ABSTRACT
The treasures of the country have been thrown away; and the weight of taxes imposed, with such a heavy hand, upon an overburthened and sinking people, is grown at length almost intolerable. The American commander, General Greene, insisted so strongly on the heavy losses sustained by Lord Cornwallis that Guilford Court-House to eyes, aware of Cornwallis’s small and virtually irreplaceable numbers, must have already begun to assume the aspect of a very Pyrrhic victory. During the Parliamentary Recess the war-news became slowly but steadily more unfavourable. Thus, naval news that showed the French able to threaten St. Lucia and capture Tobago. After Parliament had already been sitting for a critical fortnight, a methodical and uninspired bureaucrat, Welbore Ellis, had to be raised to the American Secretaryship as an avowedly stop-gap and temporary nomination.
