the
prosperous Northern coast communities, burning their towns and their
shipping, destroying their industries, and carrying off their
provisions. In 1779, Virginia, which since 1776 had quietly raised
tobacco, and the provisions which had so largely subsisted Washington's
army, was laid waste all along its easily accessible river highways.
Savannah was taken late in 1778, and at the close of the next year
Clinton himself commanded an expedition which in May, 1780, captured the
city of Charleston and forced General Lincoln to surrender his army of
2500 Continental troops. "We look upon America as at our feet," wrote
Horace Walpole. And in fact the occupation of Georgia and South Carolina
was regarded by the English, by the American Loyalists, and by many
patriots, as the prelude to the conquest of the entire South and the end
of the rebellion.

Little wonder if in these days of constant defeat and declining
enthusiasm Congress too often fell to the level of a wrangling body of
mediocre men. After the first years the ability that might have given it
dignity was largely employed in the army, on diplomatic missions, or in
the establishment and administration of the new State Governments. The
particularism of the time is revealed in the belief that a man's first
allegiance was to his State; to construct a constitution for
Massachusetts was thought to be a greater service than to draft the
Articles of Confederation; to be Governor of Virginia a higher honor
than to be President of Congress. The political wisdom of the decade is
therefore chiefly embodied in the first state constitutions and the
legislation of the new State Governments. The constitutions gave formal
expression to the philosophy of the Revolution, but in their detailed
arrangements followed closely the practices and traditions inherited
from the colonial period; popular sovereignty was everywhere declared,
but everywhere limited by basing the suffrage upon property, and often
half defeated by adopting an administrative mechanism in harmony with
the prevailing belief that good government springs from "power balanced
and cancelled and dispersed." The new regime was not altogether such as
Patrick Henry or Jefferson would have made it, but it marked a safe and
conservative advance toward the "establishment of a more equal liberty"
than had hitherto prevailed.

The erection of stable State Governments greatly diminished the power
and the prestige of federal autho