consulting with Seth Warner of Vermont, made his bivouac on the fourteenth of August at the distance of a mile from the post of Baum, to whom he vainly offered battle. The regiment of Warner came down from Manchester during the rain of the fifteenth; and troops arrived from the westernmost county of Massachusetts.

rear.

When the sun rose on the sixteenth, Stark concerted with his officers the plan for the day. Baum, seeing small bands of men, in shirt-sleeves and carrying fowling-pieces without bayonets, steal behind his camp, mistook them for friendly country people placing themselves where he could protect them; and so five hundred men under Nichols and Herrick united in his While his attention was arrested by a feint, two hundred more posted themselves on his right; and Stark, with two or three hundred, took the front. At three o'clock Baum was attacked on every side. The Indians dashed between two detachments and fled, leaving their grand chief and other warriors lifeless on the field. New England sharpshooters ran up within eight yards of the loaded cannon, to pick off the cannoneers. When, after about two hours, the firing of the Brunswickers slackened from scarcity of powder, the Americans scaled the breastwork and fought them hand to hand. Baum ordered his infantry with the bayonet, his dragoons with their sabres, to force a way; but in the attempt he fell mortally wounded, and his veteran troops surrendered.

Just then the battalions of Breymann, having taken thirty hours to march twenty-four miles, came in sight. Warner now first brought up his regiment, of one hundred and fifty men, into action; and with their aid Stark began a new attack, using the cannon just taken. The fight raged till sunset, when Breymann, abandoning his artillery and most of his wounded men, ordered a retreat. The pursuit continued till night; those who escaped owed their safety to the darkness. During the day less than thirty of the Americans were killed, and about forty were wounded; the loss of their enemy was estimated at full twice as many, besides at least six hundred and ninety-two prisoners, of whom more than four hundred were Germans.

This victory, one of the most brilliant and eventful of the war, was achieved spontaneously by the husbandmen of New

Hampshire, Vermont, and western Massachusetts. Stark only confirms the reports of Hessian officers when he writes: "Had our people been Alexanders or Charleses of Sweden, they could not have behaved better."

At the news of Breymann's retreat, Burgoyne ordered his army under arms; and at the head of the forty-seventh regiment he forded the Battenkill, to meet the worn-out fugitives. The loss of troops was irreparable. Canadians and Indians of the remoter nations began to leave in disgust. For supplies, Burgoyne was thrown back upon shipments from England, painfully forwarded from Quebec by way of Lake Champlain and Lake George to the Hudson river. Before he could move forward he must, with small means of transportation, bring together stores for thirty days, and drag nearly two hundred boats over two long carrying-places.

On the first of August congress relieved Schuyler from command by a vote to which there was no negative; and on the fourth eleven states elected Gates his successor. Before Gates assumed the command, Fort Stanwix was safe and the victory of Bennington achieved; yet congress hastened to vote him all the powers and all the aid which Schuyler in his moods of despondency had entreated. Touched by the ringing appeals of Washington, thousands of the men of Massachusetts, even from the counties of Middlesex and Essex, were in motion toward Saratoga. Congress, overriding Washington's advice, gave Schuyler's successor plenary power to make further requisitions for militia on New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Washington had culled from his troops five hundred riflemen, and formed them under Morgan into a better corps of skirmishers than had ever been attached to an army even in Europe; congress directed them to be forthwith sent to assist Gates against the Indians; and Washington obeyed so promptly that the order might seem to have been anticipated.

As for Schuyler, he proffered his services to the general by whom he was superseded, heartily wished him success, and soon learned to " justify congress for depriving him of the command, convinced that it was their duty to sacrifice the feelings of an individual to the safety of the states when the people who only could defend the country refused to serve under him."

CHAPTER XIII.

PROGRESS OF SIR WILLIAM HOWE AND BURGOYNE.

JULY-OCTOBER 20, 1777.

