ashington in
the chief command, and had failed. The treason of General Charles Lee
had come to naught,--but was to wait for disclosure till many years
after every person concerned should be graveyard dust. We had
celebrated two anniversaries of the Fourth of July. The new free and
independent States had organized local governments. The King's
appointees still made a pretence of maintaining the royal provincial
governments, but mostly abode under the protection of the King's
troops in New York. There also many of those Americans in the North
took refuge who distinctly professed loyalty to the King. New York was
thus the chief lodging-place of all that embodied British sovereignty
in America. Naturally the material tokens of British rule radiated
from the town, covering all of the island of Manhattan, most of Long
Island, and all of Staten Island, and retaining a clutch here and
there on the mainland of New Jersey.

It was the present object of Washington to keep those visible signs of
English authority penned up within this circle around New York. The
Continental posts, therefore, formed a vast arc, extending from the
interior of New Jersey through Southeastern New York State to Long
Island Sound and into Connecticut. This had been the situation since
midsummer of 1778. It was but a detachment from our main army that had
cooperated with the French fleet in the futile attempt to dislodge a
British force from Newport in August of that year.

The British commander-in-chief and most of the superior officers had
their quarters in the best residences of New York. That town was
packed snugly into the southern angle of the island of Manhattan, like
a gift in the toe of a Christmas stocking. Southward, some of its
finest houses looked across the Battery to the bay. Northward the town
extended little beyond the common fields, of which the City Hall
Square of 1898 is a reduced survival. The island of Manhattan--with
its hills, woods, swamps, ponds, brooks, roads, farms, sightly
estates, gardens, and orchards--was dotted with the cantonments and
garrisoned forts of the British. The outposts were, largely, entrusted
to bodies of Tory allies organized in this country. Thus was much of
Long Island guarded by the three Loyalist battalions of General Oliver
De Lancey, himself a native of New York. On Staten Island was
quartered General Van Cortlandt Skinner's brigade of New Jersey
Volunteers, a troop which seems to have had such diffic