This devotion of his Indian admirers is hardly less valuable than the tributes of Frederick the Great and other European soldiers and statesmen to the qualities of Washington as a Soldier; and it permanently redeems the name of Washington from any responsibility for the excessive desolation with which the Six Nations were visited in the expedition of 1779. On the twenty-fifth of August, while Sullivan was upon this Indian expedition, Admiral Arbuthnot arrived with reënforcements of three thousand men, and relieved Sir George Collier in naval command. On the twenty-first of September, Sir Andrew Hammond arrived with an additional force of fifteen hundred men, from Cork, Ireland. At this juncture, Count d’Estaing, having captured St. Vincent and Granada in the West Indies, suddenly made his appearance off the coast of Georgia. Spain had joined France in war against Great Britain; so that the whole line of British posts, from Halifax to St. Augustine, was exposed to such naval attacks as would divert the attention of Great Britain from the designs of her allied enemies against her West India possessions. Washington, upon the arrival of these British reënforcements, strengthened West Point with additional works; but Clinton, even with his large naval force, did not venture an attack upon that post, as had been his intention when making requisition for more troops. On the twenty-fifth of October, 1779, General Clinton abandoned Newport, R.I.; then Verplanck Point; then Stony Point: and for the first time since Washington landed in New York, in 1776, the whole of New England and the entire stretch of the Hudson River, was unvexed by British steel or British keel. CHAPTER XXVI. SHIFTING SCENES.—TEMPER OF THE PEOPLE.—SAVANNAH. If the mind weary of the recital of events which by night and by day burdened the soul and tasked the energies of the American Commander-in-Chief to their utmost strain, it cannot but be refreshed by evidence of his abiding confidence and patience in the cause of American Independence, as the theatre of war enlarged and gradually placed every colony under the weight of British pressure. The issue of two hundred millions of paper money had indeed been authorized, and a loan was invited abroad; but, as ever, men were wanted, and were not forthcoming. Even the States which had longest borne the brunt of battle, and had only just been relieved from its immediate dangers, seemed to weary under the reaction of that relief, as if the storm had passed by, never again to sweep over the same surface. It was also very natural as well as true, that the pledge of French intervention and the gleam of the oriflamme of France, did, in a measure, compose anxiety and lessen the sense of local responsibility for such a contribution of troops from every section as would make the nation as independent of France as of Great Britain.