In the next year, before Newport, they wholly failed General Sullivan and deserted shamelessly to their homes.
By 1779 the fighting had shifted to the South.

Washington personally remained in the North to guard the Hudson and to watch the British in New York.

He sent La Fayette to France in January, 1779, there to urge not merely naval but military aid on a great scale.

La Fayette came back after an absence of a little over a year and in the end France promised eight thousand men who should be under Washington's control as completely as if they were American soldiers.

The older nation accepted the principle that the officers in the younger nation which she was helping should rank in their grade before her own.