ad but nine rounds of ammunition each, and more
was nowhere to be procured. It was necessary to send messengers into
almost every town to beg for powder, and there were few mills in the
country to manufacture it.

As the winter approached a new trouble appeared. The brief enlistment
terms of many of the men were expiring, and, wearied and discouraged,
without proper food or clothing, these men withdrew from the army, and
the regiments rapidly decreased in numbers. Recruiting and re-enlisting
in the face of such conditions became almost impossible; yet
Washington's steady persistence, his letters to Congress, his masterly
hold on the siege of the British in Boston, his appeals for men and
ammunition, were actually successful. His army was kept up by new and
renewed material. Privateers, sent out by him upon the sea, secured
valuable supplies. Henry Knox, a Boston bookseller, whom he had made
colonel of artillery and despatched to New York and Ticonderoga,
returned to the camps with heavy cannon and ammunition.

The right wing of the American army was stationed at Roxbury, under
General Artemas Ward, and the left wing, under Major-General Charles Lee
and Brigadier-Generals Greene and Sullivan, at Prospect Hill. The
headquarters of Washington were in the centre, at Cambridge, with
Generals Putnam and Heath. Lee was not allied with the great Virginia
family of that name. He was an Englishman by birth, somewhat of a
military adventurer. Conceited, vain, and disobedient, he afterwards
came near wrecking the cause which he had ambitiously embraced. Ward was
a native of Massachusetts, a worthy man, but not distinguished for
military capacity. Putnam was a gallant hero, taken from the plough, but
more fitted to head small expeditions than for patient labor in siege
operations, or for commanding a great body of troops.

Meanwhile the British troops, some fifteen thousand veterans, had
remained inactive in Boston, under Sir William Howe, who had succeeded
Gage, unwilling or unable to disperse the militia who surrounded them,
or to prevent the fortification of point after point about the city by
the Americans. It became difficult to get provisions. The land side was
cut off by the American forces, and the supply-ships from the sea were
often wrecked or captured by Washington's privateers. At length the
British began to think of evacuating Boston and going to a more
important point, since they had ships and the control of the harb