It may perhaps appear unaccountable, that the American government should not seasonably have employed those means which might have prevented so urgent a peril. It is, however, certain, that soon after the commencement of hostilities, the Congress had appointed colonel Trumbull, a man of excellent abilities, and a zealous patriot, to superintend the purchasing of necessaries for the troops. But from his want of experience, and perhaps of sufficient support on the part of the government, as yet not well consolidated, it had resulted, that the army was often on the point of suffering from the deficiency of supplies; hence the plans of the commander-in-chief were frequently frustrated, and the movements of his army embarrassed, to the loss of many fair opportunities for the most important strokes.

When afterwards, about the middle of the year 1777, the department of colonel Trumbull began to be administered with more regufarity, the Congress, believing that the more officers of supply they had under their control, the better the troops would be served, created two commissaries-general, the one of purchases and the other of issues. They determined that each of these commissaries-general should have four deputies, to be appointed by Congress, not removable by the head of the department, and accountable to themselves only.

They afterwards resolved that the quarter-master-general's department should be executed on the following plan;

First, the military line, to be styled the quarter-master-general's, is to include the regulating of marches, encampments and order of battle. Second, the commissary of forage. Third, the commissary of horses and wagons. Fourth, the agent for the purchase of tents, intrenching tools, building of barracks, and for all the smaller supplies of the department.' Colonel Trumbull, dissatisfied with this multiplicity of departments, and still more with this independence of the deputies with respect to the head of the department, requested the Congress to appoint him a successor. The Congress persisted in their plan. The old order of things being thus annihilated, and the new not yet organised, there followed those serious inconveniences which we have mentioned above.

Congress at length perceived the inevitable preponderancy in times of war, and especially, in new states, of military men and affairs over civil; they saw there was no possibility of inducing the generals, who all disapproved it, to execute their plan for the administration of the army. It was accordingly abandoned, and general Greene, who enjoyed the entire confidence of the commander-in-chief, was appointed quarter-master-general, and a very suitable person named Wadsworth, commissary-general of purchases; both having power to appoint and remove their assistants. But these measures were not adopted till very late; and before the salutary effects of the new system could be felt, the army was a prey to such mischiefs and miseries, as brought the republic to the very brink of destruction.

The distresses of the troops were far from being confined to dearth of sustenance; the greatest scarcity, or rather a total want of all other necessaries, was also experienced in the camp. It was utterly unprovided even of clothing, an article so essential to the health, as well as to the spirits of the soldiers; tattered and half naked, they would sooner have been taken for so many mendicants, than defenders of a generous country.

Some few had one shirt, but many only the moiety of one, and the greater part none at all. Many, for want of shoes, walked barefoot on the frozen ground. Few, if any, had blankets for the night. Great numbers sickened; others, unfitted for service by the cold and their nakedness, were excused by their officers from all military duty, and either remained in their barracks, or were lodged in the houses of the neighboring farmers. Near three thousand men were thus rendered incapable of bearing arins. Congress had neglected no care to provide a remedy for so alarming an evil. They had authorised the commander-in-chief, as we have already said, to seize, wherever he might be, and from any person whatever, all articles of necessity for the army; and nothing could be more essential than to clothe it. But Washington felt great repugnance to using this power; as, on the one hand, it exasperated the citizens, and, on the other, it accustomed the soldiers to lay hands on the property of others. The Congress considered these scruples unseasonable; they recommended to the legislatures of each state to enact laws, appointing suitable persons to seize and take for the use of the army, all articles proper for the clothing of soldiers, on condition, however, of paying the proprietors for the articles so taken, at a rate to be fixed by the convention of the committees appointed for this purpose by the several

states.

They also created a commissary-general of clothing for the troops, to be assisted by a deputy commissary in each state, as well for the purpose of superintending the compulsory requisitions, as in order, if practicable, to procure all that was necessary by way of contracts. But these measures were slow in producing the desired effect. Many detested the thought of wresting from their fellow-citizens what they would not sell voluntarily. There prevailed, besides, at this time, in all the states, a scarcity of cloths, linens, leather, and generally of all the articles that were most wanted. Nevertheless, the deputy commissary of the clothing department in Massachusetts, had succeeded in concluding contracts with several merchants for large quantities of merchandise, at the rate of ten to eighteen per cent. above the current price. Their terms appeared exorbitant to some, and even to the Congress, and much was said about the avarice of the merchants. It was however just to consider, that the bills they received in payment were already fallen to one fourth of their nominal value; that the merchandise in question was extremely scarce in the country;

that the price of labor was greatly advanced, and that it was become extremely difficult to make remittance to foreign countries. Whether it was that these murmurs had piqued the merchants, or that cupidity had really more power over them than the promises of the government, several of those who had entered into contracts refused to furnish, unless they were paid in advance. The Congress, being informed of this determination, addressed a letter to the state government, requesting that the goods should be seized from such as refused to fulfil their contracts, at prices to be fixed by commissioners appointed for that purpose under the state authority. These resolutions of Congress, and the letters written to the states by Washington, urging them in the most earnest language to come to the succour of his suffering army, at length produced all the effect that was desired; yet not so promptly, however, but that the greater part of the winter was already elapsed when the first convoys of clothing arrived at the camp.

