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