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 a separate constitution, and the constitutions were not uniform nor was there any central unifying power to which they all looked up and obeyed.  The vicissitudes of the war, which had been fought over the region of twelve hundred miles of coast, had proved the repellent differences of the various districts.  The slave-breeder and the slave-owner of Virginia and the States of the South had little in common with the gnarled descendants of the later Puritans in New England.  What principle could be found to knit them together?  The war had at least the advantage of bringing home to all of them the evils of war which they all instinctively desired to escape.  The numbers of the disaffected, particularly of the Loyalists who openly sided with the King and with the British Government, were much larger than we generally suppose, and they not only gave much direct help and comfort to the enemy, but also much indirect and insidious aid.  In the great cities like New York and Philadelphia they numbered perhaps two fifths of the total population, and, as they were usually the rich and influential people, they counted for more than their showing in the census.  How could they ever be unified in the American Republic?  How many of them, like the traitorous General Charles Lee, would confess that, although they were willing to pass by George III as King, they still felt devotion and loyalty to the Prince of Wales?