Aubert Dubayet; Or, the Two Sister Republics (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. CONDITION OF THE THIRTEEN NORTH AMERICAN COLONIES OF GREAT BRITAIN IN 1780?LIEUTENANT AUBERT DUBAYET IN NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND, WITH ROCHAMBEAU AND THE FRENCH ARMY. When the French troops of which the regiment of Aubert Dubayet was a part, landed in 1780 at Newport, in Rhode Island, under the command of Count Rochambeau, the condition of the thirteen revolted colonies of Great Britain was found by their new allies to be worse than it was expected. Washington had just written to Reed, of Pennsylvania: "We have never experienced a like extremity at any period of the war." The winter of that year had been intensely rigorous. It had brought famine to the camps of the revolutionary soldiers. " For a fortnight past," wrote their illustrious chief on the 8th of January, "the troops, both officers and men, have been almost perishing with want." The Americans, tried by a multitude of indescribable sufferings, were learning to their sorrow what it costs to indulge in the luxury of revolutions. The French, not long after, made the same experiment, and have since repeated it often, although one of them has propounded to the world this question: " Is it possible for anybody to be again cheerful, who has ever witnessed a revolution and its consequences?" He might find an answer in the saying ofone of his compatriots, who asserts " that a revolution always demoralizes everybody without instructing any one." But, whatever be the effects of such political convulsions, the Americans had to meet them in the best way they could, and although the cold had been so unusual as to freeze the great bay of New York, yet it had comparatively very little to do with their distress and difficulties. The main cause was, that Congress had gone to war without adequate preparations for it?-a defe...