George Washington's Surprise Attack
Page 6
Initially upon pushing off from the Pennsylvania shore and to counter the combined effect of the strong current and contrary winds sweeping south, Glover’s mariners relied more upon eighteen-foot long oars in their laborious efforts to row their boats across the stormy Delaware. After shoving away from the icy Pennsylvania shore, two Massachusetts mariners of the five-man crews walked to and fro along the slick running boards, or footboards (also called walking rails), along the gunwales on each side of the heavily loaded vessel, pushing the lengthy poles against the river bottom. Despite the rough waters and the risk of losing their balance and falling headfirst into churning, icy waters, the sweating Marbleheaders, with their long hair queued in the tradition of seamen, muscled the Durham boat against the swirling currents by pushing and applying full body pressure against the long eighteen-foot poles. With quiet business-like efficiency, the Durham boats were first poled (an entirely new kind of labor for the versatile Marblehead Mariners) and then rowed upon reaching deeper water beyond the Pennsylvania shore.
Then, making another hurried final adjustment after the closely synchronized rowing with oars, the task of poling was once again resumed by Glover’s men upon reaching more shallow waters near the Jersey shore. With such a light weight and shallow draft of less than two feet even when fully loaded, the Durham boats now made ideal landing craft for Washington’s infantrymen. Now the Durham boats were able to land about forty American fighting men on a distant shore. With their usual ingenuity and skill, the dynamic leadership team of Colonels Henry Knox and Glover carefully supervised the initial loading of troops, while Washington, mounted on his splendid chestnut sorrel at the windswept riverbank, initially surveyed the hectic activity to make sure that the crossing progressed smoothly. Then, when General Adam Stephen’s Virginians began to cross the Delaware, the commander-in-chief gingerly stepped into a Durham boat in a classic demonstration of leading by example to instill confidence for a safe crossing, especially to anxious soldiers who could not swim if a boat suddenly capsized. Washington left his “noble horse,” in the words of Private John Howland, of Providence, Rhode Island, on the river’s west bank with a trusty aide. The Virginian’s favorite charger was later brought across the river, most likely in a ferry boat that was larger than a Durham boat.
One of Colonel Glover’s most trusted Massachusetts officers received the coveted assignment and “honor” of transporting Washington with special care across the Delaware. Captain William Blackler, Jr. was tasked with the all-important mission of escorting Washington across the Delaware because he and the Marbleheaders of his veteran company “were the most knowledgeable about how to cross” the river. A successful merchant and shipper, Blackler owned Marblehead’s second wide-ranging privateer, armed with a dozen cannon, which had first set sail in September 1776 to raid British shipping. Blackler had served with Glover on Marblehead’s patriot committee of inspection to enforce the non-importation of British goods in 1775. Age thirty-six and baptized at a Marblehead Church on May 18, 1740 on the day of his birth, Captain Blackler possessed considerable military experience and seafaring expertise. Therefore, he could be depended on to make sure that Washington was transported safely across the swollen Delaware in the most adverse conditions. Blackler had married Rebekah Chipman, and his first son, John Chipman Blackler, was born in January 1771. After having raised a Marblehead militia company as early as 1773, he spent his fortune in equipping his command of zealous volunteers. Then, based upon merit and ability, Blackler was appointed captain in late June 1775. Blackler now must have wondered if he would survive this winter campaign and live long enough to see his wedding anniversary, December 27, or his young son again back in his beloved Marblehead nestled on the picturesque harbor. Glover’s most reliable captain survived the Trenton challenge, but Blackler was destined to be crippled from serious wounds suffered at Saratoga in the fall of 1777.
With a piece of white paper pinned to his hat, like other Continental officers as Washington had specified to designate rank that could be seen in the darkness, Blackler commanded the sturdy Durham boat that carried Washington into the very vortex of the Delaware’s swirling, dark waters. One experienced seaman who manned one of the perfectly synchronized oars of the Durham boat during Washington’s delicate passage was Private John Johns Russell. He was born in his beloved port of Marblehead on November 2, 1755. Joseph Widger, who was fated to die in an August 1812 naval battle during the War of 1812, was another hardy Marbleheader who manned the fast-moving oars of Blackler’s Durham boat. All the while, humble Massachusetts enlisted men and their esteemed commander-in-chief alike shivered from the same icy blasts of arctic gales sweeping down the river’s wide, open expanse from the northeast to additionally churn up the already rough waters.
