If on the other hand they preferred to concentrate in the South, leaving only a garrison in New York, they could overrun Virginia and Maryland and then the States farther south would give up a fight in which they were already beaten.

Energy and enterprise, said Arnold, will quickly win the war.
In the autumn of 1780 the British cause did, indeed, seem near triumph.
An election in England in October gave the ministry an increased majority and with this renewed determination.

When Holland, long a secret enemy, became an open one in December, 1780, Admiral Rodney descended on the Dutch island of St.Eustatius, in the West Indies, where the Americans were in the habit of buying great quantities of stores and on the 3d of February, 1781, captured the place with two hundred merchant ships, half a dozen men-of-war, and stores to the value of three million pounds.

The capture cut off one chief source of supply to the United States.

By January, 1781, a crisis in respect to money came to a head.