The foe gathered on the other side of the river was the British army no longer, but a holding force of 1,500 Hessians settled in for the winter under the command of Colonel Johann Rall, the veteran officer who had led the fierce Hessian assaults at White Plains and Fort Washington.
Concerned about “the apparent designs” of the enemy—the “wilderness of uncertainties”—Washington moved his headquarters ten miles upstream to Buckingham Township, closer to the main body of the army, where Greene, Stirling, and Knox had their headquarters.
In two weeks, on New Year’s Day, all enlistments would expire. And what then? “Our only dependence now is upon the speedy enlistment of a new army,” he wrote to Lund Washington. “If this fails, I think the game is pretty near up.”
On December 20, in the midst of a snowstorm, General Sullivan rode into Buckingham at the head of Lee’s troops, having marched at a pace four times what Lee had set in order to join Washington as soon as possible. But instead of the 4,000 that Washington had been expecting, there were only half that number, and the men were in more wretched condition even than Washington’s own ranks. When Lee had complained of his troops having no shoes, it had been no exaggeration for effect. General Heath would later write of seeing Lee’s troops pass through Peekskill, many “so destitute of shoes that the blood left on the frozen ground, in many places, marked the route they had taken.”
One of those who had made the trek from Peekskill was Lieutenant Joseph Hodgkins. In a letter headed “Buckingham in Pennsylvania, December 20, 1776,” Hodgkins reported to his wife Sarah:
We have been on the march since the 29th of last month and we are now within 10 or 12 miles of General Washington’s army. We expect to be there tonight. But how long we shall stay there I can’t tell. Neither can I tell you much about the enemy, only that they are on one side of the Delaware River and our army on the other.
They had marched about two hundred miles, Hodgkins thought, and the greatest part of the way was dangerous—“the enemy being near,” but also because so much of the country was “full of them cursed creatures called Tories.”
General Gates, too, arrived, but to Washington’s disappointment, he had with him only six hundred men.
Before departing for Baltimore, Congress had named Robert Morris to head the committee to look after affairs in Philadelphia, by now an all-but-abandoned city. Writing to Morris three days before Christmas, Washington said he thought the enemy was waiting for two events only before marching on Philadelphia—“Ice for a passage, and the dissolution of the poor remains of our debilitated army.”
As near as could be determined, Washington now had an army of about 7,500, but that was a paper figure only. Possibly 6,000 were fit for duty. Hundreds were sick and suffering from the cold. Robert Morris and others in and around Philadelphia were doing everything possible to find winter clothes and blankets, while more and more of the local citizenry were signing the British proclamation. Congress had fled. Two former members of Congress, Joseph Galloway and Andrew Allen, had gone over to the enemy. By all reasonable signs, the war was over and the Americans had lost.
Yet for all the troubles that beset him, all the high expectations and illusions that he had seen shattered since the triumph at Boston, Washington had more strength to draw upon than met the eye—in his own inner resources and in the abilities of those still with him and resolved to carry on.
In Greene, Stirling, and Sullivan he had field commanders as good as or better than any. Though Greene, his best, and the very able Joseph Reed had let him down, both had learned from the experience, just as Washington had, and were more determined than ever to prove themselves worthy in his eyes. Greene, as he would confide to his wife, was extremely happy to have again “the full confidence of his Excellency,” confidence that seemed to increase “the more difficult and distressing our affairs grow.”
Henry Knox, a novice artilleryman no longer, and the steadfast John Glover, could be counted on no matter how tough the going. (In recognition of the part played thus far by the twenty-six-year-old Knox, Washington had already recommended him for promotion to the rank of brigadier general.) Junior officers and soldiers in the ranks, men like Joseph Hodgkins, were battered, weary, ragged as beggars, but not beaten.
Washington himself was by no means beaten. If William Howe and others of like mind thought the war was over and the British had won, Washington did not. Washington refused to see it that way.
With Lee gone and Congress entrusting him with more power, Washington was fully the commander now and it suited him. Out of adversity he seemed to draw greater energy and determination. “His Excellency George Washington,” wrote Greene later, “never appeared to so much advantage as in the hour of distress.”
His health was excellent. The loyalty of those he counted on was stronger than ever.
On December 24, the day before Christmas, Washington’s judge advocate, Colonel William Tudor, who had been with him from the beginning, wrote again, as he often had during the campaign, to tell his fiancée in Boston of his continuing love for her, and to explain why his hopes of returning soon to Boston had vanished. “I cannot desert a man (and it would certainly be desertion in a court of honor) who has deserted everything to defend his country, and whose chief misfortune, among ten thousand others, is that a large part of it wants spirit to defend itself.”
***
BRISTOL, PENNSYLVANIA, was a small town on the western side of the Delaware, downstream from Trenton, across the river from Burlington, New Jersey. It was from Bristol, where he was helping to organize Pennsylvania militia, that Joseph Reed had written a remarkable letter to Washington dated December 22.
