barely escaped with
the two thousand men in the fort, leaving behind one hundred and forty
cannon, stores, tools, and even the men's blankets. On the twentieth the
British flag was floating over Fort Lee and Washington's whole force
was in rapid flight across New Jersey, hardly pausing until it had been
ferried over the Delaware River into Pennsylvania.

Treachery, now linked to military disaster, made Washington's position
terrible. Charles Lee, Horatio Gates, and Richard Montgomery were
three important officers of the regular British army who fought on the
American side. Montgomery had been killed at Quebec; the defects of
Gates were not yet conspicuous; and Lee was next to Washington the most
trusted American general. The names Washington and Lee of the twin forts
on opposite sides of the Hudson show how the two generals stood in the
public mind. While disaster was overtaking Washington, Lee had seven
thousand men at North Castle on the east bank of the Hudson, a few miles
above Fort Washington, blocking Howe's advance farther up the river. On
the day after the fall of Fort Washington, Lee received positive
orders to cross the Hudson at once. Three days later Fort Lee fell, and
Washington repeated the order. Lee did not budge. He was safe where
he was and could cross the river and get away into New Jersey when he
liked. He seems deliberately to have left Washington to face complete
disaster and thus prove his incompetence; then, as the undefeated
general, he could take the chief command. There is no evidence that he
had intrigued with Howe, but he thought that he could be the peacemaker
between Great Britain and America, with untold possibilities of ambition
in that role. He wrote of Washington at this time, to his friend Gates,
as weak and "most damnably deficient." Nemesis, however, overtook him.
In the end he had to retreat across the Hudson to northern New Jersey.
Here many of the people were Tories. Lee fell into a trap, was captured
in bed at a tavern by a hard-riding party of British cavalry, and
carried off a prisoner, obliged to bestride a horse in night gown and
slippers. Not always does fate appear so just in her strokes.

In December, though the position of Washington was very bad, all was
not lost. The chief aim of Howe was to secure the line of the Hudson and
this he had not achieved. At Stony Point, which lies up the Hudson about
fifty miles from New York, the river narrows and passes through what is