CHAP. defence was not given up by the Americans; under the LVIII. harmonizing influence of the continental committee, 1776. Lee and the New York committee held friendly con Feb. ferences; the whole people showed a wonderful alacrity; and men and boys of all ages toiled with the greatest zeal and pleasure. To control the commerce of the Sound, a fortification was raised at Hellgate; on a height west of Trinity church, a battery was erected fronting the North River; that part of the old fort which faced Broadway was torn down; Lee and Lord Stirling, crossing to Long Island, marked out the ground for an intrenched camp, extending from the Wallabout to Gowanus Bay, and spacious enough to hold four thousand men; the connection between Long Island and New York was secured by a battery of forty guns at the foot of Wall street, and another of twenty guns a little further to the south. It was fondly hoped that the proposed fortifications would prove impregnable; the ships of war, without firing a gun, removed to the bay; and this state of peace and of confidence confirmed the preconceived notion of Lee's superior ability. The charm of exercising a separate command wrought a change in his caprices; and he who two months before had scorned the Americans as unworthy to aspire after independence, was now loud in praise of the doctrines of "Common Sense," and repudiated the thought of reconcili ation with Britain, unless "the whole ministry should be condignly punished, and the king beheaded or dethroned." His zeal and his seeming success concentred upor him public confidence. "Canada," said Washington, "will be a fine field for the exertion of your ad LVIII. Feb. mirable talents, but your presence will be as neces- CHAP. sary in New York." In like manner Franklin wrote: "I am glad you are come to New York; but I also 1776 wish you could be in Canada;" and on the nineteenth the congress destined him to "that most arduous service." John Adams, who had counselled his expedition to New York, wrote to him complacently, "that a luckier or a happier one had never been projected;" and added: "We want you at New York; we want you at Cambridge; we want you in Virginia; but Canada seems of more importance, and therefore you are sent there. I wish you the laurels of Wolfe and Montgomery, with a happier fate." Elated by such homage, Lee indulged his natural propensities, and made bold to ask money of the New York congress; "two thousand dollars at the least," said he; "if you could make it twenty five hundred it would be more convenient to me;" and they allowed him the gratuity. "When I leave this place," so he wrote to Washington on the last day of February, the "provincial congress and inhabitants will relapse into their hysterics; the men-of-war will return to their wharfs, and the first regiments from England will take quiet possession of the town." Those about him chimed in with his revilings. "Things will never go well," said Waterbury, "unless the city of New York is crushed down by the Connecticut people;" and Sears set no bounds to his contumelious abuse of the committee of New York and its convention. On the first of March, after a warm contest among Mar. the delegates of various colonies, each wishing to have CHAP. him where they had most at stake, on the motion of LVIII. Edward Rutledge, Lee was invested with the com 1776. mand of the continental forces south of the Potomac. Mar. "As a Virginian, I rejoice at the change," wrote Jan Washington; who had, however, already discovered that the officer so much courted was both "violent and fickle." On the seventh he left New York, but not without one last indulgence of his turbulent temper. The continental congress had instructed him to put the city in the best possible state of defence; and this he interpreted as a grant of unlimited authority. He therefore arrested men at discretion, and deputed power to Sears to offer a prescribed test oath to a registered number of suspected persons, and, if they refused it, to send them to Connecticut as irreclaimable enemies. To the rebuke of the New York convention, he answered: "When the enemy is at our door, forms must be dispensed with;" and on the eve of his departure, he gave Ward of Connecticut the sweeping order, "to secure the whole body of professed tories on Long Island." These arbitrary orders were resented by all the New York delegates as "a high encroachment upon the rights of the representatives of a free people," and were unequivocally condemned and reversed by congress. The expedition to the Carolinas never met the approval of Howe, who condemned the activity of the southern governors, and would have had them avoid all disputes, till New York should be recovered. When Lord Dunmore learned from Clinton that Cape Fear River was the place appointed for the meeting LVIII. 1776. of the seven regiments from Ireland, he broke out CHAP. into angry complaints, that no heed had been paid to his representations, his sufferings, and his efforts; that Jan. Virginia, "the first on the continent for riches, power, and extent," was neglected, and the preference given to "a poor, insignificant colony," where there were no pilots, nor a harbor that could admit half the fleet, and where the army, should it land, must wade for many miles through a sandy pine barren, before it could reach the inhabited part of the country. But Martin, who had good reason to expect the arrival of the armament in January or early in February, was infatuated with the hope, that multitudes, even in the county of Brunswick, would revolt "from their new-fangled government;" and "his unwearied, persevering agent," Alexander Maclean, after a careful computation of the numbers that would flock to the king's standard from the interior, brought written assurances from the principal persons to whom he had been directed, that between two and three thousand men, of whom about half were well armed, would take the field at the governor's summons. Under this encouragement he was sent again into the back country, with a commission dated the tenth of January, authorizing Allan Macdonald of Kingsborough, and eight other Scots of Cumberland and Anson, and seventeen persons who resided in a belt of counties in middle Carolina and in Rowan, to raise and array all the king's loyal subjects, and to march with them in a body to Brunswick by the fifteenth of February. Donald Macdonald, then in his sixty CHAP. fifth year, was to command the army as brigadier; next him in rank was Donald Macleod. LVIII. 1776. The first return to Martin represented that the Feb. loyalists were in high spirits; that their force would amount even to six thousand men; that they were well furnished with wagons and horses; and that by the twentieth or twenty fifth of February at furthest they would be in possession of Wilmington, and within reach of the king's ships. On receiving their commission, William Campbell, Neil MacArthur, and Donald Macleod issued circular letters, inviting all their associates to meet on the fifth of February at Cross Creek, or, as it is now called, Fayetteville. At the appointed time all the Scots appeared, and four only of the rest. The Scots, who could promise no more than seven hundred men, advised to await the arrival of the British troops; the other royalists, who boasted that they could bring out five thousand, of whom five hundred were already embodied, prevailed in their demand for an immediate rising. But the Highlanders, whose past conflicts were ennobled by their courage and fidelity to one another, whose sorrows, borne for generations with fortitude, deserved at last to find relief, were sure to keep their word; from a blind instinct of kindred, they took up arms for a cause in which their traditions and their affections had no part; while many of the chiefs of the loyalists shrunk from danger to hiding places in swamps and forests. Employing a few days to collect his army, which was composed chiefly of Highlanders and remnants of the old Regulators, Macdonald, on the eighteenth, began his march for Wilmington, and at evening his army, of which the number was very |