes from that repaired fiddle. The lively adagio airs also struck upon the sensitive vibrating soul of De Kalb, a noble of Alsace, lifting it to highest impulses, which carried him through four years of patriotic service, and even bore him in lofty triumph across the death channel in 1780, when at the battle of Camden he was carried away from the daring front, loaded with eleven bullets in various parts of his body.

These same free airs fell upon those straight, upright Poles, Kosciusko and Pulaski, and so vivifying them by warming heats, that through the whole war they bore most fragrant fruit, until at last they stood as that vintage so ripely planted in Mrs. Browning’s verse,

the blue grapes of blistered steel.

Even in England thousands of hearts warmed to the American cause. In Parliament, Charles James Fox, Earl Chatham, Edmund Burke, the virtuous Lord Camden, and others; out of it, David Hume the historian, Edward Gibbon, whose studies of the rise as well as the fall of Rome had led him down into the crypt of history, and countless able, learned, and good, others as true to state as to individual freedom, gave vent and weighty shape to the well-considered convictions of the injustice of the attempt to compel the Colonies to submit to impositions unassented to by themselves. But while in England there were advocates of colonial freedom, in the Colonies there were friends of Parliamentary oppression. These last were infiltrated more or less through all the United settlements; but they gathered in notable volume in and about the then considerable village of New York,—numbering about 26,000 inhabitants,—where all the vigilant zeal of Alexander Hamilton, an ardent, eloquent young lawyer, recently arrived from his native West Indies, the equally vigorous but cooler patriotism of John Jay, and the alert wisdom of other Sons of Liberty were needed, to make head against the Tory current whose momentum and velocity, quickened by wealth, social position, and official experience, swept with force and volumed power through the island city. Rude indeed was the shock given to the Manhattan loyalists by the overthrow in the Bowling Green of the leaden statue of George III., and the conversion of its characteristically heavy metal into lively Continental bullets. The popular repeal of this loyal statue was soon followed in Congress by the repeal of more important representatives of royalty,—leaden-typed statutes.

The year 1777 opened with the battle of Princeton, fought under the leadership of Washington and Cornwallis, whereby two hundred English and Germans were put under sodded trenches, to furnish in after times, in addition to their use in well-rounded school-boys’ periods, a special resort for the students of Nassau Hall, accompanied by such persuadable female companions—Dutch, American, English, or German—as might relish history studied under the advantageous lights of a pair of admiring eyes.

In a few days after this battle, all New Jersey was cleared of British and Hessians, who dispersed in various directions, and sought to keep up their courage for several succeeding months by raids upon those peaceful, drowsy villages, Danbury in Connecticut, and Peekskill on the Hudson, and harrying off some of the delights of a German stomach,—winter apples, cider, and sausages. On the other hand, Colonel Meigs tickled the feet of Long Island one night in May, and touched up some British corns on its Sag Harbor toe, making even the grave Congress to laugh outright in a broad vote of thanks; while Colonel Barton, early one morning in July, took, in spite of his guards, the British Major-General Prescott out of his bed, where he was cuddling up to escape the Rhode Island fogs, and bore him off through his own troops, and even through a large British fleet lying off the main-land,—a little surprise party highly relished by the visitors and their colonial friends.

The arrival in France, in the autumn of 1776, of Silas Deane, a Connecticut delegate to Congress, and of Benjamin Franklin, as commissioners, soon raised the gates which had barred French supplies of men and means from flowing into the service of the Colonies. Louis XVI. and Vergennes, his Foreign Minister, had neither forgotten the great fight for the American belt, nor the wrench which French pride had suffered by the tossing of the prize, but fifteen years ago, into the eager hands of its uncivil rival. They were, therefore, more than ready to help the ward escape from her self-constituted guardian, and to send her secretly such instruments as would file off her bolts, cut away the prison-like fences around her suspiciously guarded dwelling-place, and enlarge her straitening liberties. They had even, in the spring of 1777, secretly encouraged, while pretending to prevent, the armed emigration of Lafayette and others to America.

Just about the time that these French gentlemen, with Baron De Kalb, touched foot on American soil at Georgetown, South Carolina, an Englishman named Burgoyne, whose acquaintance we made at Bunker Hill, two years ago, came on shore at Quebec. Entering the Colonies by that favorite back-stairs, Lake Champlain, he turned the well-known and well-worn knob, Ticonderoga, and got himself and his attendants fairly inside the American door-yard. Advancing, he came to a small place called Stillwater, where he tripped his toe over a little hillock, called a breastwork, raised by Kosciusko, aided by that crack rifleman, Morgan, and pitched forward faint and weak from this unexpected accident. Still, his English robustness of strength and pluck was such as to make him quite confident of being able to reach, without difficulty, the wing of the house, called Albany, and thence gaining access to its centre, New York, where he expected to meet Sir William Howe, and with him to succeed in bringing back once more the spirited young American heiress to the selfish love of her late champion. But quite to his surprise he discovered before him, near Saratoga Springs, Gates through which he must pass in order to make any progress,—Gates so strong that, unless he could force their Polish locks, their American hinges, and solid, iron-riveted timbers, he must perish for want of food. The Gates were not passed; and October 17, 1777, he gave himself up, with 5,791 officers and men, and forty-six hundred muskets. Forty-two pieces of brass cannon also passed at that time to the Americans,—brass which gave them thenceforward more confidence and cheek. Much need, too, of it had they; for in the preceding two months, Washington, with thirteen thousand men, following Howe and Cornwallis southward, with a body of eighteen thousand men under their command, met them a few miles south of Philadelphia, on a little, dispirited stream called the Brandywine, and there drank the disagreeable dregs of a defeat, made even more distasteful by the fact that it was the first American drink which Lafayette and Pulaski had an opportunity of sipping in this country. Exceedingly nauseated by this drink, they all took another draught October 4th at Germantown; but this decoction proved equally unpalatable. It required all the beneficial effects of the Saratoga water to correct the disturbed action produced by the Brandywine and the Germantown potion.

