VII. CHAP. but among these was Knowlton, who would have been an honor to any country, and Leitch, one of Virginia's worthiest sons. 1776. Sept. 16. 19. Howe would never own how much he had suffered; his general orders rebuked Leslie for imprudence. The result confirmed him in his caution. The ground in front of the Americans was SO difficult and so well fortified that he could not hope to carry it by storm; had he by a circuitous route thrown the main body of his army in their rear, he would have left the city of New York and its garrison at Washington's mercy; he therefore waited more than three weeks, partly to collect means of transportation, and partly to form redoubts across the island. During the delay, Lord Howe and his brother, on the nineteenth, in a joint declaration, going far beyond the form prepared by the solicitor-general, promised in the king's name a revision of his instructions and his concurrence in the revisal of all acts by which his subjects in the colonies might think themselves aggrieved; and, appealing from congress, they invited all well-affected subjects to a conference. The paper was disingenuous, for the instructions to the commissioners, which were carefully kept secret, demanded as preliminary conditions grants of revenue and further changes of charters. Washington saw through the artifice. Lord Howe can escape conviction for duplicity, only by supposing that he was duped by his own wishes to misinterpret his powers; but the crafty appeal was wisely timed for its end; for there were signs of despondency and discontent VII. in the New York counties on the Hudson, in New CHAP. Jersey, and still more in Pennsylvania. 1776. 21. About one o'clock in the morning of the twenty- Sept. first, more than five days after New York had been in the exclusive possession of the British, a fire chanced to break out in a small wooden public-house of low character, near Whitehall slip. The weather had been hot and dry; a fresh gale was blowing from the southwest; the fire spread rapidly; and the east side of Broadway, as far as Exchange place, became a heap of ruins. The British troops, angry at the destruction of houses which they had looked upon as their shelter for the coming winter, haunted with the thought of incendiaries, and unwilling to own the consequences of their own careless carousals, seized persons who had come out to save property from destruction, and, without trial or inquiry, killed some with the bayonet, tossed others into the flames, and one, who happened to be a royalist, they hanged by the heels till he died. The wind veering to the southeast, the fire crossed Broadway above Morris street, destroyed Trinity church and the Lutheran church, and, sparing Saint Paul's chapel, extended to Barclay street. The flames were arrested, not so much by the English guard, as by the sailors whom the admiral sent on shore, and who paid themselves by plundering houses that escaped. houses that escaped. Of the four thousand tenements of the city, more than four hundred were burnt down. In his report, Howe, without the slightest ground, attributed the accident to a conspiracy. When, after the disasters on Long Island, Wash CHAP. ington needed to know in what quarter the attack VII. of the British was to be expected, Nathan Hale, 1776. a captain in Knowlton's regiment, a graduate of Sept. 21. 22. Yale college, an excellent scholar, comparatively a veteran in the service, having served with Knowlton at Cambridge, but three months beyond one-and-twenty, yet already betrothed, volunteered to venture, under a disguise, within the British lines. Just at the moment of his return, he was seized and carried before General Howe, in New York; he frankly avowed his name and rank in the American army, and his purpose, which his papers confirmed; and, without a trial, Howe ordered him to be executed the following morning as a spy. That night he was exposed to the insolent cruelty of his jailer. The consolation of seeing a clergyman was denied him; his request for a Bible was refused. The more humane British officer who was deputed to superintend his execution furnished him means to write to his mother and to a comrade in arms. On the morning of the twenty-second, as he ascended the gallows, he said: "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country." The provost-marshal destroyed his letters, as if grudging his friends a knowledge of the firmness with which he had contemplated death. His countrymen never pretended that the beauty of his character should have exempted him from the penalty which the laws of war imposed; they complained only that the hours of his imprisonment were embittered by barbarous harshness. The Americans kept up the system of wearing out their enemy by continual skirmishes and VII. 1776. Sept. 23. alarms. On the twenty-third, at the glimmer of CHAP. dawn, in a well-planned but unsuccessful attempt to recapture Randall's island, Thomas Henly, of Charlestown, Massachusetts, "one of the best officers in the army," lost his life. He was buried by the side of Knowlton, within the present Trinity cemetery. The prisoners of war, five hundred in number, whom Carleton had sent from Quebec on parole, were landed on the twenty-fourth from shallops at Elizabeth point. It wanted but an hour or two of midnight; the moon, nearly full, shone cloudlessly; Morgan, as he sprung from the bow of the boat, fell on the earth as if to clasp it, and cried: "O my country." They all ran a race to Elizabethtown, where, too happy to sleep, they passed the night in singing, dancing, screaming, and raising the Indian halloo from excess of joy. On hearing that Morgan was returned, Washington hastened his exchange, and recommended his promotion. Next to Washington, Morgan was the best officer whom Virginia sent into the field, though she raises no statue to the incomparable leader of her light troops. Meantime, the continental government proceeded with the dilatoriness and hesitancy which belonged to the feebleness of its organization. The committee for confederation and that for foreign alliances had been appointed in June, in connection with the committee for declaring independence. Seemingly irreconcilable differences of opinion left congress no heart to continue the work of confederation; Edward Rutledge despaired of success, unless 24. VII. CHAP. the states should appoint a special convention, to be formed of new representatives, chosen for this Sept. purpose alone. 1776. 17. On the seventeenth, after many weeks of deliberation, the members of congress adopted an elaborate plan of a treaty to be proposed to France. Its terms betray the boundlessness of their aspirations and the lurking uncertainty of their hopes. They wished France to engage in a separate war with Great Britain, and by this diversion to leave America the opportunity of establishing her independence. They were willing to assure to Spain freedom from molestation in its territories; they renounced in favor of France all eventual conquests in the West Indies; but they claimed the sole right of acquiring British continental America, and all adjacent islands, including the Bermudas, Cape Breton, and Newfoundland. It was America and not France which first applied the maxim of monopoly to the fisheries: the king of France might retain his exclusive rights on the banks of Newfoundland, as recognised by England in the treaty of 1763; but his subjects were not to fish "in the havens, bays, creeks, roads, coasts, or places," which the United States were to win. In maritime law, the rising nation avowed the principle that free ships impart freedom to goods; that a neutral power may lawfully trade with a belligerent. Privateering was not abolished, but much restricted, and in its worst form was to be punished as piracy. The young republic, in this moment of her greatest need, was not willing to make one common cause with France, nor even |