University of Virginia Library

III.—THE FEAR OF WAR.

It was in the month of September, in the year of our Lord, 1777, when
the Torch of Revolution had been blazing over the land for two long years,
that the fear of war first startled the homes of Brandywine.

For many days the rumor was vague and shadowy; the fear of war
hovered in the air, with the awful indistinctness of the Panic, that precedes
the Pestilence.

At last, the rumor took form and shape and grew into a Fact.

General Howe, with some 17,000 well armed and disciplined soldiers,
had landed on the peninsula of Maryland and Delaware, above the mouth
of the Susquehanna. His object was the conquest and possession of Philadelphia,
distant some 30 or 40 miles.

To attain this object, he would sweep like a tornado over the luxuriant
plains that lay between his troops and the city. He would write his footsteps
on the soil, in the fierce Alphabet of blood—the blasted field, the
burned farm-house, the bodies of dead men, hewn down in defence of their
hearth sides, these all would track his course.

With this announcement, there came another rumor—a rumor of the
approach of Washington; he came from the direction of Wilmington, with
his ill-clad and half-starved Continentals; he came to face the British Invader,
with his 17,000 hirelings.

It became a fact to all, that the peaceful valley of the Brandywine was
soon to be the chess board, on which a magnificent game of blood and
battle would soon be played for a glorious stake.—The city of Philadelphia,
with its stores of provisions, its munitions of war, its Continental
Congress.