This beautiful city is worthy of its inhabitants and everything there announced not only comfort but even luxury. Without knowing much of M. de Lafayette, the generals Howe,~[17] Moultrie, and Gulden, received him with the utmost kindness and attention. The new works were shown him, and also that battery which Moultrie afterwards defended so extremely well, and which the English appear, we must acknowledge, to have seized the only possible means of destroying. Several adventurers, the refuse of the islands, endeavoured vainly to unite themselves to M. de Lafayette, and to infuse into his mind their own feelings and prejudices. Having procured horses, he set out with six officers for Philadelphia. His vessel had arrived, but it was no longer protected by fortune, and on its return home it was lost on the bar of Charlestown To repair to the congress of the United States, M. de Lafayette rode nearly nine hundred miles on horseback; before reaching the capital of Pennsylvania, he was obliged to travel through the two Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware. Whilst studying the language and customs of the inhabitants, he observed also new productions of nature, and new methods of cultivation: vast forests and immense rivers combine to give to that country an appearance of youth and majesty. After a fatiguing journey of one month, he beheld at length that Philadelphia, so well known in the present day, and whose future grandeur Penn appeared to designate when he laid the first stone of its foundation.
After having accomplished his noble manoeuvres at Trenton and Princetown, General Washington had remained in his camp at Middlebrook. The English, finding themselves frustrated in their first hopes, combined to make a decisive campaign. Burgoyne was already advancing with ten thousand men, preceded by his proclamations and his savages. Ticonderoga, a famous stand of arms, was abandoned by Saint-Clair; he drew upon himself much public odium by this deed, but he saved the only corps whom the militia could rally round. Whilst the generals were busied assembling the militia, the congress recalled them, sent Gates their place, and used all possible means to support him. At that same time the great English army, of about eighteen thousand men, had sailed from New York, and the two Howes were uniting their forces for a secret enterprise; Rhode Island was occupied by a hostile corps, and General Clinton who had remained at New York, was there preparing for an expedition. To be able to withstand many various blows, General Washington, leaving Putnam on the north river, crossed over the Delaware, and encamped, with eleven thousand men, within reach of Philadelphia.