A joint Franco-American besieges Savannah from September 16, 1779 to October 18, 1779.

A major assault against the British siege works fails on October 9, 1779.

General Casimir Pułaski, probing for a weak point in the British lines during a cavalry charge, is wounded in the groin by grapeshot on October 9, 1779.

Carried from the field by several comrades, including Colonel John C. Cooper, he is taken aboard the privateer merchant brigantine Wasp, where two days later, without having regained consciousness, he dies of his wounds.

Pulaski, a Polish noble, had fought as a military commander for the Bar Confederation against Russian domination of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

When this uprising failed, he had emigrated to North America, where he had become a General in the Continental Army, fighting in the American Revolutionary War for the independence of the United States.

A noted cavalryman, Pułaski has played a large role in training Revolutionary troops, with Congress naming him "Commander of the Horse".

He is, however, infamous for his arrogance, and had demanded that his only superior be the commanding general.

Undoubtedly brave, his imperious personality and lack of English had caused him to resign his general command, but late in 1778, through Washington's intervention, he had been allowed by the Continental Congress to organize an independent corps, Pulaski's Legion, one of the few cavalry regiments in the Continental Army.

He had taken part in the Battle of Brandywine.

Known to posterity as the Father of the American Cavalry, Pułaski had demanded much of his men and trained them in tested cavalry tactics.

He used his own personal finances, when money from Congress was scarce, in order to assure his forces of the finest equipment and personal safety.

The Battle of Savannah is much remembered in Haitian history; the Fontages Legion, consisting of over five hundred gens de couleur—free men of color from Saint-Domingue—fight on the French side.

The British are to remain in control of Georgia until July 1782, close to the end of the war.

Washington Irving's brothers, concerned for his health, have financed an extended tour of Europe from 1804 to 1806.

Irving has bypassed most of the sites and locations considered essential for the development of an upwardly-mobile young man, to the dismay of his brother William, who writes that, though he was pleased his brother's health was improving, he did not like the choice to "gallop through Italy... leaving Florence on your left and Venice on your right". (Burstein, Andrew. The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving (Basic Books, 2007)

Instead, Irving is honing the social and conversational skills that will later make him one of the world's most in-demand guests.

"I endeavor to take things as they come with cheerfulness", Irving writes, "and when I cannot get a dinner to suit my taste, I endeavor to get a taste to suit my dinner". (Washington Irving to William Irving Jr., September 20, 1804; Irving, Washington. The Complete Works of Washington Irving. (Rust, et al., editors). 30 vols. (University of Wisconsin/Twayne, 1969–1986))

Washington Irving strikes up a friendship with the American painter Washington Allston while visiting Rome in 1805, and nearly allows himself to be persuaded into following Allston into a career as a painter.

"My lot in life, however", Irving said later, "was differently cast".

Washington Allston had been born on a rice plantation on the Waccamaw River near Georgetown, South Carolina.

His mother Rachel Moore had married Captain William Allston in 1775, though her husband died in 1781, shortly after the Battle of Cowpens.

Moore had remarried to Dr. Henry C. Flagg, the son of a wealthy shipping merchant from Newport, Rhode Island.

Named, like Washington Irving, in honor of the leading American general of the Revolution, Allston had graduated from Harvard College in 1800 and moved to Charleston, South Carolina for a short time before sailing in May 1801 to England, where he had gained admittance to the Royal Academy in London in September; the painter Benjamin West was then the president.

From 1803, he has visited the great museums of Paris and then, those of Italy, where he meets Irving in Rome and Coleridge, who is to become his lifelong friend.

Colerige had traveled to Sicily and Malta in the previous year, working as Acting Public Secretary of Malta under the Commissioner, Alexander Ball, a task he has performed quite successfully, though his opium dependency has only increased.

He has given this up however, and is making his way back to England.