invaders soon provided a fresh supply of chickens and eggs. Coffee at twenty-five dollars a pound (Confederate money), and sugar at not much less cost, were attainable, and I managed to keep a fair supply of them for my little family. But though our physical conditions were tolerable, life was subject to a painful strain of uncertainty and anxiety, relieved only by the conviction that the war, of which all were weary and sick unto death, was nearly over. When the end came, confusion was confounded in a jumble so bewildering as scarcely to be credited with reality. The town streets and country roads were full of negroes, wandering about idle and aimless, going they knew not whither, a pitiful spectacle of enfranchised slaves dazed by their recent boon of liberty. Presently Union soldiers were everywhere. A German colonel, lately a New York broker, moved among us in the spick-and-span bravery of his uniform, the sovereign arbiter of our destinies. The world had rarely presented such a topsy-turvy condition of things, half tragical, half comical.

As soon as matters had sufficiently quieted down to warrant it, I resolved on a visit to my Northern friends, towards whom my heart yearned. But where should I get the means? I had I had plenty of Confederate money, but that was now as dishonored and worthless within the bounds of the recent Confederacy as it was in the regions beyond. During the progress of the war I had carefully invested my little savings in some bales of cotton stored in Americus. To these I had looked as the basis of a very modest financial reconstruction when the crash should come. A Confederate soldier's tobacco pipe suddenly caused this hope to vanish in smoke. A careless spark from that pipe started a conflagration, which left me and a good many others about as naked, pecuniarily speaking, as when we came into the world.

However, a singular concatenation of circumstances, to my view strikingly providential, supplied me with the means of travel. One of them, I think, deserves recording. When I was at the very nadir of my extremity, and at some distance from home, I met a Union friend who was one of the very few men in Georgia who had issued from the war with a competent fortune. Grasping my hand with eager delight, he exclaimed: "You are the very man, of all others, I wish to see. I am about to be married, and I am in trouble as to an officiating minister. I don't want the knot to be tied by any of these violent secession parsons, and I dislike to call in a Union army chaplain. You are a genuine godsend." He was equally a godsend to me, for he rewarded my little clerical service with thirty dollars in bright crisp greenbacks and a broad twenty-dollar gold piece, a sum which at that moment seemed to me almost beyond the dreams of avarice." Having been furnished, in this and other kindly ways, for the expedition, I was able in July, 1865, to set out once more for that long-forbidden region, the North.

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My point of departure was Atlanta, still a desolation of falling walls, blackened chimneys, and almost undistinguishable streets. How queer it was to be again in the great world! How splendid Nashville, Louisville, and Cincinnati appeared, with their brilliant gas-lights, crowded thoroughfares, showy shop windows, and fashionably dressed people! Evidently war here, whatever it had meant of sorrow and deprivation, had not been war as we had known it in the beleaguered, invaded, blockaded South. This prosperity was all but incredible when contrasted with Southern poverty, distress, and desolation.

Oh, the hideous dream, the long nightmare, of those years of war! God forbid that the like should ever come again to any generation of Americans! Yet

that war forms one of the most distinctly providential chapters in that vast book of Providence which we call human history. The results of the struggle are

beyond a peradventure worth all they cost, and could never have been attained by any process less expensive or less tragic. J. R. Kendrick.

DURING the dreary winter at Valley Forge, Washington busied himself in improving the organization of his army. The fall of the Conway cabal removed many obstacles. Greene was persuaded, somewhat against his wishes, to serve as quartermaster-general, and forthwith the duties of that important office were discharged with zeal and promptness. Conway's resignation opened the way for a most auspicious change in the inspectorship of the army. Of all the foreign officers who served under Washington during the War for Independence, the Baron von Steuben was in many respects the most important. Member of a noble family which for five centuries had been distinguished in the local annals of Magdeburg, Steuben was one of the best educated and most experienced soldiers of Germany. His grandfather, an able theologian, was well known as the author of a critical treatise on the New Testament. His uncle, an eminent mathematician, had been the inventor of a new system of fortification. His father had seen half a century of honorable service in the corps of engineers. He had himself held the rank of first lieutenant at the beginning of the Seven Years' War, and after excellent service in the battles of Prague, Rossbach, and Kunersdorf he was raised to a position on the staff of Frederick the Great. At the end of the war, when the thrifty king reduced his army, and Blücher with other officers afterward famous left the service, Steuben retired to private life, with the honorary rank

of General of the Circle of Swabia. For more than ten years he was grand marshal to the Prince of HohenzollernHechingen. Then he went traveling about Europe, until in the spring of 1777 he arrived in Paris, and became acquainted with Franklin and Beaumarchais.

