Independence was adopted. Soon after that event Kentucky, though a county of Virginia, petitioned Congress to be received as the fourteenth state of the Union and sent a delegation to Patrick Henry, governor of Virginia, to offer that state the services of "a respectable body of prime riflemen."

149. George Rogers Clark wins the Northwestern Territory. One of these delegates was George Rogers Clark, a young Virginian scarcely past twenty, who had cast in his lot with the Kentucky settlers on the Ohio. Clark conceived

and executed a plan of campaign which entitles him to be called the Washington of the West. Sending spies across the Ohio to the Illinois country, he learned that the Indians and French there were only lukewarm in their allegiance to their new English masters. He therefore determined to seize this huge territory for the patriot cause, and in the autumn of 1777 went to Williamsburg to. lay his plans before Governor Patrick Henry. Henry, Jefferson, and other prominent Virginians approved Clark's bold scheme, but the utmost that the state could do for him was to authorize him to raise 350 men and advance him $1200 in depreciated currency. It was a poor start for the conquest of a region as large as New England, New York, and Pennsylvania combined, but Clark belonged to the men of genius who persist in accomplishing tasks which men of judgment pronounce impossible. He surprised the posts at Kaskaskia and Cahokia and, by intrepid assurance and skillful diplomacy, induced the French and Indians of the Mississippi Valley to transfer their allegiance from the British Empire to the new American republic. When he learned that Colonel Hamilton, the British commander at Detroit, had seized the fort of Vincennes on the Wabash, he immediately marched his men in midwinter over two hundred miles across the "drowned lands" of the Wabash, sometimes wading through icy water up to their chins, sometimes

GEORGE ROGERS CLARK

shivering supperless on some bleak knoll, but always courageous and confident, until he appeared before the post of Vincennes and summoned the wonderstricken Hamilton to an immediate and unconditional surrender (February, 1779). The capture of Vincennes was the deathblow of the British power north of the Ohio.

PEACE

150. George III abandons the Struggle. When the news of Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown reached Lord North, he threw up his hands and exclaimed, "My God! it is all over." The stubborn king was not so ready to read in Yorktown the doom of his tenacious policy of coercion. Always mistaking the satisfaction of his royal will for the salvation of the British Empire, he stormed against the rising sentiment for peace with America and wrote letters of petulant bombast to his prime minister, threatening to resign the British crown and retire to his ancestral domains in Germany. But threats and entreaties were of no avail. The nation was sick of the rule of the "King's Friends," and the early months of 1782 saw George III compelled to part with Lord North and receive into his service, if not into his confidence, the Whig statesmen. Lord Shelburne, the new prime minister, sent a diplomatic agent to Paris to discuss terms of peace with the American commissioners, Jay, Franklin, and John Adams.

151. Complications in the Peace Negotiations. The situation was a very complicated one. The United States, by the treaty of alliance with France in 1778, had pledged itself not to make a separate peace with England. Then the French had drawn Spain into the war, with the promise of recovering for her the island of Jamaica in the West Indies (taken by Oliver Cromwell's fleet in 1655) and the rock fortress of Gibraltar (captured by the English in 1704). The Franco-American alliance had been successful, as we have seen, in defeating the British invasion of the Atlantic seaboard, thus assuring the independence of the United States. But the bolder FrancoSpanish design of destroying the naval supremacy of Great Britain and dividing up her colonial empire had entirely failed. It soon became evident to the American diplomats at Paris that France was planning to find consolation for her defeated ally, Spain, at the

expense of her victorious ally, America. In fact, Vergennes, the French minister, had prepared a map on which the United States figured as the same old colonial strip between the Alleghenies and the sea, while the western region north of the Ohio was to be restored to England and that south of the Ohio to the Indians, partly under American and partly under Spanish protection (see map). Thus the new republic was to be robbed of the fruits of the labors of Boone, Sevier, Robertson, and Clark, and the Mississippi was to be a Spanish stream. "This court is interested in separating us from Great Britain," wrote Jay from Paris, "but it is not their interest that we should become a great and formidable people."

152. Our Great Debt to France. Yet we were greatly beholden to France. Her aid in men, ships, and money had been so timely and generous that it is almost certain that without it the American cause would have been lost. The Continental Congress, resorting to every possible device,-requisitions on the states, confiscation of Tory estates, domestic loans, even a national lottery,- could raise only a small fraction of the money needed to carry on the war. By 1778 it had issued $63,500,000 of paper money, which was rapidly coming to be worth hardly more than the paper on which it was printed. The bracing effect on our languishing finances of the arrival of 2,500,000 francs in French gold can easily be imagined. Our commissioners in Paris, therefore, were instructed by Congress not to proceed in the peace negotiations without the consent and concurrence of the French ministry.

153. The United States makes a Separate Peace with England. The critical question before Jay, Adams, and Franklin was whether or not they should obey their instructions from Congress and refuse to conclude a favorable peace with the willing Whig ministry of England merely because France wanted to deprive the new republic of her western conquests and recompense Spain in the Mississippi Valley for what she had failed to get in the West Indies and in the Mediterranean. The commissioners, following Jay's advice, disobeyed Congress, violated the treaty of alliance with France, and concluded the peace with England alone, thereby securing the whole territory from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. But it took all the tact and shrewd suavity of Benjamin Franklin to make the French ministry accept the terms of the treaty with even tolerably good grace.