government; and this consideration increased his anxiety in favour of
early and vigorous preparations for the next campaign. Yet it was not
until the 23d of January that congress passed the resolution,
authorizing the Commander-in-chief to re-enlist the army, nor, until
the 9th of March, that the requisition was made on the several states
for their quotas. The bounty offered by the first resolution being
found insufficient, the government was again under the necessity of
resorting to the states. Thus, at a season when the men ought to have
been in camp, the measures for raising them were still to be adopted.

About this period, several circumstances conspired to foment those
pernicious divisions and factions in congress, which, in times of
greater apparent danger, patriotism would have suppressed.

[Sidenote: Divisions in congress.]

The ministers of the United States, in Europe, had reciprocally
criminated each other, and some of them had been recalled. Their
friends in congress supported their respective interests with
considerable animation; and, at length, Mr. Deane published a
manifesto, in which he arraigned at the bar of the public, the conduct
not only of those concerned in foreign negotiations, but of the
members of Congress themselves.

The irritation excited by these and other contests was not a little
increased by the appearance, in a New York paper, of an extract from
a letter written by Mr. Laurens, the president of congress, to
Governor Huiston, of Georgia, which, during the invasion of that
state, was found among his papers. In this letter, Mr. Laurens had
unbosomed himself with the unsuspecting confidence of a person
communicating to a friend the inmost operations of his mind. In a
gloomy moment, he had expressed himself with a degree of severity,
which even his own opinion, when not under the immediate influence of
chagrin, would not entirely justify, and had reflected on the
integrity and patriotism of members, without particularizing the
individuals he designed to censure.

These altercations added much to the alarm with which General
Washington viewed that security which had insinuated itself into the
public mind; and his endeavours were unremitting to impress the same
apprehensions on those who were supposed capable of removing the
delusion. In his confidential letters to gentlemen of the most
influence in the several states, he represented in strong terms the
dangers which yet threatened t