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Washington, who had been planning an attack on New York, now continued his apparent preparations, to deceive Clinton, but crossed the Hudson on the 23d of August, to co-operate with the French fleet and three thousand French troops in Virginia, to support La Fayette. He rapidly moved his available force by swift marches across New Jersey to Elkton, Maryland, at the head of Chesapeake Bay.
This was found impassable. To ferry would have consumed to much time, and to build a bridge still more; so there was no alternative but to turn up Elk River by way of Gilbertsboro, Elkton, etc., to the stone bridge at Fayetteville, where we crossed the Elk, and proceeded to Winchester and Deckerd.
Also, with memories lively in me of the home circle in Elkton, I prayed to God. In the morning we took stock. To commence with, all but two or three had suffered frost-bite. Aaron Northrup, unable to move because of his broken hip, was very bad. It was the surgeon's opinion that both of Northrup's feet were hopelessly frozen.
Great was the joy; in the streets the soldiers and the people shouted and sang and humorists, mounted on chairs, delivered in advance mock funeral orations on Cornwallis. It was planned that the army should march the fifty miles to Elkton, at the head of Chesapeake Bay, and there take boat to Yorktown, two hundred miles to the south at the other end of the Bay. But there were not ships enough.
We moved at a sufficient distance from the Rappahannock to screen our columns from the enemy's posts of observation. We marched to the vicinity of Elkton, where we bivouacked for the night. The next morning we resumed our march, and soon struck the railroad at Bealeton, where we met and drove a detachment of Rebel cavalry.
While I was breakfasting at the garage the next morning Antoine appeared and, waiting until Flynn was out of hearing, handed me a slip of paper. "That's a New York automobile number," he said. "It was on the tag of that machine the party came in last night. I heard him saying, sir, as how he had motored up from the Elkton Inn at Stamford.
Yet did I labour sore in order to fulfil God's will that I should live. Carefully, with my hands, I cleaned out the salt water from every slight hole, in the hope that succeeding showers of rain might fill them with water that I could drink. My sad lot and the memories of the loved ones at Elkton threw me into a melancholy, so that I often lost my recollection for hours at a time.
Meshach fiercely responded that, unless the railway took the line of the Maryland counties, Delaware state would build it and carry it off to Newcastle instead of to Elkton, where Meshach meant to unite with a projected Baltimore system.
Instead of this, he put out to sea again and sailed four hundred miles, to the mouth of Chesapeake bay and up that bay to Elkton, where he landed his men on the 25th of August. Why he took such a roundabout course cannot be understood, unless he may have attached importance to Lee's advice that the presence of a British squadron in Chesapeake bay would help to arouse the Tories in Maryland.
Here it is: This is to acquaint the person into whose hands this Oar may fall, that Daniel Foss, a native of Elkton, in Maryland, one of the United States of America, and who sailed from the port of Philadelphia, in 1809, on board the brig Negociator, bound to the Friendly Islands, was cast upon this desolate island the February following, where he erected a hut and lived a number of years, subsisting on seals he being the last who survived of the crew of said brig, which ran foul of an island of ice, and foundered on the 25th Nov. 1809.
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