st hour turned the tide and saved the cause
of the Revolution.

CHAPTER VII

"MALICE DOMESTIC, AND FOREIGN LEVY"

After the "two lucky strokes at Trenton and Princeton," as he himself
called them, Washington took up a strong position at Morristown and
waited. His plan was to hold the enemy in check, and to delay all
operations until spring. It is easy enough now to state his purpose,
and it looks very simple, but it was a grim task to carry it out
through the bleak winter days of 1777. The Jerseys farmers, spurred by
the sufferings inflicted upon them by the British troops, had turned
out at last in deference to Washington's appeals, after the victories
of Trenton and Princeton, had harassed and cut off outlying parties,
and had thus straitened the movements of the enemy. But the main army
of the colonies, on which all depended, was in a pitiable state. It
shifted its character almost from day to day. The curse of short
enlistments, so denounced by Washington, made itself felt now with
frightful effect. With the new year most of the continental troops
departed, while others to replace them came in very slowly, and
recruiting dragged most wearisomely. Washington was thus obliged, with
temporary reinforcements of raw militia, to keep up appearances; and
no commander ever struggled with a more trying task. At times it
looked as if the whole army would actually disappear, and more than
once Washington expected that the week's or the month's end would find
him with not more than five hundred men. At the beginning of March he
had about four thousand men, a few weeks later only three thousand raw
troops, ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-shod, ill-armed, and almost unpaid.
Over against him was Howe, with eleven thousand men in the field, and
still more in the city of New York, well disciplined and equipped,
well-armed, well-fed, and furnished with every needful supply. The
contrast is absolutely grotesque, and yet the force of one man's
genius and will was such that this excellent British army was hemmed
in and kept in harmless quiet by their ragged opponents.

Washington's plan, from the first, was to keep the field at all
hazards, and literally at all hazards did he do so. Right and left
his letters went, day after day, calling with pathetic but dignified
earnestness for men and supplies. In one of these epistles, to
Governor Cooke of Rhode Island, written in January, to remonstrate
against raising troops for the State onl