Each Durham boat was carefully navigated with a veteran seaman’s refined skill against the currents, the ice floes, and the blustery winds, which were funneled between the tree-lined river banks to cut like a knife. All the while, Glover’s soldiers, cursing, struggling, and sweating, worked long and hard (which at least kept them warmer than their half-frozen passengers, including Washington) in passing boatload after boatload of Continentals across the river in the most nightmarish conditions. During the perilous, nerve-racking journey through the wet darkness and wintry gales, cold-numbed soldiers, from teenagers to graybeards, hunkered low to escape the icy winds that pierced their thin layers of clothing better suited for summer campaigning.
Thanks to the tireless, energetic efforts of the imposing Knox, a giant in girth and height, and the diminutive “maritime wizard” Glover, the seemingly impossible task of transporting the hundreds of Washington’s troops across the Delaware initially flowed smoothly once underway. However, the progress of Washington’s main strike force was not matched by the other two forces attempting to cross the Delaware at two points below McConkey’s Ferry. Colonel John Cadwalader, who had turned down a Continental commission offered by Washington to remain in command of his beloved Philadelphians and his large middle-class militia (a Philadelphia Associator brigade) column of around 1,200 men and a six hundred-man brigade of New England Continentals, under Rhode Islander Colonel Daniel Hitchcock, age thirty-six, ran into trouble. Here, a dozen miles south of McConkey’s Ferry at Neshaminy Ferry near Bristol, Pennsylvania, Cadwalader’s assigned crossing point (the southernmost) was located below the middle crossing point of General James Ewing and his Pennsylvania militia. All three of Washington’s designated crossing points were located almost at an equal distance from each other. Washington’s and Cadwalader’s crossing points far outflanked Trenton to the north and south, respectively, while Ewing had been positioned almost directly across from Trenton. Ewing and his task force, consisting of York, Cumberland, Lancaster, and Bucks County boys, had been ordered to cross at the South Trenton Ferry, just to Trenton’s south, to strike Trenton from the south while Washington attacked from the north. Despite the best efforts of the specialized rowing soldiers of Major Jehu Eyre’s Second Company of the City and Liberties of Philadelphia, Philadelphia Artillery battalion (a militia rather than a Continental unit), the imposing challenge of crossing the Delaware during a winter storm proved too daunting for Cadwalader’s attempt to land at Burlington, New Jersey.
Ironically, just before he had entered Captain Blackler’s Durham boat to embark upon his passage of the Delaware, Washington had written a brief message around 6:00 p.m. to General Cadwalader. He expressed the strongest hope that Cadwalader’s Philadelphians downriver and opposite Burlington would “create as great a diversion [to the south] as possible,” to enhance his own bid to catch Colonel Rall and his garrison by surprise by attack from the north.39
Assigned to the column of Cadwalader’s Philadelphians, including militiamen who wore distinctive “PB” (Philadelphia Battalion) brass buttons with their specific numerical designation displayed, situated around twenty miles below McConkey’s Ferry and as he penned in his diary about the situation upon crossing at Dunk’s Ferry,
south of Neshaminy Ferry, and after having been initially thwarted at Neshaminy Ferry, Captain Thomas Rodney recorded the extent of the challenge, while never forgetting the night. Now serving with a Dover, Delaware, volunteer company, Rodney described how “the wind blew very hard and there was much rain and sleet, and there was so much floating ice in the River that we had the greatest difficulty” in crossing the angry river in the haunting December blackness.40 However, in truth and despite the formidable obstacles, but a “single file of Colonel Glover’s regiment of military mariners would have given them [Cadwalader’s Philadelphia column] the proper time for crossing, and shown the way in which it could most easily be accomplished.”41
Indicating why the two ferries—McConkey’s Ferry on the Pennsylvania side and Garret Johnson’s Ferry, proper, on the New Jersey shore were linked together as a common watery passageway and what was essentially the McConkey-Johnson Ferry—had been established on the west bank at this point, the river narrowed during its gradual descent south toward Trenton to around eight hundred feet in width. But this more restrictive natural configuration only made the river’s currents, already higher than usual thanks to swollen waters from rain and melting ice, run even swifter and with more turbulence at this relatively narrower point.
