the
doctors as best they could, he died on the eleventh of May. At the
end he reverted to the dominant ideal of his life--the supremacy of
England. So his chief rival in Parliament, Edmund Burke, who shocked
more than half of England by seeming to approve the nascent French
Revolution, died execrating it.

The failure of the Commission on Reconciliation to get even an
official hearing in America further depressed George III, and there
seemed to have flitted through his unsound mind more and more frequent
premonitions that England might not win after all. Having made
friendly overtures, which were rejected, he now planned to be more
savage than ever. In 1779 the American privateers won many victories
which gave them a reputation out of proportion to the importance of
the battles they fought, or the prizes they took. Chief among the
commanders of these vessels was a Scotchman, John Paul Jones, who
sailed the Bonhomme Richard and with two companion ships attacked the
Serapis and the Scarborough, convoying a company of merchantmen off
Flamborough Head. Night fell, darkness came, the Bonhomme Richard and
the Serapis kept up bombarding each other at short range. During a
brief pause, Pearson, the British captain, called out, "Have you
struck your colors?" at which Jones shouted back, "I have not yet
begun to fight." Before morning the Serapis surrendered and in the
forenoon the victorious Bonhomme Richard sank. Europe rang with the
exploit; not merely those easily thrilled by a spectacular engagement,
but those who looked deeper began to ask themselves whether the naval
power that must be reckoned with was not rising in the West.

Meanwhile, Washington kept his uncertain army near New York. The city
swarmed with Loyalists, who at one time boasted of having a volunteer
organization larger than Washington's army. These later years seem
to have been the hey-day of the Loyalists in most of the Colonies,
although the Patriots passed severe laws against them, sequestrating
their property and even banishing them. In places like New York, where
General Clinton maintained a refuge, they stayed on, hoping, as they
had done for several years, that the war would soon be over and the
King's authority restored.

In the South there were several minor fights, in which now the British
and now the Americans triumphed. At the end of December, 1779, Clinton
and Cornwallis with nearly eight thousand men went down to South
Carolina intending