It was the worst of all the bad signs of the times that no government could be agreed upon that would give the young states a real union, or assure them of harmony and co-operation in the exercise of the independence for which they were struggling. Definitive articles of confederation had been suggested as of course at the time the Declaration of Independence was adopted; and the next year (November 15, 1777) the Congress had adopted the plan which Mr. Dickinson had drawn up and which its committee had reported July 12, 1776. But the states did not all accept it, and without unanimous adoption it could not go into operation. All except Delaware and Maryland accepted it before the close of 1778, and Delaware added her ratification in 1779; but Maryland still held out,—waiting until the great states, like Virginia, should forego some part of their too great preponderance and advantage in the prospective partnership by transferring their claims to the great northwestern territories to the proposed government of the confederation; and her statesmanlike scruples still kept the country without a government throughout that all but hopeless year 1780. [Illustration: BENEDICT ARNOLD’S PASS TO MAJOR ANDRÉ] But the autumn showed a sudden turning of the tide. Cornwallis had ventured too far from his base of operations on the southern coast. He had gone deep into the country of the Carolinas, north of him, and was being beset almost as Burgoyne had been when he sought to cross the forests which lay about the upper waters of the Hudson. Gates had been promptly superseded after his disgraceful discomfiture and rout at Camden, and the most capable officers the long war had bred were now set to accomplish the task of forcing Cornwallis to a checkmate: Nathanael Greene, whose quality Washington had seen abundantly tested at Trenton and Princeton, at the Brandywine, at Germantown, and at Monmouth; the dashing Henry Lee, whom nature and the hard school of war had made a master of cavalry; the veteran and systematic Steuben; Morgan, who had won with Arnold in the fighting about Saratoga, and had kept his name unstained; and William Washington, a distant kinsman of the commander-in-chief, whom English soldiers were to remember with Lee as a master of light horsemen. The wide forests were full, too, of partisan bands, under leaders whom the British had found good reason to dread. [Illustration: MAJOR ANDRÉ’S POCKET-BOOK] [Illustration: VIRGINIA COLONIAL CURRENCY]