On the seventeenth, Cornwallis, who could neither hold his post nor escape, proposed to surrender. On the eighteenth, Colonel Laurens and the Viscount de Noailles as commissioners on the American side met two high officers of the army of Cornwallis, to draft the capitulation. The articles were the same as those which Clinton had imposed upon Lincoln at Charleston. All the troops were to be prisoners of war; all public property was to be delivered up. Runaway slaves and the plunder taken by officers and soldiers in their marches through the country might be reclaimed; with this limitation, private property was to be respected. All royalists were left to be dealt with according to the laws of their own countrymen; but Cornwallis, in the packet which took his dispatches to Sir Henry Clinton, was suffered silently to send away such persons as were most obnoxious.

Of prisoners, there were seven thousand two hundred and forty-seven regular soldiers, the flower of the British army in America, beside eight hundred and forty sailors. The British loss during the siege amounted to more than three hundred and fifty. Two hundred and forty-four pieces of cannon were taken, of which seventy-five were of brass. The land forces and stores were assigned to the Americans, the ships and mariners to the French. At four o'clock in the afternoon of the nineteenth, Cornwallis remaining in his tent, Major-General O'Hara marched the British army past the lines of the combined armies and, not without signs of repugnance, made his surrender to Washington. His troops then stepped forward decently and piled their arms on the ground.

The English soldiers affected to look at the allied army with scorn; their officers conducted themselves with decorum, yet felt most keenly how decisive was their defeat.

Nor must impartial history fail to relate that the French provided for the siege of Yorktown thirty-six ships of the line; and that while the Americans supplied nine thousand troops, the contingent of the French consisted of seven thousand.

There was no day before it or after it like that on which the elder Bourbon king, through his army and navy, assisted to seal the victory of the rights of man and to pass from nation to nation the lighted torch of freedom.

When the letters of Washington announcing the capitulation reached congress, that body, with the people streaming in their train, went in procession to the Dutch Lutheran church to return thanks to Almighty God. Every breast swelled with joy. In the evening Philadelphia was illuminated with greater splendor than ever before. Congress voted honors to Washington, to Rochambeau, and to de Grasse, with special thanks to the officers and troops. The promise was given of a marble column to be erected at Yorktown, with emblems of the alliance between the United States and his most Christian majesty.

The Duke de Lauzun, chosen to take the news across the Atlantic, arrived in twenty-two days at Brest, and reached Versailles on the nineteenth of November. The king, who had just been made happy by the birth of a dauphin, received the glad news in the queen's apartment. The very last sands of the life of the Count de Maurepas were running out; but he could still recognise de Lauzun, and the tidings threw a halo round his death-bed. No statesman of his century had a more prosperous old age or such felicity in the circumstances. of his death. The joy at court penetrated the people, and the name of Lafayette was pronounced with veneration. "History," said Vergennes, "offers few examples of a success so complete." "All the world agree," wrote Franklin to Washington, "that no expedition was ever better planned or better executed. It brightens the glory that must accompany your name to the latest posterity."

The first tidings of the surrender of Cornwallis reached England from France about noon on the twenty-fifth of November. "It is all over," said Lord North many times, under the deepest agitation and distress. Fox-to whom the defeats of armies of invaders, from Xerxes' time downward, gave the greatest satisfaction-heard of the capitulation of Yorktown with triumphant delight. He hoped it might become the conviction of all mankind that power resting on armed force is invidious, detestable, weak, and tottering. The official report from Sir Henry Clinton was received the same day at midnight. When on the following Tuesday parliament came together, the speech of the king was confused, the debates in

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the two houses augured an impending change in the opinion of parliament, and the majority of the ministry was reduced to eighty-seven. A fortnight later the motion of Sir James Lowther to give up "all further attempts to reduce the revolted colonies" was well received by the members from the country, and the majority of the ministry, after a very long and animated debate, dwindled to forty-one. The city of London entreated the king to put an end to "this unnatural and unfortunate war." Such, too, was the wish of public meetings in Westminster, in Southwark, and in the counties of Middlesex and Surrey.

The chimes of the Christmas bells had hardly died away when the king wrote as stubbornly as ever: "No difficulties can get me to consent to the getting of peace at the expense of a separation from America." Yet Lord George Germain was compelled to retire from the cabinet. It was sought to palliate his disgrace by a peerage; but, when for the first time he repaired to the house of lords, he was met by reproof for cowardice and incapacity.

CHAPTER V.

BRITAIN IS WEARY OF WAR WITH AMERICA.

JANUARY-JUne 1782.

THE campaign in Virginia being finished, Washington and the eastern army were cantoned for the winter in their old positions around New York; Wayne, with the Pennsylvania line, marched to the South to reinforce Greene; the French under Rochambeau encamped in Virginia; and de Grasse took his fleet to the West Indies.

As the hope of peace gained strength, congress could not repress alarm at the extent of the control over the negotiations for it, which, in the previous month of June, had been granted to France. On the seventh of January 1782, Robert R. Livingston, the first American secretary for foreign affairs, proving himself equal to the supreme responsibility devolved upon him, rose above every local interest or influence, and, clearly representing the spirit of the people and the desires of congress, communicated to the American commissioners for peace new instructions on its conditions. The boundaries on the east, the north-east, and the north were to be the ocean and the well-known line between the United States and Canada; on the west, the Mississippi; for the south, Livingston, foreseeing the dangers of restoring West Florida to Great Britain, with wise forethought declared that the interests of France and of the United States conspired to exclude Great Britain from both the Floridas; but no objection was made to their restoration to Spain.

Livingston asserted the equal common rights of the United States to the fisheries on the banks of Newfoundland; yet not

within such distance of the coasts of other powers as the law of nations allows them to appropriate; the sea, by its nature, cannot be appropriated; its common benefits are the right of all mankind.

The commissioners were further instructed that no stipulation must be made in favor of the American partisans of England who had been banished the country or whose property had been forfeited.

Should the Floridas be ceded to Spain, it would be essential to fix their limits precisely, for which the directions of congress of 1777 were made the rule.

These instructions were received by Franklin in March. They carried joy to the old man's heart, and he answered: "Your communications of the sentiments of congress with regard to a treaty of peace give me great pleasure, and the more as they agree so perfectly with my own opinions and furnish me with additional arguments in their support. My ideas on the points to be insisted on in the treaty of peace are, I assure you, full as strong as yours. Be assured I shall not willingly give up any important right or interest of our country, and, unless this campaign should afford our enemies some considerable advantage, I hope more may be obtained than I yet expect. Let us keep not only our courage but our vigilance."*

The action of congress was slower but not less firm. On the seventeenth of November 1781 the delegates for Massachusetts laid before congress the prayer of their state, that the right in the fisheries which had heretofore been enjoyed might be continued and secured. †

The subject was referred to Lovell of Massachusetts, Carroll of Maryland, and to Madison. The young Virginia statesman, whose wisdom so often pointed out to his country the way of escape from embarrassment, took the lead in the committee, and the ultimatum of peace which he prepared merged the prayer of a single commonwealth in an ultimatum that included the interests of the nation. IIis report, which was

*Diplomatic Correspondence, iii., 314, 328.

Secret Journals, iii., 150. This report, which is in the handwriting of Madison, is preserved in the State Department, in the MSS. labeled "Committees on State Papers." It is printed in Secret Journals, iii., 151-201, and in New York Historical Collections for 1878.