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Rh fellow officer required his assistance, which he still was unable to believe would be in the least necessary.

The ease with which Fort Ticonderoga had been taken, and the apparently futile efforts of the "rebels" to check the invasion, at last convinced Lord Howe that Burgoyne was abundantly able to look after his own interests, and that he himself would be free to adopt such measures for crushing the little rebel army near him as he might deem best. This very confidence, however, in all probability proved the undoing of Howe and Burgoyne. Had Howe gone up the Hudson and placed the ill-trained Continentals between his own forces and those of Burgoyne, there can be little doubt that they would have crushed the "rebels" in the north, and rent the colonies asunder as Burgoyne had planned to do. Confident, however, that Burgoyne required no aid from him, Lord Howe put to sea with a fleet of two hundred and twenty-eight ships, in which he had embarked an army of eighteen thousand men, and sailed to the south. At New York he left Sir Henry Clinton with seven thousand men to defend that place, and then he wrote a letter to John Burgoyne, in which he stated that he was about to sail for