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.

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.

ance.

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 allegiTo 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

listments for the war; the defeat on Long Island had impaired the confidence of the troops in their officers and in one another; the militia, dismayed, intractable, and impatient, went off by half-companies, by companies, and almost by whole regiments at a time. The necessity for abandoning the city of New York was so imminent, that the question whether its houses should be left to stand as winter-quarters for the enemy would "admit of but little time for deliberation." Rufus Putnam, the able engineer, reported that the enemy, from their command of the water, could land at any point between the bay and Throg's Neck; Greene advised a general retreat, and that the city and its suburbs should be burnt.

When, on the second of September, Sullivan was introduced to the congress, John Adams broke out to the member who sat next him: "Oh, the decoy-duck! would that the first bullet from the enemy in the defeat on Long Island had passed through his brain!" In delivering his message, Sullivan affirmed that Lord Howe said "he was ever against taxing us; that America could not be conquered; that he would set aside. the acts of parliament for taxing the colonies and changing the charter of Massachusetts." Congress directed Sullivan to reduce his communication to writing. He did so, and presented it the next morning. Its purport was "that, though Lord Howe could not at present treat with congress as such, he was very desirous as a private gentleman to meet some of its members as private gentlemen; that he, in conjunction with General Howe, had full powers to compromise the dispute between Great Britain and America; that he wished a compact might be settled at this time; that in case, upon conference, they should find any probable ground of an accommodation, the authority of congress must be afterward acknowledged."

Congress having received this paper, which proposed their own abdication and the abandonment of independence and of union, proceeded to the business of the day. In committee of the whole, they took into consideration the unreserved confession of Washington, that he had not a force adequate to the defence of New York, and they decided that "it should in no event be damaged, for they had no doubt of being able to recover it, even though the enemy should obtain possession of

it for a time." They ordered for its defence three more battalions from Virginia, two from North Carolina, and one from Rhode Island; and they invited the assemblies and conventions of every state north of Virginia to forward all possible aid; but this reliance on speculative reinforcements increased the public peril.

On the fourth and fifth, congress debated the message of Lord Howe. Witherspoon, with a very great majority of the members, looked upon it as an insult. "We have lost a battle and a small island," said Rush, "but we have not lost a state; why then should we be discouraged? Or why should we be discouraged, even if we had lost a state? If there were but one state left, still that one should peril all for independence." George Ross sustained his colleague. "The panic may seize whom it will," wrote John Adams; "it shall not seize me;" and, like Rush and Witherspoon, he spoke vehemently against the proposed conference. On the other hand, Edward Rutledge favored it, as a means of procrastination; and at last New Hampshire, Connecticut, and even Virginia gave way for the sake of quieting the people. Sullivan was directed to deliver to Lord Howe a written "resolve, that the congress, being the representatives of the free and independent states of America, could not send their members to confer with him in their private characters; but, ever desirous of peace on reasonable terms, they would send a committee of their body to learn what authority he had to treat with persons authorized by them, and to hear his propositions." On the sixth the committee was elected by ballot, and the choice fell on Franklin, John Adams, and Edward Rutledge. For the future, it was ordered that no proposals for peace between Great Britain and the United States should be received unless they should be made in writing, and should recognise the authority of the states in congress.

Washington, seeing that it was impossible to hold New York, on the seventh convened his general officers, in the hope of their concurrence. The case was plain; yet Mercer, who was detained at Amboy, wrote an untimely wish to maintain the post; others interpreted the vote of congress as an injunction that it was to be defended at all hazards; and, as one third