It was time something was done, something aggressive and surprising, Reed wrote. Even failure would be preferable to doing nothing.
Will it not be possible, my dear General, for our troops or such part of them as can act with advantage to make a diversion or something more at or about Trenton? The greater the alarm, the more likely success will attend the attacks….
I will not disguise my own sentiments that our cause is desperate and hopeless if we do not take the opp[ortunit]y of the collection of troops at present to strike some stroke. Our affairs are hastening fast to ruin if we do not retrieve them by some happy event. Delay with us is now equal to total defeat.
Apparently the letter was unsolicited. What was remarkable was the degree to which it corresponded with Washington’s own mind and plans.
In the bleak days after the Battle of Brooklyn, Washington had told Congress, “We should on all occasions avoid a general action or put anything to the risk unless compelled by a necessity.” But he had also written of the possibility of some “brilliant stroke” on his part that might save the cause.
On December 14, he had written to Governor Trumbull that a “lucky blow” against the enemy would “most certainly rouse the spirits of the people, which are quite sunk by our misfortunes.”
Now, compelled by necessity, his “brilliant stroke” worked out in his mind, he was ready to put almost everything at risk.
With Greene and a few others at the Buckingham headquarters, he had been going over the plan for days, insisting on the strictest secrecy.
But on December 21, Robert Morris had written to say he had heard an attack across the Delaware was being prepared and that he hoped this was true.
Responding now to Reed, Washington confirmed that an attack on Trenton was to begin Christmas night. “For Heaven’s sake keep this to yourself, as discovery of it may prove fatal to us…but necessity, dire necessity, will, nay must, justify an attempt.”
III
ON CHRISTMAS EVE, Washington called a meeting at Greene’s headquarters to go over the final details.
The army was to attack across the Delaware at three places. A force of 1,000 Pennsylvania militia and some 500 veteran Rhode Island troops, led by General John Cadwalader and Joseph Reed, were to cross downriver at Bristol and advance toward Burlington.
; A second smaller force of 700 Pennsylvania militia under General James Ewing was to attack directly across the river at Trenton and hold the wooden bridge over Assunpink Creek at the foot of Queen Street, which the enemy might use as an escape route.
The third and much the largest force of 2,400 of the Continental Army led by Washington, Greene, Sullivan, and Stirling would cross the Delaware, nine miles upstream from Trenton, at McKonkey’s Ferry.
Once over the river, Washington’s army would head south, then halfway to Trenton divide into two columns, one led by Sullivan, taking the River Road, the other, commanded by Greene, taking the Pennington Road farther inland. Four of Knox’s cannon were to advance at the head of each column. Washington would ride with Greene.
According to the latest intelligence, the enemy’s force at Trenton numbered between 2,000 and 3,000 men.
The first step, the crossing, was set for midnight, December 25, Christmas night. By marching through the night, the two columns were to arrive at Trenton no later than five in the morning. The attack was set for six, an hour before daylight. Officers were to have a piece of white paper in their hats to distinguish them. Absolute secrecy was demanded. A “profound silence” was to be observed, the orders read, “and no man to quit his ranks on pain of death.”
Christmas Day the weather turned ominous. A northeast storm was gathering. The river was up, and filled with broken sheets of ice.
In the course of the day, Joseph Reed arrived from Bristol, accompanied by Congressman and physician Benjamin Rush, who, since the adjournment of Congress, had reported to Reed and Cadwalader to volunteer his services. Years later, Rush would recall a private meeting with Washington at Buckingham, during which Washington seemed “much depressed.” In “affecting terms,” he described the state of the army. As they talked, Washington kept writing something with his pen on small pieces of paper. When one of them fell to the floor by Rush’s foot, he saw what was written: “Victory or Death.” It was to be the password for the night.
When Rush, or possibly Reed, warned the general not to expect very much from the militiamen under Cadwalader, Washington scratched out a note that he asked Rush to take to Cadwalader as soon as possible:
I am determined, as the night is favorable, to cross the river and make an attack on Trenton in the morning. If you can do nothing real, at least create as great a diversion as possible.
The crossing of Washington’s force was to be made in big flat-bottomed, high-sided Durham boats, as they were known, normally used to transport pig iron on the Delaware from the Durham Iron Works near Philadelphia. Painted black and pointed at both ends, they were forty to sixty feet long, with a beam of eight feet. The biggest of them could carry as many as forty men standing up, and fully loaded they drew only about two feet, and so could be brought close to shore. The oars—or sweeps—used to propel the boats were eighteen feet long.
Henry Knox was to organize and direct the crossing, and the biggest, most difficult part of the task, as he knew, would be transporting eighteen field cannon and fifty horses or more, including those of the officers. Again, as at Brooklyn, John Glover and his men were in charge of the boats.
