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The Continental Army, Chapter V

An Army for the War: 1777 Most Continental enlistments expired on 31 December 1776. Congress and Washington hoped to avoid a recurrence of the problems of the previous winter by beginning their preparations for reorganizing the Continental Army during the early fall of 1776. Profiting from that earlier experience, they not only started sooner but…

Washington and His Comrades: Chapter II

Boston and Quebec Washington was not a professional soldier, though he had seen the realities of war and had moved in military society. Perhaps it was an advantage that he had not received the rigid training of a regular, for he faced conditions which required an elastic mind. The force besieging Boston consisted at first…

Colonel Alexander Scammel

From Diary of the American Revolution, Vol II.  Compiled by Frank Moore and published in 1859. Scammel is dead:—When the good man, the just, the generous, and the brave, and one who has from a sense of duty, founded in the reflection of a virtuous and enlightened mind, and hi defence of his country’s freedom,…

Cornwallis’ Report of the Siege of Yorktown

From Diary of the American Revolution, Vol II.  Compiled by Frank Moore and published in 1859. October 20.—This morning, Cornwallis, in a letter to Sir Henry Clinton, gives the following account of the siege, which terminated yesterday in his surrender to the allied forces of France and America:—”I never saw Yorktown in any favorable light,…