“I have a small house near the barracks with our friend Colonel Ware and the best of negro slaves and every comfort.  It is now a loyal city, secure from attack, and, but for the soldiers, one might think it a provincial English town.  This war may last for years and as the sea is, for a time, quite safe, I have resolved to ask you and Margaret to take passage on one of the first troop ships sailing for New York, after this reaches you.  Our friend Sir Roger and his regiments will be sailing in March as I am apprised by a recent letter.  I am, by this post, requesting him to offer you suitable accommodations and to give you all possible assistance.  The war would be over now if Washington would only fight.  His caution is maddening.  His army is in a desperate plight, but he will not come out and meet us in the open.  He continues to lean upon the strength of the hills.  But there are indications that he will be abandoned by his own army.”

Those “indications” were the letters of one John Anderson, who described himself as a prominent officer in the American army.  The letters were written to Sir Henry Clinton.  They asked for a command in the British army and hinted at the advantage to be derived from facts, of prime importance, in the writer’s possession.

Margaret and her mother sailed with Sir Roger Waite and his regiments on the tenth of March and arrived in New York on the twenty-sixth of April. Rivington’s Gazette of the twenty-eighth of that month describes an elaborate dinner given by Major John Andre, Adjutant-General of the British Army, at the City Hotel to General Sir Benjamin Hare and Lady Hare and their daughter Margaret.  Indeed the conditions in New York differed from those in the camp of Washington as the day differs from the night.

A Committee of Congress had just finished a visit to Washington’s Highland camp.  They reported that the army had received no pay in five months; that it often went “sundry successive days without meat”; that it had scarcely six days’ provisions ahead; that no forage was available; that the medical department had neither sugar, tea, chocolate, wine nor spirits.

The month of May, 1780, gave Washington about the worst pinch in his career.  It was the pinch of hunger.  Supplies had not arrived.  Famine had entered the camp and begun to threaten its life.  Soldiers can get along without pay but they must have food.  Mutiny broke out among the recruits.

In the midst of this trouble, Lafayette, the handsome French Marquis, then twenty-three years old, arrived on his white horse, after a winter in Paris, bringing word that a fleet and army from France were heading across the sea.  This news revived the drooping spirit of the army.  Soon boats began to arrive from down the river with food from the east.  The crisis passed.  In the north a quiet summer followed.  The French fleet with six thousand men under Rochambeau arrived at Newport, July tenth, and were immediately blockaded by the British as was a like expedition fitting out at Brest.  So Washington could only hold to his plan of prudent waiting.