The surrender of Cornwallis at the battle of Yorktown soon followed, and the happy moment arrived when by the virtue and bravery of her sons, America, aided by the bounty of Heaven, compelled her invaders to acknowledge her independence; her armies quitted the tented field, and retired to cultivate the arts of peace and happiness. General Greene now returned to his native state, where he remained two years in the adjustment of his private affairs, and in October, 1785, settled with his family on his estate near Savannah, Georgia. The three Southern States, South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia, who had been most essentially benefited by his valor and services, manifested their sense of justice and gratitude by liberal donations. South Carolina presented to General Greene an estate valued at ten thousand pounds sterling. Georgia, with an estate, a few miles from Savannah, worth five thousand pounds; and North Carolina, with twenty-five thousand acres of land in the State of Tennessee. In writing from his new home, he speaks of his plantation with a kind of buoyant joy, which is constantly breaking out in gay and cheerful expressions; of his garden, and his flowers, the mocking-birds that sing around him morning and evening, and the mild and balmy atmosphere, with the same interest with which he would once have spoken of his troops, of their bravery and their discipline. But this felicity was to be of short duration. On Monday, the 12th of June, 1786, he went down to Savannah with his wife, and on their return the following day they paid a visit to an old friend, at whose house he was seized with an inflammation of the brain, which caused him to sink into a torpor, from which he never again was roused; he expired on Monday the 19th of June. The melancholy tidings soon reached Savannah, calling forth the strongest expressions of public grief. They had known him first as the champion of the South, in the hour of her greatest need, then as a fellow citizen, kind-hearted and benevolent, endearing himself to all by his social and civil virtues; and now, in the prime of manhood, he was suddenly snatched away, and a grave was all they could give him. On the following day the body of the deceased was conveyed to Savannah, and at the request of the inhabitants, was interred in a private cemetery with military honors. On the 12th of August of the year in which General Greene died, the Congress of the United States unanimously resolved—“That a monument be erected to the memory of the honorable Nathaniel Greene, at the seat of the federal government, with the following inscription—