had evacuated Ninety-Six, joined Rawdon with his troops. He had called around him the royalists in the district and set before them the option of making their peace with the Americans or fleeing under his escort to Charleston. Once more loyalists who had signalized themselves by devoted service to the king learned from his officer that he could no longer protect them in their own homes. Forced to elect the lot of refugees, they brought into the camp of Cruger their wives, children, and slaves, wagons laden with the little of their property that they could carry away, sure to be pushed aside by the English at Charleston as troublesome guests, and left to wretchedness and despair.

The British, when united, were superior in number; but their detachments were attacked with success. They could not give the protection which they had promised, and the people saw no hope of peace except by driving them out of the land. Weary of ceaseless turmoil, Rawdon repaired to Charleston, and, pretending ill health, sailed for England, but not till after a last act of vengeful inhumanity. Isaac Hayne, a planter in the low country whose affections were always with America, had, after the fall of Charleston, obtained British protection; at the same time he avowed his resolve never to meet a call for military service under the British flag. When the British lost the part of the country in which he resided and could protect him no longer, he resumed his American citizenship and led a regiment of militia against them. Taken prisoner, Balfour hesitated what to do with him; but Rawdon, who was Balfour's superior in command, had no sooner arrived in Charleston than, against the entreaties of the children of Hayne, of the women of Charleston, of the lieutenant-governor of the province, he sent him to the gallows. The execution was illegal; for the loss of power to protect forfeited the right to enforce allegiance. It was most impolitic; for in moderate men it uprooted all remaining attachment to the English government, and roused the women of Charleston to implacable defiance. After the departure of Rawdon there remained in South Carolina no British officer who would have acted in like manner. His first excuse for the execution was the order of Cornwallis which had filled the woods of Carolina with assas

sins. Feeling the act as a stain upon his name, he attempted, but not till after the death of Balfour, to throw on that officer the blame that belonged to himself. On the voyage to England he was captured by the French.

After a short rest, Greene moved his army from the hills of Santee in a roundabout way to attack the British at their post near the junction of the Wateree and Congaree. They retreated before him, and halted at Eutaw Springs. He continued the pursuit with so much skill that the British remained ignorant of his advance. At four o'clock on the morning of the eighth of September his army was in motion to attack. them. The centre of the front line was composed of two small battalions from North Carolina, and of one from South Carolina on each wing, commanded, respectively, by Marion and Pickens. The second line was formed of three hundred and fifty continentals of North Carolina, led by General Sumner; of an equal number of Virginians, commanded by LieutenantColonel Campbell; and of two hundred and fifty Marylanders, under Otho Williams. Long and gallantly did the militia maintain the action, those with Marion and Pickens proving themselves equal to the best veterans. As they began to be over powered by numbers, they were sustained by the North Carolina brigade under Sumner, while the Virginians under Campbell and the Marylanders under Williams charged with the bayonet. The British were routed. On a party that prepared to rally, William Washington bore down with his cavalry and a small body of infantry, and drove them from the field. Great numbers of the British fell, or were made prisoners.

Many of the Americans who joined in the shouts of triumph were doomed to bleed. A brick house sheltered the British as they fled. Against the house Greene ordered artillery to play from open ground; the gunners were shot down by riflemen, and the field-pieces abandoned to the enemy. Upon a party in an adjacent wood of barren oaks, of a species whose close, stiff branches by their stubbornness made cavalry helpless, Greene for a slight object ordered William Washington to charge with his horsemen; the order was obeyed, and the excellent officer, to whom belonged so much of the glory of the campaign, was wounded, disabled, and taken prisoner. So

there were at Eutaw two successive engagements. In the first, Greene won a brilliant victory and with little loss; in the second, his own hasty orders brought upon himself a defeat, with the death or capture of many of his bravest men. In the two engagements the Americans lost, in killed, wounded, and missing, five hundred and fifty-four men; they took five hundred prisoners, including the wounded; and the total loss of the British approached one thousand.

The cause of the United States was the cause of Ireland. Among the fruits of their battles was the recovery for the Irish of her equal rights in trade and legislation. Yet such is the complication in human affairs that the people who of all others should have been found taking part with America sent against them some of their best troops and their ablest men. Irishmen fought in the British ranks at Eutaw. Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who received on this day wounds that were all but mortal, had in later years no consolation for his share in the conflict; "for," said he, "I was then fighting against liberty."