Before leaving his headquarters to lead the march, Washington, in what seems to have been a state of perfect calm, wrote to Robert Morris, “I agree with you that it is vain to ruminate upon, or even reflect upon the authors of our present misfortunes. We should rather exert ourselves, and look forward with hopes, that some lucky chance may yet turn up in our favor.”
Drums rolled in the camps, and starting about two in the afternoon the army began moving out for the river, each man carrying sixty rounds of ammunition and food enough for three days.
***
IT WAS NEARLY DARK and raining when the first troops reached McKonkey’s Ferry where the boats waited. Henry Knox’s unmistakable bass voice could be heard bellowing orders above the rising wind and rain. According to one account, had it not been for the powerful lungs and “extraordinary exertions” of Knox, the crossing that night would have failed.
Knox himself later praised the heroic efforts of Glover and his men, describing how ice in the river made their labor “almost incredible,” and the “almost infinite difficulty” they had getting the horses and cannon on board the boats.
The Delaware was not so broad at McKonkey’s Ferry as at Trenton or below Trenton, where it became a tidal estuary. Under normal conditions the width of the river at McKonkey’s Ferry was about eight hundred feet, but with the water as high as it was that night, the distance was greater by fifty feet or more, and the current strong, the ice formidable, as all accounts attest.
Glover’s men used oars and poles to get the big boats across. The troops went standing, packed on board as close as possible.
Washington crossed early and watched the slow process from the New Jersey side. About eleven o’clock, the storm struck, a full-blown northeaster.
Among the most vivid firsthand accounts of the night was that of John Greenwood, the young fifer from Boston, who after the march to New York in April had been sent off to serve in Canada and had only just rejoined Washington’s army.
Fifes not being a priority under the circumstances, sixteen-year-old Greenwood carried a musket like every other man and crossed in one of the first boats.
Over the river we then went in a flat-bottomed scow [he wrote]…and we had to wait for the rest and so began to pull down fences and make fires to warm ourselves, for the storm was increasing rapidly. After a while it rained, hailed, snowed, and froze, and at the same time blew a perfect hurricane, so much so that I perfectly recollect, after putting the rails on to burn, the wind and fire would cut them in two in a moment, and when I turned my face to the fire, my back would be freezing. However…by turning myself round and round I kept myself from perishing.
As during the escape from Brooklyn, Washington’s other daring river-crossing by night, a northeaster was again, decisively, a blessing and a curse—a blessing in that it covered the noise of the crossing, a curse in that, with the ice on the river, it was badly slowing progress when time was of the essence. The plan was to have the whole army over the river no later than midnight, in order to reach Trenton before dawn.
According to Washington, it was three o’clock, three hours behind schedule, before the last of the troops, horses, and cannon were across.
At that point the attack might have been called off, the men sent back over the river, since the entire plan rested on the element of surprise and the chances for surprise now seemed gone. It was a decision that could not be delayed and involved great risk either way.
Washington decided without hesitation. As he would explain succinctly to John Hancock, “I well knew we could not reach it [Trenton] before day was fairly broke, but as I was certain there was no making a retreat without being discovered, and harassed on repassing the river, I determined to push on at all events.”
Downstream, as he had no way of knowing, the other part of his plan was failing badly. General Ewing had called off his attack on Trenton because of ice in the river. At Bristol, where ice was piled higher even than at Trenton, Cadwalader and Reed had succeeded in getting some of their troops over to the other side, but then, unable to move their cannon across, they, too, had called off the attack.
“It was as severe a night as I ever saw,” wrote an officer with Cadwalader,
and after two battalions were landed, the storm increased so much that it was impossible to get the artillery over, for we had to walk one hundred yards on the ice to get on shore. General Cadwalader, therefore, ordered the whole to retreat again, and we had to stand at least six hours under arms—first to cover the landing, and till all the rest had retreated again—and by this time the storm of wind, rain, hail, and snow with the ice was so bad that some of the infantry could not get back till next day.
Unable to recross the ice with their horses, Reed and another officer chose to stay on the New Jersey side, concealed in the house of a friend.
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Thus, of the three planned attacks on the enemy, only one was moving forward and it perilously behind schedule.
The march south from McKonkey’s Ferry was for many the most harrowing part of the night. The storm grew worse, with cold driving rain, sleet, snow, and violent hail. The troops, as Henry Knox wrote, pushed on “with the most profound silence.”
For the first half mile or more the dark road from the ferry was a steep uphill climb. After another two miles the road dropped into a ravine and crossed Jacobs Creek.
John Greenwood remembered moving no faster than a child could walk, stopping frequently, and suffering terribly from the cold.
I recollect very well that at one time, when we halted on the road, I sat down on the stump of a tree and was so be-numbed with cold that I wanted to go to sleep. Had I been passed unnoticed, I should have frozen to death without knowing it.
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