The American alliance was already secretly contemplated by the French ministry, and the astute Vergennes, knowing that the chief defect of our armies lay in their want of organization and discipline, saw in the scientific German soldier a most efficient instrument for remedying the evil. After much hesitation Steuben was persuaded to undertake the task. That his arrival upon the scene might excite no heart-burning among the American officers, the honorary rank which he had held in Germany was translated by Vergennes into the rank of lieutenant-general, which the Americans would at once recognize as more eminent than any position existing in their own army except that of the commander-in-chief.

Knowing no English, Steuben took with him as secretary and interpreter the youthful Pierre Duponceau, afterward famous as a lawyer, and still more famous as a philologist. One day, on shipboard, this gay young Frenchman laid a wager that he would kiss the first Yankee girl he should meet on landing. So as they came ashore at Portsmouth on a frosty December day, he gravely stepped up to a pretty New Hampshire maiden who was passing by, and told

her that before leaving his native land to fight for American freedom he had taken a vow to ask, in earnest of victory, a kiss from the first lady he should meet. The prayer of chivalry found favor in the eyes of the fair Puritan, and the token of success was granted.

At Boston John Hancock furnished the party with sleighs, drivers, and saddlehorses for the inland journey of more than four hundred miles to York. During this cheerful journey, which it took three weeks to perform, Steuben's heart was warmed toward his new country by the reminiscences of the Seven Years' War which he frequently encountered. The name of Frederick was everywhere deservedly popular in America, and his familiar features decorated the signboard of many a wayside inn, while on the coffee-room walls hung quaint prints with doggerel verses commemorating Rossbach and Leuthen along with Louisburg and Quebec. On arriving at York, the German general was received by Congress with distinguished honors; and this time the confidence given to a trained European soldier turned out to be well deserved. Throughout the war Steuben proved no less faithful than capable. He came to feel a genuine love for his adopted country, and after the war was over, retiring to the romantic woodland near Oriskany, where so many families of German lineage were already settled, and where the State of New York presented him with a farm of sixteen thousand acres in acknowledgment of his services, he lived the quiet life of a country gentleman until his death in 1794. A little village some twelve miles north of the site of old Fort Stanwix still bears his name and marks the position of his estate.

After his interview with Congress, Steuben repaired at once to Valley Forge, where Washington was not slow in recognizing his ability; nor was Steuben, on the other hand, at a loss to perceive, in the ragged and motley army which

he passed in review, the existence of soldierly qualities which needed nothing so much as training. Disregarding the English prejudice which looked upon the drilling of soldiers as work fit only for sergeants, he took musket in hand and showed what was to be done. Alert and untiring, he worked from morning till night in showing the men how to advance, retreat, or change front without falling into disorder, - how to perform, in short, all the rapid and accurate movements for which the Prussian army had become so famous. It was a revelation to the American troops. Generals, colonels, and captains were fired by the contagion of his example and his tremendous enthusiasm, and for several months the camp was converted into a huge training - school, in which masters and pupils worked with incessant and furious energy. Steuben was struck with the quickness with which the common soldiers learned their lessons. He had a harmlessly choleric temper, which was part of his overflowing vigor, and sometimes, when drilling an awkward squad, he would exhaust his stock of French and German oaths, and shout for his aid to come and curse the blockheads in English. "Viens, mon ami Walker," he would say, .“ viens, mon bon ami.

Sacre-bleu-Gott-verdam de gaucherie of dese badauts. Je ne puis plus; I can curse dem no more!" Yet in an incredibly short time, as he afterward wrote, these awkward fellows had acquired a military air, had learned how to carry their arms, and knew how to form into column, deploy, and execute manœuvres with precision. In May, 1778, after three months of such work, Steuben was appointed inspector-general of the army, with the rank and pay of major-general. The reforms which he introduced were so far-reaching that after a year they were said to have saved more than 800,000 French livres to the United States. No accounts had been kept of arms and accoutrements,

and owing to the careless good-nature which allowed every recruit to carry home his musket as a keepsake, there had been a loss of from five to eight thousand muskets annually. During the first year of Steuben's inspectorship less than twenty muskets were lost. Half of the arms at Valley Forge were found by Steuben without bayonets. The American soldier had no faith in this weapon, because he did not know how to use it; when he did not throw it away, he adapted it to culinary purposes, holding on its point the beef which he roasted before his camp-fire. Yet in little more than a year after Steuben's arrival we shall see an American column, without firing a gun, storm the works at Stony Point in one of the most spirited bayonet charges known to history.

Besides all this, it was Steuben who first taught the American army to understand the value of an efficient staff. The want of such a staff had been severely felt at the battle of Brandywine; but before the end of the war Washington had become provided with a staff that Frederick need not have despised. While busy with all these laborious reforms, the good baron found time to prepare a new code of discipline and tactics, based on Prussian experience, but adapted to the peculiar conditions of American warfare; and this excellent manual held its place, long after the death of its author, as the Blue Book of our army. In this adaptation of means to ends, Steuben proved himself to be no martinet, but a thoroughly military scholar; he was able not only to teach, but to learn. And in the art of warfare there was one lesson which Europe now learned from America. woodland fights with the Indians, it had been found desirable to act in loose columns, which could easily separate to fall behind trees and reunite at brief notice; and in this way there had been developed a kind of light infantry peculiar to America, and especially adapted for skirmishVOL. LXIV.-No. 384.

