succumbed unresistingly to his sensual nature. He was not much in earnest against the Americans, partly because he was persuaded that they could not be reduced by arms; partly because he professed to be a liberal in politics; partly because he never kindled with zeal for anything. He had had military experience, and had read books on war; but, being destitute of swiftness of thought and will, he was formed to carry on war by rule. On the field of battle he sometimes showed talent as an executive officer; but, except in moments of high excitement, he was lethargic, wanting alertness and sagacity. He hated business; and his impatience at being forced to attend to it made him difficult of access, and gained him the reputation of being haughty and morose. Indolence was his bane: not wilfully merciless, he permitted his prisoners to suffer from atrocious cruelty; not meaning that his troops should be robbed, he left peculators uncontrolled, and the army and the hospitals were wronged by contractors. His notions of honor in money matters were not nice; but he was not so much rapacious as insatiable. He indulged freely in pleasure, and loved to shake off sluggishness by the hazards of the faro-table. His officers were expected to be insensible to danger like himself; in their quarters he was willing they should openly lead profligate lives; and his example led many of the young to ruin themselves by gaming.

All the following night Washington, who was fixed in the purpose "to avoid a general action," kept watch over the British army and his own. In Philadelphia, rumor quadrupled his force; congress expected him to stay the enemy at the threshold, as had been done at Charleston; but the morning of Thursday showed him that the British had broken ground within six hundred yards of the height now known as Fort Greene, and that they intended to force his lines by regular approaches, which the nature of the ground and his want of heavy cannon extremely favored; all Long Island was in their hands, except only the neck on which he was intrenched, and a part of his camp would soon be exposed to their guns; his men were falling sick from hard service, exposure, and bad food; on a change of wind, he might be encircled by the entrance of the British fleet into the East river. It was no longer

safe to delay a retreat, of which the success would depend on preparing for it with impenetrable secrecy.

Through Mifflin, in whom he confided more than in any general on the island and who agreed with him in opinion, he despatched, at an early hour, a written command to Heath, at King's Bridge, "to order every flat-bottomed boat and other craft at his post, fit for transporting troops, down to New York as soon as possible, without the least delay."* In like manner, before noon, he sent Trumbull, the commissary-general, to New York, with orders for Hugh Hughes, the assistant quartermaster-general, "to impress every kind of water-craft, on either side of New York, that could be kept afloat, and had either oars or sails, or could be furnished with them, and to have them all in the East river by dark."†

These orders were issued so secretly that not even his general officers knew his purpose. All day long he continued abroad in the wind and rain, visiting the stations of his men as before. Not till "late in the day" did he meet his council of war at the house of Philip Livingston on Brooklyn Heights. The abrupt proposal to retreat startled John Morin Scott, who, against his better judgment, impulsively objected to "giving the enemy a single inch of ground." But unanswerable reasons were urged in favor of Washington's design: the Americans were invested by an army of much more than double their number from water to water; Macdougall, whose nautical experience gave weight to his words, declared "that they were liable every moment, on the change of wind, to have the communication between them and the city cut off by the British frigates;" their supplies were scant; the rain, which had fallen for two days and nights with little intermission, had injured their arms and spoiled a great part of their ammunition; the soldiery, of whom many were without cover at night, were worn out by incessant duties and watching. The resolution to retreat was therefore unanimous.

To conceal the design to the very last, the regiments after dark were ordered to prepare for attacking the enemy in the

*Heath's Memoirs by himself, 57. For the order, see Force, American Archives, Fifth series, i., 1211. + Memorial of Hugh Hughes, 32, etc. John Morin Scott to J. Jay, 6 September 1776. MS.

night; several of the soldiers published to their comrades their unwritten wills; but the true purpose was soon surmised. At eight o'clock Macdougall was at Brooklyn ferry, charged to superintend the embarkation; and Glover of Massachusetts, with his regiment of Essex county fishermen, the best mariners in the world, manned the sailing-vessels and flat-boats. The rawest troops were the first to be embarked; Mifflin, with the Pennsylvania regiments of Hand, Magaw, and Shee, the men of Delaware, and the remnant of the Marylanders, claimed the honor of being the last to leave the lines. About nine the ebb of the tide was accompanied by a heavy rain and the continued adverse wind, so that for three hours the sail-boats could do little; but at eleven the north-east wind, which had raged for three days, died away; the water became so smooth that the row-boats could be laden nearly to the gunwales; and a breeze sprung up from the south and south-west, swelling the canvas from the right quarter. It was the night of the full moon; the British were so nigh that they were heard with their pickaxes and shovels; yet neither Agnew, their general officer for the night, nor any one of them, took notice of the murmur in the camp, or the plash of oars on the river, or the ripple under the sail-boats. All night long Washington was riding through the camp, insuring the regularity of every movement. Some time before dawn on Friday morning Mifflin, through a mistake of orders, began to march the covering party to the ferry; Washington discovered and countermanded the premature movement. The order to resume their posts was a trying test of young soldiers; the regiments wheeled about with precision, and recovered their former station before the enemy perceived that it had been relinquished. As day approached, a thick fog rolled in from the sea, shrouded the British camp, hid all Brooklyn, and hung over the East river without enveloping New York. When every other regiment was safely cared for, the covering party came down to the water-side and were embarked. Last man of all, Washington entered a boat. It was seven o'clock before all the companies reached the New York shore. At four, Montresor had given the alarm that the Americans were in full retreat; but some hours elapsed before he and a corporal, with six men, clam

