The main army, therefore, remained quiet, and when the autumn had passed went into winter-quarters in well-posted detachments about New York.  In December Clinton made an ineffectual raid, and then all was peaceful again, and Washington was able to go to Philadelphia and struggle with Congress, leaving his army more comfortable and secure than they had been in any previous winter.

In January he informed Congress as to the next campaign.  He showed them the impossibility of undertaking anything on a large scale, and announced his intention of remaining on the defensive.  It was a trying policy to a man of his temper, but he could do no better, and he knew, now as always, what others could not yet see, that by simply holding on and keeping his army in the field he was slowly but surely winning independence.  He tried to get Congress to do something with the navy, and he planned an expedition, under the command of Sullivan, to overrun the Indian country and check the barbarous raids of the Tories and savages on the frontier; and with this he was fain to be content.  In fact, he perceived very clearly the direction in which the war was tending.  He kept up his struggle with Congress for a permanent army, and with the old persistency pleaded that something should be done for the officers, and at the same time he tried to keep the States in good humor when they were grumbling about the amount of protection afforded them.

But all this wear and tear of heart and brain and temper, while given chiefly to hold the army together, was not endured with any notion that he and Clinton were eventually to fight it out in the neighborhood of New York.  Washington felt that that part of the conflict was over.  He now hoped and believed that the moment would come, when, by uniting his army with the French, he should be able to strike the decisive blow.  Until that time came, however, he knew that he could do nothing on a great scale, and he felt that meanwhile the British, abandoning practically the eastern and middle States, would make one last desperate struggle for victory, and would make it in the south.  Long before any one else, he appreciated this fact, and saw a peril looming large in that region, where everybody was considering the British invasion as little more than an exaggerated raid.  He foresaw, too, that we should suffer more there than we had in the extreme north, because the south was full of Tories and less well organized.

All this, however, did not change his own plans one jot.  He believed that the south must work out its own salvation, as New York and New England had done with Burgoyne, and he felt sure that in the end it would be successful.  But he would not go south, nor take his army there.  The instinct of a great commander for the vital point in a war or a battle, is as keen as that of the tiger is said to be for the jugular vein of its victim.  The British might overrun the north or invade the south, but he would