twenty-five hundred men, including the corps of Morgan, without first consulting General Gates and the governor of New York. It was even moved that he should not detach any troops except after consultation with Gates and Clinton; and Samuel Adams, John Adams, and Gerry of Massachusetts, and Marchant of Rhode Island voted for that restriction. Time was wasted by this interference on the part of congress. Besides; while the northern army had been borne onward to victory by the rising of the people, Washington encountered other difficulties from the disaffection of a great part of the inhabitants of Pennsylvania, the languor of others, and the internal feuds and distraction of the whole. So the opportunity of driving Howe from Philadelphia before winter was lost.

By the tenth of November the British had completed their batteries on the reedy morass of Province island, five hundred yards from the American fort on Mud island, and began an incessant fire from four batteries of heavy artillery. Smith gave the opinion that the garrison could not repel a storming party; but Major Fleury, the resolute French engineer, reported the place still defensible. On the eleventh, Smith, having received a slight hurt, passed immediately to Red-bank; the next in rank desired to be recalled; and early on the thirteenth the brave little garrison of two hundred and eighty-six fresh men and twenty artillerists was confided to Major Simeon Thayer of Rhode Island, who had distinguished himself in the expedition against Quebec, and who now volunteered

CHAP.

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1777.

Nov.

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Nov.

2

CHAP. to take the desperate command.1 Supported by his superior ability and the skill and cool courage 1777 of Fleury, the garrison held out gallantly during an incessant bombardment and cannonade. On the fifteenth, the wind proving fair, the "Vigilant," carrying sixteen twenty-four pounders, and the hulk of a large Indiaman with three twenty-four pounders, aided by the tide, were warped through an inner channel which the obstructions in the river had deepened, and anchored so near the American fort that they could send into it hand-grenades, and marksmen from the masts of the "Vigilant" could pick off men from its platform. Five large British ships of war, which drew near the chevauxde-frise, kept off the American flotilla, and sometimes directed their fire at the fort on its unprotected side. The land batteries, now five in number, played from thirty pieces at short distances. The ramparts and block-houses on Mud island were honey-combed, their cannon nearly silenced. storming party was got ready; but to avoid bloodshed, Sir William Howe, who on the fifteenth was present with his brother, gave orders to keep up the fire all night through. In the evening, Thayer sent all the garrison but forty men over to Red-bank, and after midnight followed with the rest. When, on the sixteenth, the British troops entered the fort, they found nearly every one of its cannon stained

1 The authorities of weight are: Fleury's journal in Marshall, and in Sparks, v. 154, from the Washington papers; Varnum to Washington, 15 and 16 November, 1777, and Varnum to Wheeler, 2 August, 1786; and Colonel Israel Angell's

A

letter of 17 February, 1778, in Cowell's Spirit of 1776 in Rhode Island, 296. The account in Marshall, i. 178, is very complete.

2 Varnum: "one hundred yards;" Münchhausen: "two."

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with blood. Never were orders to defend a place CHAP. to the last extremity more faithfully executed. Thayer was reported to Washington as an officer 1777. of the highest merit; Fleury won promotion from congress for his disinterested gallantry.

Cornwallis was next sent by way of Chester to Billingsport, with a strong body of troops to clear the left bank of the Delaware. A division under Greene was promptly despatched across the river to give him battle. But Cornwallis was joined by five British battalions from New York, while the American reënforcements from the northern army were still delayed. It therefore became necessary to evacuate Red-bank. Cornwallis, having levelled its ramparts, returned to Philadelphia, and Greene rejoined Washington; but not till Lafayette, who attended the expedition as a volunteer, had secured the applause of congress by routing a party of Hessians. For all the seeming success, many officers in the British camp expressed the opinion that the states could not be subjugated, and should be suffered to go free.

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66

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE CONFEDERATION.

NOVEMBER 15, 1777.

CHAP. WHILE the winter-quarters of the British in Philadelphia were rendered secure by the posses1777. sion of the river Delaware, the congress which was scoffed at in the British house of lords as a vagrant" horde resumed at Yorktown the work of confederation. Of the committee who, in June, 1776, had been appointed to prepare the plan, Samuel Adams alone remained a member; and even he was absent when, on the fifteenth of November, 1777,"articles of confederation and perpetual union" were adopted, to be submitted for approbation to the several states.

The present is always the lineal descendant of the past. A new form of political life never appears but as a growth out of its antecedents, just as, in nature there is no animal life without a seed or a spore. In civil affairs, as much as in husbandry, seed-time goes before the harvest, and the harvest may be seen in the seed, the seed in

XXVI.

the harvest. According to the American theory, CHAP. the unity of the colonies had, before the declara- 1777. tion of independence, resided in the British king. Nov. The congress of the United States was the king's successor, and it inherited only such powers as the colonies themselves acknowledged to have belonged to the crown.

The vastness of America interfered with the instincts of local attachment. Affection could not twine itself round a continental domain of which the greatest part was a wilderness, associated with no recollections. The sentiment of unity existed only in the germ. Gadsden of South Carolina

had advised all to be, not Carolinians or New Yorkers, but Americans; yet "my country," in the mouth of Washington, in the early part of 1776, meant Virginia only; and though with the declaration of independence he learned to embrace all the states in that name, the narrower usage was still kept up by Patrick Henry. The confederacy was formed under the influence of political ideas which had been developed by a contest of centuries for individual and local liberties against an irresponsible central authority. Now that power passed to the people, new institutions were required strong enough to protect the state, while they should leave untouched the liberties of the individual. But America, misled by what belonged to the past, took for her organizing principle the principle of resistance to power, which in all the thirteen colonies had been hardened into stubbornness by a succession of common jealousies and struggles.