To all the miseries of the army already enumerated, must still be added the want of straw. The soldiers, overwhelmed with lassitude, enfeebled by hunger, and benumbed with cold in their service by day and by night, had no other bed in their huts except the bare and humid ground. This cause, joined to the others that have been related, propagated diseases; the hospitals were as rapidly replenished as death evacuated them; their administration was no less defective in its organisation than that of the camp. The unsuitableness of the buildings in which they had been established, the excessive penury of every kind of furniture, and the multitude of sick that crowded them, had generated an insupportable fetor. The hospital fever broke out in them, and daily swept off the most robust as well as the feeble. It was not possible to remedy it by often changing the linen, for of this they were utterly unprovided; nor by a more salubrious diet, when the coarsest was scarcely attainable; nor even by medicines, which were either absolutely wanting, or of the worst quality, and adulterated through the cupidity of the contractors; for such, in general, has been the nature of these furnishers of armies, that they should rather be denominated the artisans of scarcity; they have always preferred money to the life of the soldier. Hence it was, that the American hospital resembled more a receptacle for the dying than a refuge for the sick; far from restoring health to the diseased, it more often proved mortal to the well. This pestilential den was the terror of the army. The soldiers preferred perishing with cold in the open air, to being buried alive in the midst of the dead. Whether it was the effect of inevitable necessity, or of the avarice of men, it is but too certain, that an untimely death carried off a multitude of brave soldiers, who, with better attentions, might have been preserved for the defence of their country in its distress.

All these disorders, so pernicious to the republic, took their origin in the causes we have related, and partly also in the military organisation itself. The chiefs appeared to acknowledge no system, and the subalterns no restraint of obedience. Horses were allowed to perish in the highways, or to escape into the fields, without search. The roads were incumbered with carts belonging to the army, and unfit for service. Hence it happened, that when the incredible. exertions of the government and of good citizens had succeeded in collecting provisions for the army, they could not be conveyed to the camp, and, by long delays, they were again dispersed, or wasted. This defect of carriages was equally prejudicial to the transportation of arms and military stores, which were, in consequence, abandoned to the discretion of those who either plundered them, or suffered them to be plundered. An incalculable quantity of public effects was thus dissipated or destroyed. In the camp of Valley Forge, men were constrained to perform, as they really did, with inconceivable patience, the service of beasts of draught, as well in procuring firewood as in drawing the artillery. And certainly, nothing could be imagined to equal the sufferings which the American army had to undergo in the course of this winter, except the almost superhuman firmness with which they bore them. Not but that a certain number, seduced by the royalists, deserted their colors, and slunk off to the British army in Philadelphia; but these were mostly Europeans, who had entered the continental service. The trueborn Americans, supported by their patriotism, as by their love and veneration for the commander-in-chief, manifested an unshaken perseverance; they chose rather to suffer all the extremes of famine and of frost, than to violate, in this perilous hour, the faith they had pledged to their country. They were encouraged, it it true, by the example. of their generals, who, with an air of serenity, took part in all their fatigues, and shared in all their privations. But can it be dissembled, that if general Howe had seen fit to seize the opportunity, and had suddenly attacked the camp at Valley Forge, he would inevitably have gained a complete victory? Without military stores and with- out provisions, how could the Americans have defended their intrenchments? Besides, to enter the field anew, in the midst of so rigorous a season, was become for them an absolute impossibility. On the first of February, four thousand of their men were incapable of any kind of service, for want of clothing. The condition of the rest was very little better. In a word, out of the seventeen thousand men that were in camp, it would have been difficult to muster five thousand fit for service.

We pretend not to decide what were the motives of the British general for not taking advantage of a conjuncture so favorable. It appears to us, at least, that the extreme regard he had to the preservation of his troops, did but lead him on this occasion to reserve

them for greater perils; and his circumspection rather deserves the appellation of timidity than of prudence.

Washington was filled with anguish at the calamities of his army. But nothing gave him more pain than to see his soldiers exposed to the most pernicious example; the officers openly declared the design of resigning their commissions; many of them had already left the army, and returned to their families. This determination was principally owing to the depreciation of paper money; it was become so considerable, and the price of all articles of consumption, as well for this reason as from the difficulties of commerce, was so prodigiously advanced that the officers, far from being able to live as it become their rank, had not even the means of providing for their subsistence. Some had already exhausted their private resources to maintain a decent appearance, and others, destitute of patrimonial fortune, had been forced to contract debts, or restrict themselves to a parsimony little worthy of the rank with which they were invested. Hence a disinclination for the service became almost universal. Nor should it be supposed that only the less deserving or worthless desired to resign; for the regiments being incomplete, and the nuinber of officers too great, their retreat would not have been an evil; but it was especially the bravest, the most distinguished, the most spirited, who, disdaining more than others the state of degradation to which they were reduced, were fully resolved to quit the army, in order to escape from it. Alarmed at the progress of the evil, Washington endeavored to resist it by the use of those remedies which he believed the most suitable; he spared neither promises nor encouragements; he wrote the most pressing letters to the Congress that they might seriously consider the subject, and take the proper measures thereon. He exhorted them especially, to secure half pay to the officers after the war, either for life or for a definite term. He observed that it was easy to talk of patriotism, and to cite a few examples from ancient history of great enterprises carried by this alone to a successful conclusion; but that those who relied solely upon individual sacrifices for the support of a long and sanguinary war, must not expect to enjoy their illusion long; that it was necessary to take the passions of men as they are, and not as it might be wished to find them; that the love of country had indeed operated great things in the commencement of the present revolution; but that to continue and complete it, required also the incentive of interest and the hope of reward. The Congress manifested at first very little inclination to adopt the propositions of the commander-in-chief, either because they deemed them too extraordinary, or from reluctance to load the state with so heavy a burden; or, finally, because they thought the grants of lands to the officers and soldiers, of which we have made mention in its place, ought to satisfy the wishes of men possessed of any moderation. But at length, submitting to