bered into the works, only to find them evacuated. The whole American army who were on Long Island, with their provisions, military stores, field-artillery, and ordnance, except a few worthless iron cannon, landed safely in New York.

"Considering the difficulties," wrote Greene, "the retreat from Long Island was the best effected retreat I ever read or heard of."*

* Correct the thoroughly perverse account of the retreat from Long Island by the biographer of Joseph Reed. Reed's Reed, i., 221 to 226. The main authority of the biographer for his statement is a paper purporting to be a letter from an old man of eighty-four, just three days before his death, when he was too ill to write a letter or to sign his name, or even to make his mark, and yet, as is pretended, able to detail the substance of conversations held by the moribund fiftysix years before, with Colonel Grayson of Virginia, ten or eleven years after the retreat from Long Island, to which the conversations referred. His story turns on a change of wind, which he represents as having taken place before the council of war was called; now no such change of wind took place before the council of war met, as appears from their unanimous testimony at the time. (Proceedings of a council of war held August 29, 1776, at head-quarters in Brooklyn, printed by Onderdonk, 161, and in Force's Archives, fifth series, i., 1246.)

The lifting of the fog on the twenty-ninth, and consequent sight of the British fleet, forms the pivot of the biographer's attribution of special merit to Colonel Reed. But the accounts of contemporaries all agree that the fog did not rise till the morning of the thirtieth. Boston Independent Chronicle of September 19, 1776: "At sunrise" on the thirtieth. Benjamin Tallmadge's Memoirs, 10, 11: "As the dawn of the day approached, a very dense fog began to rise." Gordon's History, ii., 314, English edition of 1788: "A thick fog about two o'clock in the morning." Gordon wrote from the letters of Glover, and the information of others who were present. Note to the Thanksgiving sermon of Dr. John Rogers of New York, delivered in New York, December 11, 1783, and printed in 1784: "Not long after day broke, a heavy fog rose." Graydon mentions the fog as of the morning of the thirtieth. Compare Henry Onderdonk's Revolutionary Incidents in Suffolk and King's Counties, 158, 162.

The biographer of Reed seems not to have borne in mind the wonderful power of secrecy of Washington, in which he excelled even Franklin. That Washington was aware of his position appears from his allowing himself no sleep for eight-and-forty hours (Sparks, iv., 70), and from his account that his own deliberate policy was "to avoid a general action." It is of the more importance to set this matter right, as Washington Irving was misled by the error of Reed. For a concise notice of the retreat, written by Joseph Reed, 30 August 1776, see Sedgwick's Life of William Livingston, 203.

CHAPTER III.

THE PROGRESS OF THE HOWES.

AUGUST 30-SEPTEMBER 1776.

CARE sat heavily on the young people, who were to be formed to fortitude and endeared to after ages by familiarity with sorrows. Lord Howe received Sullivan on board of the Eagle with hospitable courtesy, approved his immediate exchange for General Prescott who was at Philadelphia, and then spoke so strongly of his own difficulty in recognising congress as a legal body, and yet of his ample powers to open a way for the redress of grievances, that the American general volunteered to visit Philadelphia as a go-between. A few hours after the troops passed over from Long Island he followed on parole, taking no minute of the offer which he was to bear, relying only on his recollection of desultory conversations. The American commander-in-chief disapproved his mission, but deemed it not right to prohibit by military authority an appeal to the civil power.

Washington withdrew the garrison from Governor's Island. Of the inhabitants of Long Island, some from choice, some to escape the prison-ship and ruin, took the engagement of allegiance. To Germain, the British general already announced the necessity of another campaign. In his report of the events on Long Island he magnified the force which he encountered two or three times, the killed and wounded eight or ten times, and enlarged the number of his prisoners. His own loss he somewhat diminished.

Conscious that congress were expecting impossibilities, Washington reminded them that the public safety required en