240
ips of the English navy, and a number of privateers acting as convoy to a cloud of transports, entered the Capes of the Chesapeake. The Raisonnable drew too much water to go farther than Hampton Roads: they probably did not know the channel as well as the Merrimack's pilots do. But the rest of them went up Elizabeth River, as one Pawnee did afterwards,--and there, at Gosport, found the State's navy-yard, as the Pawnee found a nation's. There was a vessel of war, unfinished, of twenty-eight guns, and many smaller vessels,--and they burned them all. How exactly it begins as the history of another war begins! Different branches 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 militar