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ing. It was light infantry of this sort that, in the hands of Arnold and Morgan, had twice won the day in the Saratoga campaign. Reduced to scientific shape by Steuben, and absorbed, with all the other military knowledge of the age, by Napoleon, these light-infantry tactics have come to play a great part on the European battle-fields of the nineteenth century.

Thus from the terrible winter at Valley Forge, in which the accumulated evils of congressional mismanagement had done their best to destroy the army, it came forth, nevertheless, stronger in organization and bolder in spirit than ever before. On the part of the enemy nothing had been done to molest it. The position at Valley Forge was a strong one, and Sir William Howe found it easier to loiter in Philadelphia than to play a strategic game against Washington in the depths of an American winter. When Franklin at Paris first heard the news that Howe had taken Philadelphia, knowing well how slight was the military value of the conquest, he observed that it would be more correct to say that Philadelphia had taken General Howe. And so it turned out, in more ways than one; for his conduct in going there at all was roundly blamed by the opposition in Parliament, and not a word was said in his behalf by Lord George Germaine. The campaign of 1777 had been such a bungling piece of work that none of the chief actors, save Burgoyne, was willing frankly to assume his share of responsibility for it. Sir William Howe did not care to disclose the secret of his peculiar obligations to the traitor Lee; and it would have ruined Lord George Germaine to have told the story of the dispatch that never was sent. Lord George, who was never noted for generosity, sought to screen himself by throwing the blame for everything indiscriminately upon the two generals. Burgoyne, who sat in Parliament, defended himself ably and candidly;

and when Howe heard what was going on, he sent in his resignation, in order that he too might go home and defend himself. Besides this, he had grown sick of the war, and was convinced that it must end in failure. On the 18th of May, Philadelphia was the scene of a grand farewell banquet, called the Mischianza, a strange medley, combining the modern parade and regatta with the mediæval tournament, wherein seven silk-clad knights of the Blended Rose and seven more of the Burning Mountain did amicably break lances in honor of fourteen blooming damsels dressed in Turkish trousers, while triumphal arches, surmounted by effigies of Fame, displayed inscriptions commemorating in fulsome Latin and French the glories of the departing general. In these curious festivities, savoring more strongly of Bruges in the fifteenth century than of Philadelphia in the eighteenth, it was long after remembered that the most prominent parts were taken by the illstarred Major André and the beautiful Miss Margaret Shippen, who was soon to become the wife of Benedict Arnold. With such farewell ceremonies Sir William Howe set sail for England, and Sir Henry Clinton took his place as commander-in-chief of the British armies in America.

Washington's position at Valley Forge had held the British in check through the winter. They had derived no advantage from the possession of the "rebel capital," for such poor work as Congress could do was as well done from York as from Philadelphia, and the political life of the United States was diffused from one end of the country to the other. The place was worthless as a basis for military operations. It was harder to defend and harder to supply with food than the insular city of New York; and, moreover, a powerful French fleet, under Count d'Estaing, was approaching the American coast. With the control of the Delaware imperiled,

Philadelphia would soon become untenable, and, in accordance with instructions received from the ministry, Sir Henry Clinton prepared to evacuate the place and concentrate his forces at New York. His first intention was to go by water; but finding that he had not transports enough for his whole army, together with the Tory refugees who had put themselves under his protection, he changed his plan. The Tories, to the number of 3000, with their personal effects, were sent on in the fleet, while the army, encumbered with twelve miles of baggage wagons, began its retreat across New Jersey. On the morning of the 18th of June, 1778, the rear-guard of the British marched out of Philadelphia, and before sunset the American advance marched in and took possession of the city. General Arnold, whose crippled leg did not allow him to take the field, was put in command, and after a fortnight both Congress and the state government returned. Of the Tories who remained behind, twenty-five were indicted, under the laws of Pennsylvania, for the crime of offering aid to the enemy. Two Quakers, who had actually conducted a party of British to a midnight attack upon an American outpost, were found guilty of treason and hanged. The other twenty-three were either acquitted or pardoned. Across the river, seventeen Tories, convicted of treason under the laws of New Jersey, all received pardon from the governor.

The British retreat from Philadelphia was regarded by the Americans as equivalent to a victory, and Washington was anxious to enhance the moral effect of it by a sudden blow which should cripple Sir Henry Clinton's army. In force he was about equal to the enemy, both armies now numbering about 15,000, while in equipment and discipline his men were better off than ever before. Unfortunately, the American army had just received one addition which went far to neutralize these advantages. The