The fury of George III. at the close of the campaign of 1777 was perfectly Hanoverian. He had been led to expect the speedy submission of the Colonies; but he had reluctantly discovered that early disasters had only stiffened the gristle of discontent into the bone of unconquerable resistance. His obstinacy, however, in prosecuting the war was met by equal firmness on the part of the Colonies in defending their rights. If, like one of his predecessors, who, irritated by the resistance of Scotland to his royal wishes, threatened to make that country a royal hunting-ground, George III. threatened to make a shooting-park of North America, the colonists, in the spirit of the Scottish nobleman who, in reply to the menace, answered, “In that case, may it please your Majesty, I must be home to uncouple the hounds,” were fully determined to muzzle the royal pack, and to increase their own war-dogs.

Parliament, however, curbed by the strong arm of popular sentiment, found it best to hold in check the royal passion and resentment. It even slipped from the leash, not the savage bloodhounds of strife, but three very sleek-looking house-pets, called Peace Commissioners, who came with nice little dainty titbits in their mouths, pardons and promises, to drop around the American door-yard.

Too late!—these royal poodles and King Charles spaniels. America had outgrown pets, petting, and even pantalettes. She had come of age, and deliberately made up her mind to leave the uncomfortable homestead and to do for herself. She had a good friend in France, who encouraged her independent notions, and who, on the 6th of February, 1778, told everybody—England, America, and the other nations—that she was ready to stand by the plucky Colonies. This declaration, usually termed a treaty of alliance and commerce, was received with great joy by America, and with keen resentment by England. Russia, always our friend from the first, clapped France on the back for her conduct, and the people of Europe, out of dislike to England, sided with the Colonies, and applauded their new friend.

The old rivals, England and France, again scowled, flushed up, and clinched.

During the rest of our Revolution French names are turned up by the wheel, which had so far run entirely on land, side by side with American. It was now at times to be put into water, and to dip its blades into an element which, troubled by navigation acts, had separated us from England, but which now, blessed by a treaty of amity, was to unite us to the country of Lafayette.

At the opening of the crocuses, in the spring of 1778, Lord Howe and his brother, the Admiral, were in the Quaker City, a city which, though mainly made up of the disciples of peace, wielded both pen and musket in favor of war for peace. A French fleet, commanded by Count d’Estaing, sailed from France to pen up in the Delaware the English brothers with their fleet and army; but these some Howe getting at once wind of this intention and into their own sails, contrived to escape to New York. Part of the British forces took the land route to New York, courageously braving the dangers incident to New Jersey travelling. A little accident befell them on the route, June 28th, about eighteen miles south of Philadelphia, at a small place then called Monmouth, where, colliding with Washington and the artillery train of which he was conductor, they lost three hundred men. The American loss was only seventy,—very trifling for a genuine American collision. It was in this battle that General Charles Lee became insubordinate, lost his reason, and was cast on the lee shore of patriotic duty,—a misfortune which, eighty-three years later, happened to another general of the same name.

The French fleet, finding on its arrival at Philadelphia, that the Howes had gone to New York, followed suit thitherward; but on reaching Sandy Hook, it was defeated in its intended action against them by an injunction raised by the New York bar, and so proceeded to that fashionable watering-place, Newport. Admiral Howe soon after took a notion to go to the same place, and, being reinforced by several ships, set out with his squadron. D’Estaing, intermitting his study of the “Round Tower,” “The Spouting Rock,” and “The Dumplings,” sailed out like a generous foe, to meet him half-way. The fleets, long in ogling sight, and loath to leave each other, were yet kept apart by those adverse winds and rough seas which sometimes in naval war, as in love, neither blow nor run smooth, and which, at least in this case,—as sometimes happens with lovers,—prevented an engagement.

In September, General Clinton, who had superseded Lord Howe, sent out two marauding expeditions, one to Buzzard’s Bay, which burnt seventy American ships roosting there on their anchors; the other against Little Egg Harbor, which took a considerable amount of stores laid there, over which much British cackling was had.