A DOUBT arose whether Washington retained authority over the new chief of the northern department till congress declared that "they never intended to supersede or circumscribe his power;" but, from an unwillingness to confess their own mistakes, from the pride of authority and jealousy of his superior popularity, they slighted his advice and neglected his wants. They remodelled the commissary department in the midst of the campaign on a system which no competent men would undertake to execute. Washington, striving for an army, raised and officered by the United States, "used every means in his power to destroy state distinction in it, and to have every part and parcel of it considered as continental;" congress more and more reserved to the states the recruiting of men, and the appointment of all but general officers. Political and personal considerations controlled the nomination of officers; and congress had not vigor enough to drop the incapable. "The wearisome wrangles for rank," and the numerous commissions given to foreign adventurers of extravagant pretensions, made the army "a just representation of a great chaos." A reacting "spirit of reformation" was at first equally undiscerning; Kalb and Lafayette, arriving at Philadelphia near the end of July, met with a repulse. When it was told that Lafayette desired no more than leave to risk his life in the cause of liberty without pension or allowance, congress gave him the rank of major-general, and Washington received him into his family; but at first the claim of Kalb was rejected.

On the fifth of July, General Howe, leaving more than seven regiments in Rhode Island, and about six thousand men under Sir Henry Clinton at New York, began to embark the main body of his army for a joint expedition with the naval force against Philadelphia. The troops, alike foot and cavalry, were kept waiting on shipboard till the twenty-third. The fleet of nearly three hundred sail spent seven days in beating from Sandy Hook to the capes of Delaware. Finding the Delaware river obstructed, it steered for the Chesapeake, laboring against the southerly winds of the season. August was half gone when it turned Cape Charles; and on the twenty-fifth, after a voyage of thirty-three days, it anchored in Elk river, six miles below Elktown and fifty-four miles from Philadelphia.

Expressing the strange reasoning and opinions of many of his colleagues, John Adams, the head of the board of war, could write: "We shall rake and scrape enough to do Howe's business; the continental army under Washington is more numerous by several thousands than Howe's whole force; the enemy give out that they are eighteen thousand strong, but we know better, and that they have not ten thousand. Washington is very prudent; I should put more to risk, were I in his shoes; I am sick of Fabian systems. My toast is, a short and violent war." Now at that time the army of Howe, apart from the corps of engineers, counted, at the lowest statements, seventeen thousand one hundred and sixty-seven men, with officers amounting to one fifth as many more, all soldiers by profession and perfectly equipped.

Congress gave itself the air of efficiency by calling out the militia of Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey; but New Jersey had to watch the force on the IIudson; the slaveholders on the Maryland eastern shore and in the southern county of Delaware were disaffected; the Pennsylvania militia with Washington did not exceed twelve hundred men, and never increased beyond twenty-five hundred.

On the twenty-fourth of August, Washington led the continental army, decorated with sprays of green, through the crowded streets of Philadelphia; the next day he reached Wilmington just as the British anchored in the Elk with the purpose of marching upon Philadelphia by an easy inland route

through an open country which had no difficult passes, no rivers but fordable ones, and was inhabited chiefly by royalists and Quakers. When Sullivan, who had just lost two hundred of the very best men in a senseless expedition to Staten Island, brought up his division, the American army, which advanced to the highlands beyond Wilmington, was not more than half as numerous as the British; but Howe, from the waste of horses on his long voyage, was compelled to wait till others could be provided.

On the third of September the two divisions under Cornwallis and Knyphausen began the march toward Philadel phia; Maxwell and the light troops, composed of drafts of one hundred men from each brigade, occupied Iron Hill, and, after a sharp skirmish in the woods with a body of German yagers and light infantry, withdrew slowly and in perfect order. For two days longer Howe waited, to provide for his wounded men in the hospital-ship of the fleet, and purchase still more means of transportation. Four miles from him, Washington took post behind Red Clay creek, and invited an attack. On the eighth, Howe sent a strong column in front of the Americans to feign an attack, while his main army halted at Milltown. The British and Germans went to rest in full confidence of turning Washington's right on the morrow, and cutting him off from the road to Lancaster. But Washington had divined their purpose, and, by a masterly and really secret movement, took post on the high grounds above Chad's ford on the north side of the Brandywine, directly in Howe's path.

The baggage of the army was sent forward to Chester. A battery of cannon with a good parapet guarded the ford. The American left, resting on a thick, continuous forest along the Brandywine, which below Chad's ford becomes a rapid, encumbered by rocks and shut in by abrupt high banks, was sufficiently defended by Armstrong and the Pennsylvania militia. On the right the river was hidden by thick woods and the unevenness of the country; to Sullivan was assigned the duty of taking "every necessary precaution for the security of that flank;" and the six brigades of his command, consisting of the divisions of Stirling, of Stephen, and his own, were stationed in echelons along the river.