he began his instructions on the 29th of March, 1778.  The discipline thus invented was carried back to Europe by English and by French officers; and when the wars of the French Revolution began, the rapid movement of the new light infantry approved itself to military men of all the great warring nations, and the old tactics of the heavy infantry of the last century died away in face of the American improvement.  Besides Cornwallis, and for a time under him, here figured the traitor Arnold.  Against them, besides Steuben, were Wayne and Lafayette,—­the last in his maiden campaign, in which, indeed, he earned his military reputation, “never but once,” says Tarleton, his enemy “committing himself during a very difficult campaign.”  In the beginning, General Phillips, the same who had been captured at Saratoga, had the chief command of the English army.  Lafayette notes grimly that General Phillips had commanded at Minden the battery by which the Marquis de Lafayette, his father, was killed.  He makes this memorandum in mentioning the fact that one of his cannon-shot passed through the room in which Phillips was dying in Petersburg.  Such were the prominent actors in the campaign.  It is not till within a few years that the full key to it has been given in the publication of some additional letters of Lord Cornwall.  Until that time, a part of his movements were always shrouded in mystery.

In October, 1780, the English General Leslie entered Chesapeake Bay again, and established himself for a while at Portsmouth, opposite Norfolk.  But Colonel Ferguson, with whom Leslie was to cooperate, had been defeated at King’s Mountain, and when Leslie learned of the consequent change in Cornwallis’s plans, he returned to New York on the 24th of November.  His departure was regarded as a victory by General Muhlenberg, and the Virginia militia, who were called out to meet him.

They had scarcely been disbanded, however, when a second expedition, which had been intrusted to the traitor Arnold, arrived from New York in James River.  Baron Steuben, the Prussian officer, who had “brought the foreign arts from far,” was at this time in command, but with really little or no army.  Steuben was, at the best, an irritable person, and his descriptions of the Virginia militia are probably tinged by his indignation at constant failure.  General Nelson, who was the Governor of the State, behaved with spirit, but neither he nor Steuben could make the militia stand against Arnold.  They could not create a corps of cavalry among the Virginia Cavaliers, and Arnold’s expedition, therefore, marched twenty-five miles and back without so much as a shot being fired at them.  He established himself at Portsmouth, where Muhlenberg watched him, and he there waited a reinforcement.

Just at this juncture a little gleam of hope shot across the darkened landscape, in the arrival of three French vessel’s of war at the mouth of James River.  The American officers all hated Arnold with such thorough hatred that they tried to persuade the French officers to shut up Elizabeth River by sea, while they attacked him at Portsmouth from the land; but the Frenchmen declined cooperation, and Steuben was always left to boast of what he might have done.  As he had but eight rounds of ammunition a man for troops who had but just now failed him so lamentably, we can scarcely suppose that Arnold was in much danger.