It was the present object of Washington to keep those visible signs of English authority penned up within this circle around New York. The Continental posts, therefore, formed a vast arc, extending from the interior of New Jersey through Southeastern New York State to Long Island Sound and into Connecticut. This had been the situation since midsummer of 1778. It was but a detachment from our main army that had cooperated with the French fleet in the futile attempt to dislodge a British force from Newport in August of that year. The British commander-in-chief and most of the superior officers had their quarters in the best residences of New York. That town was packed snugly into the southern angle of the island of Manhattan, like a gift in the toe of a Christmas stocking. Southward, some of its finest houses looked across the Battery to the bay. Northward the town extended little beyond the common fields, of which the City Hall Square of 1898 is a reduced survival. The island of Manhattan--with its hills, woods, swamps, ponds, brooks, roads, farms, sightly estates, gardens, and orchards--was dotted with the cantonments and garrisoned forts of the British. The outposts were, largely, entrusted to bodies of Tory allies organized in this country. Thus was much of Long Island guarded by the three Loyalist battalions of General Oliver De Lancey, himself a native of New York. On Staten Island was quartered General Van Cortlandt Skinner's brigade of New Jersey Volunteers, a troop which seems to have had such difficulty in finding officers in its own State that it had to go to New York for many of them,--or was it that so many more rich New York Loyalists had to be provided with commissions than the New York Loyalist brigades required as officers?