[Sidenote: December 2 and 3.]

"Hasten your march or your arrival may be too late." When this urgent
appeal was penned Lee had not yet seen fit to cross the Hudson, nor was
it until Washington had reached Princeton that Lee's troops were at last
put in motion toward the Delaware.

Hitherto Lee had been in some sort Washington's tutor, or at least
military adviser,--a role for which, we are bound in common justice to
say, Lee was not unfitted. But from the moment of separation he appears
in the light of a rival and a critic, and not too friendly as either. In
the beginning Washington had looked up to Lee. Lee now looked down upon
Washington. Unquestionably the abler tactician of the two, Lee seemed to
have looked forward to Washington's fall as certain, and to so have
shaped his own course as to leave him master of the situation. In so
doing he cannot be acquitted of disloyalty to the cause he served, if
that course threatened to wreck the cause itself.

[Sidenote: Lee's plans.]

It is only just to add that for troops taking the field in the dead of
winter, Lee's were hardly better prepared than those they were going to
assist. General Heath, who saw them march off, says that some of them
were as good soldiers as any in the service, but many were so destitute
of shoes that the blood left on the rugged, frozen ground, in many
places, marked the route they had taken; and he adds that a considerable
number, totally unable to march, were left behind at Peekskill. This
brings us face to face with the extraordinary and unlooked-for fact that
instead of bending all his energies toward effecting a junction with the
commander-in-chief, east of the Delaware, in time to be of service, Lee
had decided to adopt an entirely different line of conduct, more in
accord with his own ideas of how the remainder of the campaign should be
conducted. Meantime, as a cloak to his intentions, he kept up a show of
obeying the spirit, if not the letter, of his instructions, leaving the
impression, however, that he would take the responsibility of
disregarding them if he saw fit. If he had written to Washington, "You
have had your chance and failed; mine has now come," his words and acts
would have been in exact harmony.[1]

[Sidenote: December 7 and 8.]

On the 7th Lee was at Pompton. This day an express was sent off to him
by Heath informing him of the arrival of Greaton's, Bond's, and Porter's
battalions from Albany. Lee replied from Chatham