The Count de Rochambeau, with a soldier’s exactness, soon caught the fire of Washington’s zeal, and well comprehended the situation of American affairs generally. So intense is his delineation of the condition of things as he observed them, that if penned by Washington himself, nothing could have been added. His letter to the Count de Vergennes, dated on July sixteenth, only six days after his landing in America, reads, in part, as follows: “Upon our arrival here, the country was in consternation; the paper money had fallen to sixty for one.... I spoke to the principal persons of the place, and told them, as I write to General Washington, that this was merely the advance guard of a greater force, and that the king was determined to support them with his whole power. In twenty-four hours their spirits rose, and last night, all the streets, houses, and steeples were illuminated, in the midst of fireworks and great rejoicing.... You see, Sir, how important it is to act with vigor.... Send us troops, ships, and money; but do not depend upon this people, nor upon their means. They have neither money nor credit. Their means of resistance are but momentary, and called forth when they are attacked in their homes. Then they assemble themselves for the moment of immediate danger, and defend themselves. Washington sometimes commands fifteen thousand, and sometimes three thousand men.” The restriction of the French fleet to Narragansett Bay so immediately after its arrival, led Washington and Rochambeau to postpone operations against New York; and it is proper to notice the fact that no news was received of the second division of French troops until late in the fall, when it was reported as blockaded in the home port of Brest. A proclamation was made and published by Lafayette, with the sanction of Washington, announcing to the Canadians that the French would aid them to expel the British troops from their country. The object of this proclamation was chiefly to divert the attention of the garrison of New York from a proposed joint attack upon that city, which Washington kept always in view. The expedition was never seriously entertained; but General Clinton, on the thirty-first of August, as anticipated by Washington, forwarded a copy of the paper to Lord Germaine, while at the same time he placed before him, in confidence, a proposition of a different kind, from which he derived a strong expectation of British gain, through the acquisition, by purchase, of the principal Hudson River military post, West Point itself.