The next year a like disappointment was added. In midsummer a French fleet arrived upon the northern coast, but it proved impossible to use it. On the 10th of July a French squadron put in at Newport and landed a force of six thousand men under the Comte de Rochambeau; but a powerful British fleet presently blockaded the port, and Rochambeau could not prudently withdraw while the fleet was threatened. He had been ordered to put himself at General Washington’s disposal; but he could not do so till the blockade was raised. Meanwhile not only Georgia but the entire South seemed lost and given over to British control. In the spring, Clinton had concentrated all his forces once more at New York; and then, leaving that all-important place strong enough to keep Washington where he was, he had himself taken eight thousand men by sea to Charleston. Two thousand more troops, already in the South, joined him there, and by the 12th of May (1780) he had taken not only the place itself, but General Lincoln and three thousand men besides. South Carolina teemed with loyalists. Partisan bands, some serving one side, some the other, swept and harried the region from end to end. Wherever the British moved in force, they moved as they pleased, and were masters of the country. In June General Clinton deemed it already safe to take half his force back to New York, and Cornwallis was left to complete the work of subjugation. [Illustration: WASHINGTON AND ROCHAMBEAU IN THE TRENCHES AT YORKTOWN] That same month the Congress conferred the chief command in the South upon General Horatio Gates, who had been in command of the army to which Burgoyne had surrendered at Saratoga,—the army which Schuyler had made ready and which Morgan and Arnold had victoriously handled. Intriguers had sought, while Washington lay at Valley Forge, to substitute Gates for the commander-in-chief; now he was to show how happy a circumstance it was that that selfish intrigue had failed. He met Cornwallis at Camden, in South Carolina, his own force three thousand men, Cornwallis’s but two thousand, and was utterly, even shamefully, defeated (August 16, 1780). “We look on America as at our feet,” said Horace Walpole, complacently, when the news had made its way over sea. [Illustration: HORATIO GATES]