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vance; on the tenth all his fleet was in motion. Arnold, whose judgment did not equal his courage, moored his squadron in the bay between Valcour Island and the main, leaving the great channel of the lake undisputed to his enemies, who, on the morning of the eleventh, with a wind from the northwest, passed between Great and Valcour Islands and came into his rear, with much more than twice his weight of metal and twice as many fighting vessels. His defiant self-reliance did not fail him; forming a line at anchor from Valcour to the main, he advanced in the schooner Royal Savage, supported by his row-galleys. The wind favored him, while it kept off the Inflexible, which was already to the south of him; but the Carleton was able to get into action, and was sustained by the artillery-boats. The galleys were driven back; the Royal Savage, crippled in its masts and rigging, fell to the leeward and was stranded on Valcour Island, whence Arnold, with the crew, made his way to the Congress. Meantime, the Carleton, accompanied by the artillery-boats, beat up against the breeze, till it came within musket-shot of the American line, when it opened fire from both sides. The Congress, on which Arnold acted as gunner, was hurt in her main-mast and yards, was hulled twelve times, and hit seven times between wind and water; the gondola New York lost all her officers except her captain; in the Washington, the first lieutenant was killed, the captain and master wounded, the main-mast shot through so that it became useless; a gondola was sunk. Of the British artillery-boats, one, or perhaps two, went down. The Carleton, which, owing to the wind, could receive no succor, suffered severely; Dacres, its captain, fell senseless from a blow; Brown, a lieutenant of marines, lost an arm; but Pellew, a lad of nineteen, who succeeded to the command, carried on the fight, to prevent Arnold's escape. Just before dark, when sixty or more of the Americans and forty or more of the British had been killed or wounded, the artillery-boats, on the signal of recall, towed the Carleton out of the reach of shot. At eight in the evening the British fleet anchored, having their left wing near the mainland, the right near Valcour Island, with several armed boats still farther to the right, to guard the passage between Valcour and Great Island. Ar

nold and his highest officers, Waterbury and Wigglesworth, saw no hope but in running the blockade. An hour or two before midnight they hoisted anchor silently in the thick darkness; Wigglesworth, in the Trumbull, led the retreat; the gondolas and small vessels followed; then came Waterbury in the Washington; and, last of all, Arnold, in the Congress; and, having a fair wind, they stole unobserved through the British fleet, close to its left wing.

When day revealed their escape, Carleton, advancing slowly against a southerly breeze, in the morning of the thirteenth, at half-past twelve, was near enough to the fugitives to begin a cannonade. At half-past one the wind came suddenly out of the north, striking the British sails first; the Washington was overtaken near Split Rock, and compelled to strike. The Congress, with four gondolas, keeping up a running fight of five hours, suffered great loss, and was chased into a small creek in Panton on the east side of the lake. To save them from his pursuers, Arnold set them on fire, with their colors flying. The last to go on shore, he formed their crews, and, in sight of the English ships, marched off in order.

Carleton reproved his prisoners for engaging in the rebellion, found an excuse for them in their orders from the governor of Connecticut whose official character the king still recognised, and dismissed them on their parole.

On the fourteenth, master of the lake, he landed at Crown Point, within two hours' sail of Ticonderoga, which must have surrendered for want of provisions had he pushed forward. But he never for a moment entertained such a design, and waited only for tidings from Howe. These were received on the twenty-seventh, and on the next day his army began its return to Canada for winter-quarters. On the third of November his rear guard abandoned Crown Point; British officers were astonished at his retreat, which seemed to the Americans a flight that could not be accounted for.

No sooner had Moultrie and his brave garrison repulsed the attack near Charleston than Lee used his undeserved fame to extort from congress thirty thousand dollars as an indemnity for the possible forfeiture of property in England.

Acting on the suggestion of a stranger, without reflection

or exact inquiry, Lee, in the second week of August, at the unhealthiest season of the year, hastily marched off the Virginia and North Carolina troops, without a field-piece or even a medicine-chest, on an expedition against Florida. Howe of North Carolina and Moultrie soon followed, and about four hundred and sixty men of South Carolina, with two field-pieces, were sent to Savannah by water along the inland route. At Sunbury a deadly fever broke out in the camp, especially in the battalion from the valley of Virginia. By this time Lee sought to shift from himself to Moultrie the further conduct of the expedition, but Moultrie replied that there were no available resources which could render success possible. Early in September congress called Lee to the North, to command in chief in case of mishap to Washington; he at once began the journey, taking with him all the continental force except the troops of North Carolina.

