About the same time that Sir Henry Clinton definitively abandoned his schemes on the Hudson he also withdrew the large command which, since the winter of 1770, had been in occupation of Rhode Island. One of his reasons for this move, as well as for his withdrawal of the garrisons from Verplanck's and Stony Points, was his apprehension that the French fleet of d'Estaing, which had sailed from the West Indies, would now unite with Washington in a siege of New York. But d'Estaing stopped at Savannah to assist General Lincoln in his effort to recover that place, and afterward, the joint operation having failed disastrously, returned to France. Clinton next carried his arms southward and besieged and took Charleston. He was occupied in the South from the beginning of 1780 until June. The winter of 1779-80 was the severest ever known in this part of the country. Not only the whole North River, but much of New York Bay, was frozen solid,1 and if the army under Washington had been in any condition to assume the aggressive New York, with its relatively small garrison, must probably have succumbed. But never was Washington's army in a more deplorable plight than during that terrible winter. It was encamped in two divisions, one 1 General Heath relates in his Memoirs, under date of February 7, 1780, that " A body of the enemy's horse, said to be about 300,

and the Seventh British regiment, came over from Long Island to Westchester on the ice."