[Footnote 2: Irving, iv, 383.]

With little delay Washington went back to the North with his army,
expecting to see the first fruits of the capitulation. There were
nearly seventeen thousand Allied troops at Yorktown of whom three
thousand were militia of Virginia. The British force under Cornwallis
numbered less than eight thousand men.

Months were required before the truce between the two belligerents
resulted in peace. But the people of America hailed the news of
Yorktown as the end of the war. They had hardly admitted to themselves
the gravity of the task while the war lasted, and being now
relieved of immediate danger, they gave themselves up to surprising
insouciance. A few among them who thought deeply, Washington above
all, feared that the British might indulge in some surprise which they
would find it hard to repel.

But the American Revolution was indeed ended, and the American
Colonies of 1775 were indeed independent and free. Even in the brief
outline of the course of events which I have given, it must appear
that the American Revolution was almost the most hare-brained
enterprise in history. After the first days of Lexington and Concord,
when the farmers and country-folk rushed to the centres to check
the British invaders, the British had almost continuously a large
advantage in position and in number of troops. And in those early days
the Colonists fought, not for Independence, but for the traditional
rights which the British Crown threatened to take from them. Now they
had their freedom, but what a freedom! There were thirteen unrelated
political communities bound together now only by the fact of having
been united in their common struggle against England. Each had adopted