He left a savage war raging in the mountains of the two Carolinas and Georgia. The Cherokees were amazed at the estrangement between their father over the water and their elder brothers of the Carolinas; but Cameron and Stuart, British agents, having an almost unlimited credit on the British exchequer, swayed them to begin war. The colonists in what is now eastern Tennessee were faithful to the patriot cause. Twice they received warning from the Overhill Cherokees to remove from their habitations; but the messenger took back a defiance, and threats from the district then called Fincastle county in Virginia. So stood the Cherokees, when a deputation of thirteen or more Indians came to them from the Six Nations, the Shawnees and Delawares, the Mingoes, and the Ottawas. The moment, they said, was come to recover their lost lands. The Shawnees produced their war-tokens, of which the young Cherokee warriors laid hold, showing in return a war-hatchet received about six years before from the northern Indians. When the news of the arrival of Clinton and Cornwallis off Charleston reached the lower settlements of the Cherokees, their warriors, on each side of the mountains, twenty-five hundred in number, prepared for deeds of blood. The Overhills collected a thousand skins for moccasons, and beat their maize into flour. A few whites were to go with them to

invite all the king's men to join them, after which they were to kill or drive all whom they could find. While Henry Stuart was seeking to engage the Choctas and Chickasas as allies, the Cherokees sent a message to the Creeks with the northern wartokens; but the Creeks returned for answer that "the Cherokees had plucked the thorn out of their foot, and were welcome to keep it." The rebuff came too late; at the news that the lower settlements had struck the borders of South Carolina, the wily warriors of all the western settlements fell upon the inhabitants of eastern Tennessee, and roved as far as the cabins on Clinch river and the Wolf Hills, now called Abingdon. The common peril caused a general rising of the people of eastern Tennessee and south-western Virginia, of North Carolina and the uplands of South Carolina. The Overhills received a check on the twentieth of July at the Island Flats, in what Haywood, the venerable historian of Tennessee, calls a “miracle of a battle," for not one white man was mortally wounded, while the Cherokees lost forty. The next day a party was repulsed from Fort Watauga by James Robertson and his garrison of forty men. Colonel Christian, with Virginia levies, joined on their march by troops from North Carolina and Watauga, made themselves masters of the upper settlements on the Tellico and the Tennessee; but, when the Cherokees sued for peace, the avenging party granted it, except that towns like Tuskega, where a captive boy had lately been burnt alive, were reduced to ashes.

The warriors of the lower settlements, who began the war, at daybreak on the first of July poured down upon the frontiers of South Carolina, killing and scalping without distinction of age or sex. The people, having parted with their best rifles to the defenders of Charleston, flew for safety to stockade forts. The Indians were joined by the agent Cameron and a small band of white men, to promote a rising of the loyalists in upper South Carolina. Eleven hundred patriots of that state, under the lead of Williamson, made head against the invaders, and, in August, destroyed the Cherokee towns on the Keowee and the Seneca and on one side of the Tugaloo, while a party of Georgians laid waste those on the other. Then, drawing nearer the region of precipices and waterfalls, which

mark the eastern side of the Alleghanies, Williamson's army broke up the towns on the Whitewater, the Toxaway, the Estatoe, and in the beautiful valley of Jocassa, leaving not one to the east of the Oconee Mountain. The outcasts, who had taken part in scalping and murdering, fled to the Creeks, whose neutrality was respected.

In September, establishing a well-garrisoned fort on the Seneca, and marching up War Woman's creek, Williamson passed through Rabun gap, destroyed the towns on the Little Tennessee as far as the Unica Mountain, and then toiled over the dividing ridge into the Hiwassee valley, sparing or razing the towns at his will. There he was joined by Rutherford of North Carolina, who had promptly assembled in the district of Salisbury an army of more than two thousand men, crossed the Alleghanies at the Swannanoa gap, forded the French Broad, and penetrated into the middle and valley towns, of which he laid waste six-and-thirty. Germain, in November, wrote to his trusty agent: "I expect with impatience to hear that you have prevailed with the Creeks and Choctas to join the Cherokees in a general confederacy against the rebels." But the Choctas never inclined to the war; the Chickasas receded; the Creeks kept wisely at home; and the Cherokees were forced to beg for mercy. At a talk in Charleston, in February 1777, the Man-killer said: "You have destroyed my homes, but it is not my eldest brother's fault; it is the fault of my father over the water;" and, at the peace in the following May, they gave up their lands as far as the watershed of the Oconee Mountain.

Nor was the overawing of the wild men the only good that came out of this bootless eagerness of the British minister to crush America by an Indian confederacy; henceforward the settlers of Tennessee upheld American independence; and, putting their mind into one word, they named their district WASHINGTON.

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