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the Battle of Monmouth in the following June. The next considerable events of the war were the taking of Stony Point by the British in 1779, and its recapture by Anthony Wayne in the same year. The war went on during the next two years with varying results, but none decisive. The defection of Benedict Arnold deprived the Americans of a capable soldier and gave him to the enemy. The American victory at the Battle of the Cowpens, January 17, 1781, was offset by the triumph of Cornwallis at Guilford Court House, March 15th, but this was that general's last success on American soil. His own account of the surrender of Yorktown, in a letter addressed to Sir Henry Clinton, here follows the complete narrative of Dawson, which covers the final year of the actual War of the American Revolution. HENRY B. DAWSON The seventh year of the War of the Revolution was productive of great events. Opening with the mutiny of the Pennsylvania line of troops, its progress soon developed the disaffection of the New Jersey line also, and all the skill of General Washington was necessary to maintain that discipline in the army on which the salvation of the country depended. The resources of the country, from the long-continued struggle through which it had passed during six years, had become exhausted; its currency had become depreciated beyond precedent; and the people, weary of the contest, were lukewarm as well as enervated. At that time, also, the Federal Congress appeared to lack that nerve and decision which had marked the proceedings of the same body earlier in the war; and contenting itself with "recommendations," without attempting to enforce its requisitions or even to advise the adoption of compulsory measures by the States, it left the troops who were in the field without clothing, provisions, or pay, and indirectly forced upon them those acts of apparent insurrection which, resolved to their first elements, might not improperly have been called "acts of necessity," and been justified, in charity, as essential to their self-preservation. So gloomy, indeed, were the prospects of American independence at that time that the interposition of some foreign government was, by general consent, considered absolutely essential; and never were the good qualities of the Commander-in-Chief more nobly displayed than at this period, when, amid the most pressing discour
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