When General Clinton sailed with his seven thousand five hundred men, the British force in the Southern Department became thirteen thousand two hundred and sixty-seven; but it left in New York an effective strength of twenty-one thousand and six men. And yet this garrison was not without apprehension of attack. The winter was one of unexampled severity. New York harbor froze until teams could cross upon the ice. The British army was almost in a starving condition. Country supplies of wood were cut off, until vessels at the wharves were chopped up for fuel. The American army was not wholly idle. Lord Stirling, with twenty-five hundred men, crossed to Staten Island on the ice, in spite of the extreme cold, to attack that British supply-post; but a sudden opening in the ice restored British communication with the city, and his expedition failed of valuable results. On the twenty-fifth of January, General Knyphausen sent a small detachment across the ice at Paulus Hook and captured a company at Newark; while Lieutenant-Colonel Buskirk crossed from Staten Island, and at Elizabethtown captured the picket and burned the Town House, as well as the church of the Rev. James Caldwell, Chaplain of Colonel Elias Dayton’s Regiment. On the second of February, Lieutenant-Colonel Norton rode in sleighs, to attack a small American post near White Plains; but, otherwise, the British as well as the American army had enough to do to prevent freezing to death. During the extreme freeze of January, 1780, the suffering in the American camp is reported as “baffling description. The paths were marked by blood from the feet of barefooted soldiers.” Bancroft and Irving have left nothing to add here. General Greene, Quartermaster-General, reported on the eleventh of January: “Such weather I never did feel. For six or eight days there has been no living abroad. We drive over the tops of fences. We have been alternately out of meat and bread for eight or nine days past, and without either for three or four.” It was a time, also, when the royalist element gained some hope; and Clinton’s Official Return for December reports a force of four thousand and sixty-four Provincials then in British pay. The women of New Jersey came to the rescue of the suffering soldiers of Washington in a manner that exhausts all possible forms of recognition. Clothing and feeding the naked and hungry was their constant employment. Washington says of New Jersey, that “his requisitions were punctually complied with, and in many counties exceeded.” During this entire period there was one supervision exercised by the American Commander-in-Chief which knew no interruption, whatever the inclemency of the weather. Every pass to his strongly intrenched camp, and every bold promontory, or distinct summit, that observed or commanded approach, was guarded, and watch-fires were instituted for signals of danger, or warning to the militia. The perpetuation of his strongholds in New Jersey saved the Republic.