The massacre at Wyoming by Colonel John Butler and his Indian allies—only palliated by the plea that, while it cruelly put out of existence some three hundred settlers, it called into being the beautiful “Gertrude of Wyoming”—and the barbarities committed by another band of Tories and savages at Cherry Valley, raised the hair on the head of many in Europe as well as in America.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Again the scenes of the war lie south of Baltimore. At the Cowpens, in South Carolina, Colonel Tarleton was caught on the horns of Morgan, three hundred of his men tossed fatally, and the rest, with their leader, severely gored and gashed. Cornwallis soon found that the Southern commander was not a Greenehorn. At Guilford Court-House, the English leader, with a superior force, met the American general, with 4,500 men, and after a severe grapple, fell back with the air and conviction of a man disagreeably undeceived. The Americans now seemed to have received an ally in general success; for in April, May, and June they retook, one after another, all the forts, outposts, cities, and military points occupied by Lord Rawdon. On the Catawba, Morgan gave to Tarleton a little more grape, which sent his lines reeling backwards in awkward confusion towards the main body.

As soon as September began to cool the air and make travelling tolerable in a warm climate, General Greene, with an American party, and Colonel Stewart, with an English company, took it into their heads mutually to visit Eutaw Springs, about fifty miles west of Charleston. The meeting was unusually lively; in fact, quite an Irish gathering. Like most Irish fights, too, it was impossible to say, which had the worst of it. Both sides held a funeral wake over about three hundred killed, and claimed the fewest graves and victory.

After this affair, the British flock, which had been scattered more or less over the two Carolinas and Georgia, gathered back and alighted for a long time on two favorite spots, Charleston and Savannah. Near them gradually collected ready American hunters and fowlers, fond of foreign game, vigilant in watching and very desirous of bagging the entire lot.

Meanwhile, Cornwallis had advanced northward through North Carolina into Virginia, where the young French marquis—more fortunate than the almost useless French fleets, first under D’Estaing, and afterwards under Admiral De Ternay—was doing good service. The route of Cornwallis was nearly along the present track of the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad, which fortunately for him was not then in existence, to invite him to use its delaying time-tables and dangerous rails. As it was, he reached Petersburg in the course of time, and in safety.

A detachment sent to Charlottesville, where the Legislature of Virginia was in session, seized several of those most unmanageable specimens of the human race, members of assembly, troublesome enough when let alone, but as prisoners wholly incapable of definition, exchange, or valuation. The squad came near burning their fingers by taking the red-haired and red-vested Jefferson, whose term as Governor had expired only two days before, but around whose head there yet lingered enough of the aureola of official dignity to make him worth several cart-loads of assemblymen.

For Cornwallis himself the three military fates—Washington, Rochambeau, and Lafayette—were securely and steadily spinning lines for his entanglement. At last they enmeshed him at Yorktown. Nine thousand Americans and seven thousand Frenchmen held the netting which, gathered in fold after fold, finally, October 19, 1781, caught the whole shoal,—Cornwallis, that voracious old pike which had devoured scores of American armored fish, and 7,000 others. In this splendid haul were found 235 cannon, 8,000 small arms, and regimental colors enough to supply all the state-houses for the next sixty-five years.

When Lord George Germain hastened with the disagreeable and accelerating news to Lord North, the premier raised his hands wildly in the air, and exclaimed, with an oath too big to fit our Comic History, “It is all over.”

For the first time, during the last six years, Lord North was right.

George III. stormed loudly, and, at a hint that American independence must follow, threatened to freight a large boat with his ponderous heaviness, and be transported to Hanover; but he soon concluded to take another bucolic roll in the rich English clover, and to postpone turning himself out into the thin grazing lands along the Weser.

The American George rejoiced with temperate joy, thanked God for the crowning mercy, ordered divine service to be performed throughout the camps, and thanksgiving turkeys to be rendered to, and thanksgiving by, the troops. And so ended 1781, as all years should end, with thanksgiving and turkey.

Christmas dinners, or something else in America, had the effect of turning the English stomach against the war ministry of Lord North. “Let us have peace,” piped the English House of Commons to the watch on the deck of the still fine, but somewhat battered, Royal George. “Ay! ay!” responded the first mate. So the ship was hove to, and a gentleman stepped down the ladder let down her sides, was rowed to the French shore, and at Paris met four American ex-rebels,—Adams, Franklin, Jay, and Henry Laurens.

These five gentlemen, on the 30th of November, 1782, sitting at a round table covered with green baize, signed a preliminary agreement for peace, which was joyfully attested by many millions of witnesses.

This agreement was dressed up with new ribbons ten months after, and then became a fixed, resolute treaty,—a gay, laughing, sunny break in our history,—but in the English chronicles a flinty, hard, jagged fact, against which the waves of national pride long broke sullenly and hoarsely. England had sent one hundred and twelve thousand five hundred and eighty four soldiers and twenty-two thousand seamen to this unjust, successless war; had lost many thousands out of their ranks; had lost much solid, precious money; lost credit and honor, more precious still; and now at last lost the colonial empires themselves.

She had thus millions of reasons for not being jolly.