With each passing day, New York felt less like a fortress and more like a trap to many American soldiers. They were “cooped up, or are in danger of being so, on this tongue of land where we ought never have been,” Colonel Joseph Reed, the adjutant general, told his wife, Esther, in early September. “We cannot stay, and yet we do not know how to go.… The motions of the enemy are very dark and mysterious.” A third of the army’s twenty-four thousand men were still sick. One camp emitted “a complication of stinks,” a visitor wrote. “The army here is numerous but ragged, dirty, sickly, and
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