In time the
"continental dollar" was worth only two cents. Yet soldiers long
had to take this money at its face value for their pay, with the
result that the pay for three months would scarcely buy a pair of
boots. There is little wonder that more than once Washington had
to face formidable mutiny among his troops. The only ones on whom
he could rely were the regulars enlisted by Congress and
carefully trained. The worth of the militia, he said, "depends
entirely on the prospects of the day; if favorable, they throng
to you; if not, they will not move." They played a chief part in
the prosperous campaign of 1777, when Burgoyne was beaten. In the
next year, before Newport, they wholly failed General Sullivan
and deserted shamelessly to their homes.
By 1779 the fighting had shifted to the South. Washington
personally remained in the North to guard the Hudson and to watch
the British in New York. He sent La Fayette to France in January,
1779, there to urge not merely naval but military aid on a great
scale. La Fayette came back after an absence of a little over a
year and in the end France promised eight thousand men who should
be under Washington's control as completely as if they were
American soldiers. The older nation accepted the principle that
the officers in the younger nation which she was helping should
rank in their grade before her own.
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