of the militia, and by a sudden fall of rain which threatened to swell the river and intercept his return.  In general he did little injury to the inhabitants on that short and hasty excursion, which was of about sixty miles from their main army, then in Spotsylvania, and ours in Orange.  It was early in June, 1781.  Lord Cornwallis then proceeded to the Point of Fork, and encamped his army from thence all along the main James River, to a seat of mine called Elk-hill, opposite to Elk Island, and a little below the mouth of the Byrd Creek. (You will see all these places exactly laid down in the map annexed to my Notes on Virginia, printed by Stockdale.) He remained in this position ten days, his own head-quarters being in my house, at that place.  I had time to remove most of the effects out of the house.  He destroyed all my growing crops of corn and tobacco; he burned all my barns, containing the same articles of the last year, having first taken what corn he wanted; he used, as was to be expected, all my stock of cattle, sheep, and hogs, for the sustenance of his army, and carried off all the horses capable of service; of those too young for service he cut the throats; and he burned all the fences on the plantation so as to leave it an absolute waste.  He carried off also about thirty slaves.  Had this been to give them freedom, he would have done right:  but it was to consign them to inevitable death from the small-pox and putrid fever, then raging in his camp.  This I knew afterwards to be the fate of twenty-seven of them.  I never had news of the remaining three, but presume they shared the same fate.  When I say that Lord Cornwallis did all this, I do not mean that he carried about the torch in his own hands, but that it was all done under his eye; the situation of the house in which he was, commanding a view of every part of the plantation, so that he must have seen every fire.  I relate these things on my own knowledge, in a great degree, as I was on the ground soon after he left it.  He treated the rest of the neighborhood somewhat in the same style, but not with that spirit of total extermination with which he seemed to rage over my possessions.  Wherever he went, the dwelling-houses were plundered of every thing which could be carried off.  Lord Cornwallis’s character in England would forbid the belief that he shared in the plunder; but that his table was served with the plate thus pillaged from private houses, can be proved by many hundred eye-witnesses.  From an estimate I made at that time, on the best information I could collect, I supposed the State of Virginia lost under Lord Cornwallis’s hands, that year, about thirty thousand slaves; and that of these, about twenty-seven thousand died of the small-pox and camp-fever, and the rest were partly sent to the West Indies, and exchanged for rum, sugar, coffee, and fruit, and partly sent to New York, from whence they went, at the peace, either to Nova Scotia or England.  From this last place, I believe they