57 
inflicting a loss of 205 in killed and wounded (eleven times 
as many per gun employed against them as the English 
lost at Trafalgar) ; thus decisively demonstrating the value 
of fortifications, and the superiority of land batteries to 
ships. But with an immense sea-coast line and sparse 
population, it was impossible to hold our seaports against 
the great naval power of the mother country, and the war 
of the Revolution was mainly a contest of land forces. 
After the attainment of our independence, the importance 
of fortifying our harbors impressed itself on the mind of 
General Washington, and the political agitations which grew 
out of the French revolution, and which threatened to 
involye the new-born Power of the West, prompted early 
action in this direction. In that day war, though a science, 
had not grown into one which makes tributary to it all 
other sciences, as it has since done. Fortification, indeed, 
had reached a high degree of perfection, but the elaborate 
treatises on that subject scarcely touched the subject of 
harbor defence, so little art was apparently supposed to 
be involved in throwing up batteries to defend the entrances 
of ports. The art of a Vauban and Cormontaigne was little 
concerned in the war from which we had just emerged, 
and the circumstances were too dissimilar, the theatre too 
large and too thinly populated, the armies engaged too 
small, to afford to the precepts of a Lloyd or a Temple- 
hoff much apparent applicability. While the war devel- 
oped generals of unquestionable ability in the spheres in 
which they acted, it seemed to be conceded, that for military 
Science, and especially for the art of fortification, we must 
look to Europe. Hence we find so many of the early 
harbor defences of our principal seaport towns to have been 
built under the direction of foreign officers who had found 
employment among us, and who did not always possess the 
knowledge of the art to which they laid claim. 
