For the next seven years this remained the chief British stronghold in America. If the eastern and southern colonies could be split apart by English control of the Hudson, the backbone of the colonial federation would be broken—as the backbone of the Confederacy was broken, nearly a century later, by Sherman’s march to the sea. So every energy was bent toward dislodging the Continentals from this dividing-line. This was the immediate object of Arnold’s treachery, as well as of many an overt movement from south and north. But Washington outgeneralled the enemy and kept the federation intact, till the capture of Yorktown made New York no longer tenable by the foe. The city was well-nigh ruined by its experiences during these seven terrible years; and the outlying country to the north—Westchester County—suffered no less severely, being exposed to raids from the opposing bodies of regulars, and to constant marauding at the hands of free-booters, who pretended affiliation with one side or the other, sometimes in good faith, but often merely as a pretext for lawless depredations. [Illustration: FRAUNCES’S TAVERN.] The most joyously celebrated event in the annals of Manhattan was the city’s evacuation by the British at the close of the war. On the day that this occurred, November 25, 1783, General Washington arrived in town and dined at Fraunces’s Tavern; and hither he repaired again, ten days later, on the eve of his departure for Annapolis, to bid farewell to his officers. In this same building, and in the same Long Room, the first meeting of the New York Chamber of Commerce had been held, in 1768, fifteen years before any similar association was organized in Great Britain. This hostelry had, indeed, been the fashionable rendezvous of New Yorkers since 1762, when the shop at the southeast corner of Broad and Pearl Streets was converted to still more public uses by Samuel Fraunces (“Black Tom”), who in later years was to become the first President’s steward. At the beginning it was known as the Queen’s Head Tavern, its sign bearing a portrait of Queen Charlotte. Enlarged, and otherwise altered, but not improved, Fraunces’s Tavern is still, as it has always been, a public-house, though fashion has long since deserted it. It would be most deplorable if the march of improvement (in whose name, as in Liberty’s, so many offences are committed) should ever be allowed to obliterate this most aged and interesting relic of old New York.