After the initial crossing of the Delaware began at around 6:00 p.m., an ever-increasing level of difficulties was encountered by the hard-working Marbleheaders, coinciding with more gusty winds, rougher and yet-rising waters, and a heavier sheet of snow and snow. With the almost full winter moon (waning gibbous just a few days after a full moon) on the rise—beginning at 5:31 p.m.—in a high winter arc, and now hidden by clouds, young Major Wilkinson, the enterprising southern Marylander of the planter class, and whose grandfather had migrated from England in 1729, described how “the force of the current, the sharpness of the frost, the darkness of the night, the ice [floes] and a high wind rendered the passage of the river extremely difficult.”42
As the nasty northeaster howled with greater intensity and chilled Washington’s men to the bone, the ever-vigorous Colonel Knox, the son of Scotch-Irish immigrants from northern Ireland, continued to orchestrate this precarious movement of nervous troops to the east bank of the raging river with unprecedented skill. Under the cold, wet deluge, Stirling’s Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Virginia brigade, leading the veteran infantry of Greene’s Second Division, prepared to embark and cross the most formidable natural obstacle that these men had ever faced, following Stephen’s Virginia vanguard brigade. Spirits among the less determined leaders and enlisted men plummeted, falling in proportion to the increasing wrath unleashed by the angry winter storm. To some religious and superstitious-minded soldiers, mirroring the cultural belief system of the ancient Romans, the intensifying storm seemed like an ill omen, a harbinger of certain disaster. In consequence, a tense silence pervaded in the ranks, along with the growing conviction that the winter storm had already wrecked Washington’s slim chances for success. Struggling against a seemingly vengeful Mother Nature, Knox was nagged by doubts about getting everyone safely across in time with so much floating ice from upriver cascading down to repeatedly slam into the vulnerable sides of the Durham boats, now filled with increasingly anxious infantrymen, all crammed together like sardines.
From a distance to the sight of Glover’s mariners, especially in the omnipresent darkness, the descending ice floes were imperceptible. And then when they were suddenly close to the Durham boat, these chunks of ice, with only a fraction bobbing above the surface, appeared deceptively insignificant until they suddenly slammed violently into wooden hulls with a thud and a sharp jolt. These violent jolts to the hull’s left, or northern, side forced some Durham boats slightly off course, pushing them a short distance downstream with the strong, onrushing current until Glover’s seamen mastered the situation and regained control. Knowing their mission’s supreme importance that even surpassed the stealthy withdrawal from Long Island on that hot August night, the Marblehead boys muscled their Durham boats back on course and in line with Johnson’s Ferry on the distant east bank that was yet unseen in the blackness. However, through the deluge, a distant flaming torch, lamp, or light from the fireplaces of an illuminated Johnson Ferry House was eventually barely seen when Glover’s mariners neared the east bank, serving as a dim beacon to guide the Marbleheaders to their final objective.
Although only in his mid-twenties and hardly looking the part, America’s most dynamic artillery commander Colonel Knox considered the Delaware crossing a task that “seemed impossible,” as he soon candidly admitted to wife Lucy Flucker Knox, the pampered daughter of a former Massachusetts former. However, Knox concealed his growing fears from his nerve-racked troops, especially the scrawny, ill-nourished teenagers from America’s hardscrabble small farms on the western frontier and in the South. These soaked, cold-numbed youngsters looked up to not only Washington, but also Knox like a father for guidance during this hellish night on the Delaware. If anyone could accomplish the impossible in getting Washington’s main task force across the Delaware, Knox was that energetic, resourceful officer, as Washington fully appreciated.
