Upon the triumph of American arms and the settlement of peace, American revolutionary millennialism rose to its last fever pitch in the early 1780's. Numerous clergymen who printed sermons celebrating the victory described the Revolution as establishing the basis for the future Kingdom of God. God had secured the American republic in order “to prepare the way for the promised land of the latter days,” observed the exultant Scotch-Irish Presbyterian Robert Smith. The Revolution appeared to David Tappan, a Congregationalist minister in Connecticut, to be “a principal link – a chain, which is gradually drawing after it the most glorious consequences to mankind, … hastening on the accomplishment of the scriptureprophecies relative to the Millenial State”. Such statements were frequently expressed by the laity as well. The physician Thomas Welsh of Boston, chosen in 1783 to give the last oration in commemoration of the Boston Massacre, told the town that soon all nations would “beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks,” and in Baltimore a college commencement speaker likewise anticipated “that Happy Period” when war would be no more. A gathering of “respectable” citizens in 1782 in Richmond, Virginia, a social group not normally given to millennial declarations, toasted the wish that “universal liberty soon fulfill the design of Heaven in promoting universal happiness”. Even as typically sober- and secular-minded a revolutionary as John Adams was so moved by the news of victory at Yorktown that he referred to millennial prophecy in expressing his high hopes for the future: “The great designs of Providence must be accomplished.