George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 10

[417] native Americans, freeholders or sons of freeholders.

Chap. XIX.} 1781 Jan.

In spite of their nakedness, they marched through deep snows, over mountainous roads, and suppressed the incipient revolt. The passions of the army were quieted by their patriotism; and order and discipline returned. ‘Human patience has its limits,’ wrote Lafayette to his wife on the occasion; ‘no European army would suffer the tenth part of what the American troops suffer. It takes citizens to support hunger, nakedness, toil, and the total want of pay, which constitute the condition of our soldiers, the hardiest and most patient that are to be found in the world.’

Knox reported from New England zealous efforts to enlist men for the war. Congress could do nothing, and confessed that it could do nothing. ‘We have required,’ thus they wrote to the states on the fifteenth of January, 1781, ‘aids of men, provisions, and money;’ and they stated exactly the difficulty under which the union labored when they added: ‘the states alone have authority to execute.’

Since congress itself made a public confession of its powerlessness, nothing remained but to appeal to France for rescue not from a foreign enemy, but from the evils consequent on its own want of government. ‘If France lends not a speedy aid,’ wrote Greene from the south to her minister in Philadelphia, ‘I fear the country will be for ever lost;’ and Greene was ‘not of a desponding spirit or idle temper.’

It was therefore resolved, for the moment, to despatch to Versailles as a special minister some one who had lived in the midst of the ever-increasing distresses of the army, to set them before the government