Occupying the field of battle by a strong picket, Greene drew off to his morning's camp, where his troops could have the refreshment of pure water, and prepare to renew the attack. But the British in the night, after destroying stores and breaking in pieces a thousand muskets, retreated to Charleston, leaving seventy of their wounded. Resting one or two days, Greene with his troops, which were wasted not only by battle, but by the climate, regained his old position on the heights of Santee. From Morris, the financier, he received good words and little else; but his own fortitude never failed him. He says of himself: "We fight, get beaten, and fight again." He had been in command less than ten months; and in that time the three southern states were recovered, excepting only Wilmington which was soon after evacuated, Charleston, and Savannah. The legislature of South Carolina, at its next meeting, in testimony of its approbation and gratitude, voted him an estate in their "country" of the value of ten thousand guineas. To this Georgia added five thousand guineas, and North Carolina four-and-twenty thousand acres of the most fertile land in Tennessee.

CHAPTER IV.

THE LAST CAMPAIGN OF THE AMERICAN WAR.

1781.

SIR HENRY CLINTON persevered in the purpose of holding a station in the Chesapeake bay; and, on the second of January 1781, Arnold, with sixteen hundred men, appeared by his order in the James river. The generous commonwealth of Virginia having sent its best troops and arms to the more southern states, Governor Jefferson promptly called the whole militia from the adjacent counties; but, in the region of planters with slaves, there were not freemen enough at hand to meet the invaders. Arnold offered to spare Richmond if he might unmolested carry off its stores of tobacco; the proposal being rejected with scorn, on the fifth and sixth its houses and stores, public and private, were set on fire. Washington used his knowledge of the lowlands of Virginia to form for the capture of Arnold a plan of which the success seemed to him certain. From his own army he detached about twelve hundred men of the New England and New Jersey lines under the command of Lafayette, and asked the combined aid of the whole French fleet at Newport and a detachment from the land forces under Rochambeau. But d'Estouches, the French admiral, had already sent out a sixty-four-gun ship and two frigates, and did not think it prudent to put to sea with the residue of the fleet. The ships-of-war, which arrived safely in the Chesapeake, having no land troops, could not reach Arnold; but, on their way back to Rhode Island, they captured a British fifty-gun frigate. Washington, on the sixth of March, met Rochambeau and d'Estouches in council on board

the flag-ship of the French admiral at Newport, and the plan of Washington, for a combined expedition of the French fleet and land forces into Virginia, was adopted. But the execution of the plan was too slow; the benefit of a fair wind and of a day were lost, so that Arbuthnot, with the British fleet, overtook them off the capes of Virginia. A partial engagement ensued for an hour. On the next day the French, advised by its council of war not to renew the action, returned to Newport; while the British sailed into the Chesapeake.

On the twenty-sixth of March, General Phillips, who brought from New York a reinforcement of two thousand picked men, took the command in Virginia. All the stores of produce which its planters in five quiet years had accumulated were carried off or destroyed. Their negroes, so desired in the West Indies, formed the staple article of plunder.

By a courier from Washington Lafayette received information that Virginia was to become the centre of active operations, and was instructed to defend the state as well as his means would permit. His troops, who were chiefly from New England, dreaded the climate of lower Virginia, and, besides, were destitute of everything; yet when Lafayette, from the south side of the Susquehannah, in an order of the day, offered leave to any of them to return to the North, not one would abandon him. At Baltimore he borrowed two thousand pounds sterling, supplied his men with shoes and hats, and bought linen, which the women of Baltimore made into summer garments. Then, by a forced march of two hundred miles, he arrived at Richmond on the twenty-ninth of April, the evening before Phillips reached the opposite bank of the river. Having in the night been joined by Steuben with militia, Lafayette was able to hold in check the larger British force. The line of Pennsylvania was detained in that state week after week for needful supplies; while Clinton, stimulated by Germain's praises of the activity of Cornwallis, sent another considerable detachment to Virginia.

On the thirteenth of May, General Phillips died of malignant fever. Arnold, on whom the command devolved, though only for seven days, addressed a letter to Lafayette, who returned it, refusing to correspond with a traitor. Arnold