Among the letters now passing through New York was one upon that battle, addressed to the President of Congress, which Washington took the liberty of opening for his own guidance. After instructing Schuyler, who was to be left in charge of the forces in New York, to keep watch upon Tryon[419] and Guy Johnson,[420] Washington the next day (26th) started for Cambridge. On the 2d of July Washington reached Watertown, and on the 3d, under a tree still standing,[421] he took command of the army, which thus passed, in effect, under Continental control, numbering at the time nearly 15,000 men fit for duty.[422] To brigade this army, rectify the circumvallating lines, watch the constant skirmishes, and assign the new bodies of troops arriving to places in the works, was the labor to which Washington devoted himself at once. On the 9th of July he held his first council of war,[423] and on the 10th he addressed his first letter to Congress, describing the condition of the siege as he had found it. [Illustration] To guard against surprise, and replenish the magazines, required constant diligence, and the supply of powder never ceased to be a cause of anxiety in the one camp, while the diminishing stock of provisions produced almost as much concern in Boston. The beleaguered British, however, got some relief from the exodus of the Boston people, which the stress of want forced the royal commander to permit.[424] So the summer was made up of anxious moments. The independent husbandmen of New England made but intractable raw recruits, and Washington, who had expected to find discipline equal to that which the social distinctions of the South gave to the masses there, was disappointed, and did not wholly conceal his disgust.[425] He grew, however, to discern that campaigns could produce that discipline as well, if not better, than a life of civil subservience. Recruits came in from the South, and when some of the Northern officers saw the kind of men that Morgan and others brought as riflemen from Virginia, their comment was scarcely less austere. "The army would be as well off without them", said Thomas, who, next to Washington, was the best disciplinarian in the camp. Of the generals, Lee was, however, by much the most conspicuous. There was a glamour about the current rumors of his soldierly experience that obscured what might have been told of his questionable character.[426] His eccentricities were the camp talk, and rather served to magnify his presence, while it proved dangerous to perambulate the lines with him and his crowd of dogs, since the exhibition tempted the enemy to drop their shells in that spot.[427] Early in July a trumpeter approached the American lines bringing a letter from General Burgoyne to General Lee, and the camp straightway proceeded to invest the strange general with political importance. Burgoyne and Lee were old campaigners together, and Lee, before he left Philadelphia, had written a stirring letter to the British