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Already the St. Lawrence river was open to navigation. On the first of June, General Riedesel arrived with troops from Brunswick, and General Burgoyne with troops from Ireland, swelling the command of General Carleton to an aggregate of nine thousand nine hundred and eighty-four effective men; and British preparations were at once made to take the offensive, and expel the American force from Canada. Before the last of June the “invasion of Canada” came to an end, and the remnants of the army, which had numbered more than ten thousand men, returned, worn out, dispirited, and beaten.

Washington had been stripped of troops and good officers at a most critical period, against his remonstrance; and Congress accounted for the disaster by this brief record: “Undertaken too late in the fall; enlistments too short; the haste which forced immature expeditions for fear there would be no men to undertake them, and the small-pox.”

Gradually the principal officers and many of the returning troops joined the army at New York. The occupation of New York, the fortification and defence of Brooklyn Heights, the tardy withdrawal of the army to Harlem Heights, with a constant and stubborn resistance to the advancing British army and its menacing ships-of-war, have always been treated as of questionable policy by writers who have not weighed each of those incidents as did Washington, by their effect upon the Continental army, as a whole, and in the light of a distinctly framed plan for the conduct of the war. This plan was harmonious and persistently maintained from his assumption of command until the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, in 1781.