s of this expedition destroyed
one hundred and thirty-seven vessels, and tobacco beyond account,--and
they were all snugly back in New York in twenty-four days after they
started.

It is the second campaign which is the most picturesque, varied, and
exciting of the campaigns of the American Revolution,--and which was
fought on ground which will have been made sacred by another campaign,
perhaps even before these words meet the reader's eye. The men engaged
in it were men who have left their mark. Cornwallis and Baron Steuben
share with each other the honor of inventing the present light-infantry
tactics of the world. Cornwallis. in Carolina, had seen the necessity of
divesting his troops of their impediments. Steuben had been doing the
same with the American line, ever since he began his instructions on the
29th of March, 1778. The discipline thus invented was carried back to
Europe by English and by French officers; and when the wars of the
French Revolution began, the rapid movement of the new light infantry
approved itself to military men of all the great warring nations, and
the old tactics of the heavy infantry of the last century died away in
face of the American improvement. Besides Cornwallis, and for a time
under him, here figured the traitor Arnold. Against them, besides
Steuben, were Wayne and Lafayette,--the last in his maiden campaign, in
which, indeed, he earned his military reputation, "never but once,"
says Tarleton, his enemy "committing himself during a very difficult
campaign." In the beginning, General Phillips, the same who had been
captured at Saratoga, had the chief command of the English army.
Lafayette notes grimly that General Phillips had commanded at Minden the
battery by which the Marquis de Lafayette, his father, was killed. He
makes this memorandum in mentioning the fact that one of his cannon-shot
passed through the room in which Phillips was dying in Petersburg. Such
were the prominent actors in the campaign. It is not till within a few
years that the full key to it has been given in the publication of some
additional letters of Lord Cornwall. Until that time, a part of his
movements were always shrouded in mystery.

In October, 1780, the English General Leslie entered Chesapeake Bay
again, and established himself for a while at Portsmouth, opposite
Norfolk. But Colonel Ferguson, with whom Leslie was to cooperate,
had been defeated at King's Mountain, and when Leslie learned of the
con