[Bird squawks] Voice: You ask me, "Can the enemy continue to prosecute the war?"

I answer, "Can we carry on the war much longer?"

Certainly, no.

The true point of light, then, in which to place and consider this matter is not simply whether Great Britain can carry on the war, but whose finances-- theirs or ours-- is most likely to fail.

[George Washington] Narrator: General Washington spent the first 5 weeks of 1779 in Philadelphia, summoned there by Congress.

It was not a happy visit.

"I never was much...afraid of the enemy's arms," Washington wrote a friend, but he did fear that people were wearying of the war that had gone on for 4 years and still had no end in sight, and Congress seemed mired, he said, in "party disputes and personal quarrels."

The value of Continental currency was melting "like snow before a hot sun," he complained, so that "a wagon load of money will scarcely purchase a wagon load of provisions."

Christopher Brown: On both the North American side and on the British side, there is an exhaustion that is settling in and an economic reality for both-- the American side, the question of coming up with the resources every year to be able to fight the war-- uniforms, guns, paying the men, replacing the ones who die, replacing the ones who desert.

Britain has the money, but it starts to look a little bit like a sunk-cost problem.

"Are we going to continue to pour money into an effort when there's no end in view?"

♪ Hogeland: One of the critical ways by which the Revolutionary War was funded was debt.

There were a number of ways to raise money, but the best ways were to borrow, so you had to go to lenders, largely a merchant class, but also planters and even some prosperous farmers.

It was a bit of a risky speculation because getting paid back and getting your interest paid would depend upon winning this extremely unlikely war.

Nonetheless, that was a pretty good way of raising money to fight the Revolution, and it created an entire class of American lenders with strong interests in creating a very strong government because that was the only way they could see themselves getting paid their interest.

♪ Voice: Shall we at last become the victims of our own abominable lust of gain?

Forbid it, heaven.

Forbid it all.

Our cause is noble.

It is the cause of mankind, and the danger to it springs from ourselves.

George Washington.