After all, crossing the around eight hundred foot-wide Delaware was even more daunting than Knox’s amazing feat of transporting around sixty cannon, including large siege pieces and mortars—weighing 119,000 pounds—on oxen-drawn sleds from Fort Ticonderoga, New York, and more than three hundred miles in six weeks across New England’s frozen countryside, including the heavily timbered mountains of western Massachusetts, the Berkshires, to Washington’s Army during the 1775-1776 siege of Boston. Most importantly, Knox’s tireless efforts forced Howe’s evacuation of Boston in March 1776 to bestow Washington with his first success as the army’s commander. But now Knox’s seemingly impossible mission was even more formidable, requiring the safe transportation of nearly four hundred tons of ordinance across the Delaware as quickly as possible and without incident.43
Thankfully, Glover’s exhausted mariners, as ragged as Washington’s other men, received some timely assistance when most needed, thanks to Washington’s and Knox’s timely efforts to speed up their most hazardous operation to date. To add much-needed extra muscle to the herculean effort in what was already becoming a losing race with time that continued to slip away, a contingent of eighty-five cannoneers from Captain Joseph Moulder’s Associator company of Knox’s Regiment of Continental Artillery was assigned to assist Glover’s mariners in their monumental undertaking.
Under the command of capable, twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant Anthony Cuthbert, who was one of Philadelphia’s shipbuilders and had once enjoyed a peaceful existence in a comfortable brick house on fashionable Penn Street with wife Sarah, these hardy Pennsylvania artillerymen were a perfect fit for this crucial assignment. Cuthbert’s young gunners consisted of durable sailors, longshoremen, riggers, seamen, ship’s carpenters, shipwrights, and other comparable experienced hands from the dingy wharves and docks situated for two miles along the Delaware, especially Penn’s Landing, in east Philadelphia. Moulder’s independent company, which had been formed as an Associator artillery unit of the City and Liberties of Philadelphia, was heavily Irish and Scotch-Irish. However, this fine artillery company also included Germans, Dutch, and other ethnic groups who had sided with America’s cause in which men were considered equal, regardless of place of birth or origin.
And more timely assistance for Glover’s overworked seamen was forthcoming from a small contingent of civilian volunteers, veteran Pennsylvania and New Jersey boatmen and ferrymen, who had suddenly appeared at exactly the right time and place. Having served under Glover in the past, John Blunt, an experienced ship captain who had long sailed the Delaware’s tricky waters, provided his navigational expertise in helping to get the bobbing fleet of Durham boats back and forth across the churning river. Most important, these experienced freshwater boatmen understood intimately the Delaware’s treacherous currents and its often-unfathomable inherent characteristics, especially duri
ng winter and high water conditions, than Glover’s Atlantic seafarers.44
In orchestrating the nightmarish crossing and attempting to get everyone across without the loss of a single man, meanwhile, Knox remained a constant swirl of nonstop activity. To make sure that all was proceeding as planned and that his men followed his orders to the letter, the erudite Bostonite, whose massive size made his voice sound like a bellowing bull in the New England woods, shouted out precise instructions, sharp criticisms, and inspiring encouragement in “a deep bass heard above the crash of the ice which filled the river.” Knox’s directives echoed out of the inky darkness and across the Delaware like the blaring war trumpet of the Hebrew “Mighty Warrior” Gideon (the “Destroyer”) of the Old Testament.45
All the while, additional Continental troops from Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York, Virginia, Maryland, and New England piled quietly into the wet, wooden bottoms of the Durham boats. With an icy rain and light snow tumbling down, these grim-faced soldiers wearily descended into the slippery, black hulls as if entering a cold, dark tomb from which they feared that they would never emerge. Wrapped in old, lice-covered blankets to cover threadbare summer uniforms, now full of holes where not patched, many soldiers were understandably consumed by their own gloomy thoughts and anxieties that surrounded them like the sting of the biting cold, fearing the worst before their Durham boats were even launched in the blackness on this most haunting of nights. For good reason, these Continentals grew more apprehensive, if not deeply troubled, not only about the ever-increasing risks inherent with this perilous river crossing, but also about what the sunrise of December 26 might bring for them on the mysterious New Jersey side of the river, when they faced an elite brigade of crack German soldiers known for their ruthlessness in battle. While the merciless northeast wind cut their thin clothing and carried the reverberating sound of barking officer’s orders across river like unearthly directives from angry Roman gods of war, Mars, Glover, and Knox shouted themselves hoarse in issuing orders to ensure that everything flowed like clockwork as much as possible under the most appalling conditions.