e taken.]

At this time a second detachment from the army of the North, under
Gates,[3] was on the march across Sussex County to the Delaware. Being
cut off from communication with the commander-in-chief, Gates sent
forward a staff officer to learn the condition of affairs, report his
own speedy appearance, and receive directions as to what route he should
take, Hearing that Lee was at Morristown, this officer pushed on in
search of him, and at four o'clock in the morning of the 13th, he found
Lee quartered in an out-of-the-way country tavern at Baskingridge,
three miles from his camp, and by just so much nearer the enemy, whose
patrols, since Washington had been disposed of, were now scouring the
roads in every direction. One of these detachments surprised the house
Lee was in, and before noon the crestfallen general was being hurried
off a prisoner to Brunswick by a squadron of British light-horse.

Lee's troops, now Sullivan's, with those of Gates, one or two marches in
the rear, freed from the crafty hand that had been leading them astray,
now pressed on for the Delaware, and thus that concert of action, for
which Washington had all along labored in vain, was again restored
between the fragments of his army, impotent when divided, but yet
formidable as a whole.

Lee's written and spoken words, if indeed his acts did not speak even
louder, leave no doubt as to his purpose in amusing Washington by a show
of coming to his aid, when, in fact, he had no intention of doing so. He
not only assumed the singular attitude, in a subordinate, of passing
judgment upon the propriety or necessity of his orders,--orders given
with full knowledge of the situation,--but proceeded to thwart them in
a manner savoring of contempt. Lee was Washington's Bernadotte. Neither
urging, remonstrance, nor entreaty could swerve him one iota from the
course he had mapped out for himself. Conceiving that he held the key to
the very unpromising situation in his own hands, he had determined to
make the gambler's last throw, and had lost.

Although Lee's conduct toward Washington cannot be justified, it is more
than probable that some such success as that which Stark afterwards
achieved at Bennington, under conditions somewhat similar, though
essentially different as to motives, might, and probably would, have
justified Lee's conduct to the nation, and perhaps even have raised him
to the position he coveted--of the head of the army, on the ruins of