sands of men to get possession of it."

[Footnote 24: "_Feb. 23d, 1776._--... General Lee is taking every
necessary step to fortify and defend this city. The men-of-war are
gone out of our harbor; the Phoenix is at the Hook; the Asia lays
near Beedlow's Island; so that we are now in a state of perfect peace
and security, was it not for our apprehensions of future danger. To
see the vast number of houses shut up, one would think the city almost
evacuated. Women and children are scarcely to be seen in the streets.
Troops are daily coming in; they break open and quarter themselves in
any houses they find shut up. Necessity knows no law."--_Letter from
F. Rhinelander. "Life of Peter Van Schaack._"]

To construct these extensive works Lee could muster, two weeks after
his arrival, but seventeen hundred men. Waterbury's Connecticut
regiment was first on the ground; the First New Jersey Continentals,
as yet incomplete, under Colonel the Earl of Stirling, soon followed;
and from Westchester County, New York, came two hundred minute-men
under Colonel Samuel Drake. Dutchess County sent down Colonels
Swartwout and Van Ness with about three hundred more; and on the 24th
Colonel Ward arrived with his Connecticut regiment, six hundred
strong, which had rendezvoused at Fairfield. Stirling's regiment was
quartered principally in the lower barracks at the Battery;
Waterbury's at the upper, on the site of the new Court House; Ward's
was sent to Long Island; and Drake's minute-men were posted at Horn's
Hook, opposite Hell Gate, where they began work on the first battery
marked out for the defence of New York City during the Revolution.

[Illustration: [signature: John Lasher]

COLONEL FIRST NEW YORK CITY BATTALION 1775-1776.

Steel Engr. F. von Egloffstein N.Y.]

But Lee's stay at this point was to be brief. The Continental Congress
appointed him to the command of the newly created Department of the
South, and on the 7th of March he left New York in charge of Lord
Stirling, who, a month before, had been promoted by Congress to the
rank of brigadier-general. This officer's energy was conspicuous. His
predecessor had already found him "a great acquisition," and he pushed
on the defences of the city as rapidly as his resources would permit.
The force under his immediate command, according to the returns of the
13th, amounted to a total of two thousand four hundred and twenty-two
officers and men,[25] besides the city independent compan