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Meanwhile, the citizens of the sea-coast towns of New England began to be anxious as to their own safety. A British armed transport cannonaded Stonington, and other vessels threatened New London and Norwich. All of these towns implored Washington to send them troops. Governor Jonathan Trumbull, of Connecticut (the original “Brother Jonathan”), whose extraordinary comprehension of the military as well as the civil issues of the times made him then, and ever, a reliable and constant friend of Washington, consulted the Commander-in-Chief as to these depredations, and acquiesced in his judgment as final.

Washington wrote thus: “The most important operations of the campaign cannot be made to depend upon the piratical expeditions of two or three men-of-war privateers.” This significant rejoinder illustrated the proposition to burn Boston, and was characteristic of Washington’s policy respecting other local raids and endangered cities. It is in harmony with the purpose of this narrative to emphasize this incident. Napoleon in his victorious campaign against Austria refused to occupy Vienna with his army, and counted the acquisition of towns and cities as demoralizing to troops, besides enforcing detachments from his fighting force simply to hold dead property. Washington ignored the safety of Philadelphia, the Colonial capital, repeatedly, claiming that to hold his army compactly together, ready for the field, was the one chief essential to ultimate victory. Even the later invasions of Virginia and Connecticut, and the erratic excursions of Simcoe and other royalist leaders into Westchester County, New York, and the country about Philadelphia, did not bend his deliberate purpose to cast upon local communities a fair share of their own defence. In more than one instance he announced to the people that these local incursions only brought reproach upon the perpetrators, and embittered the Colonists more intensely against the invader.