The Crossing

by Howard Fast

  A number of companies, geographically connected, as in town or county or colony, were logged together as regiments. Most of the companies were commanded by captains, who were usually assisted by one or two or five lieutenants. The number of lieutenants depended upon the size of the company—from forty to a hundred men at the beginning—and also upon how many young officers could afford saddle horses and tailored uniforms. The regiment—and all of this applies only to the first months of the war—would consist of from two to ten companies. It was commanded by a colonel, a man whose command derived from prior military experience, or from his wealth, or from his position in the community or from his education, for these were a people dedicated to education and deeply impressed by it.

  Two or five or ten regiments—again depending upon size—would be logged together as a brigade, and this would be under the command of a brigadier or brigadier general. These general officers who commanded the brigades of General Washington’s army were as unusual a group of men as this continent ever saw associated in a single effort—doctors, lawyers, merchants, college professors, teachers, professional soldiers who had left the British army to fight with the Americans, planters, builders, saintly men, drunkards, scoundrels, cheats, liars—but in their great majority men of high purpose and integrity. In other words, they were precisely the kind of collection of men such a situation as the American Revolution would produce.

  Over the brigadiers was the commander in chief, who was directly responsible to the Congress of the Colonies.

  [6]

  HE ALSO FEET RESPONSIBLE to his brigadiers. A week after the defeat in Brooklyn, he called them together to talk about whether they should try to defend New York City and Manhattan Island against the British fleet and army or whether they should retreat and take up their position in a better place. As always, his general staff was divided; and as was often the case, the division was between those who had been trained in foreign military establishments and those who were volunteer soldiers out of American civilian life. The professionals looked down upon the Americans, both as soldiers and as colonials.

  General Roche de Fermoy led the trend of professional opinion in the belief that New York City could be held. This was boastful and impractical, but Fermoy still commanded a Pennsylvania rifle regiment that had been untouched by Brooklyn Heights. He insisted that the British soldiers could be picked off if they were to leave their great warships and attempt a landing. There was considerable sourness about riflemen in battle, and such civilian general officers as Nathanael Greene and William Alexander had the deepest respect for the huge ships of the line that had anchored in the Upper Bay and in the Hudson River. Like Washington, they were involved in a venture upon which they had staked life and family, and they were desperately eager not to be caught in a trap.

  The result of the argument among the general officers was that the commander in chief allowed himself to be pressed into a ridiculous compromise, and against all his better judgment. In time, he would trust only himself because there was no alternative. But now he was still the amiable amateur, trying to please everyone. And even though he had told those closest to him that he believed the city could not be held, and even though he knew the danger of risking his cause on an island when the British controlled the water, he allowed himself to be talked into dividing his army. Five thousand men were retained for the defense of New York City and Manhattan Island, and nine thousand were sent to build a fortified position at the little village of Kingsbridge in the Bronx. Two thousand more were stationed in the northern part of Manhattan.

  Sixteen thousand in all. Eight days before, he had commanded over twenty thousand men. The attrition was terrifying, and he and his officers knew that it had only begun.

  Another week, and the British made their second move. They sailed their great warships into Kip’s Bay, and began a thunderous cannonade of the beach, while the British regulars and marines were carried ashore by landing boats. Anticipating the move by watching the progress of the ships, Washington had stationed riflemen on the shore to pick off the British soldiers in the landing boats. But when the cannonading began, the riflemen panicked. It was simply too close to the memories of Brooklyn Heights, and the riflemen threw down their guns and ran away. Washington and Nathanael Greene charged down on the fleeing men, screaming and swearing and threatening them—and eventually they caused some line of battle to be formed. But it was too late. New York City was lost.

  The American army fled on the double, and Washington organized them into a line of defense across the whole of Manhattan Island about seven miles to the north, just beyond the deep valley of Harlem, which was then called the Hollow Way.

  Entrenched on Harlem Heights above the Hollow Way, Washington and his generals took heart. This was the strongest position they had held since the Battle of Bunker Hill, and since they commanded every road north through Manhattan, the British would have to march against them and sweep them out of the way.

  But General Howe was past the stage of marching against hilltops where the Americans crouched in ditches. After a brief testing of the defenses, he embarked his army in the warships and sailed up the Sound to Westchester. Now he was behind the Americans, and their defense of Manhattan Island became meaningless.

  The Americans had built a strong fort on the high ridge of northern Manhattan, facing the Hudson River, and they had named it Fort Washington, in honor of their commander in chief. The Americans now moved there, while Washington himself rode into Westchester to meet the British landing party. At the Battle of White Plains, in October, the Continental troops once again failed to halt the British advance.

  Washington crossed over to New Jersey, hoping they could hold Fort Washington in Manhattan. But again, the British refused to march head on into an American trap, and they brought up to Fort Washington a great concentration of heavy cannon. Then, for hours, they poured artillery fire into the earthworks until they were leveled. When the cannon smoke cleared, the American defenders saw a column of Scottish Highlanders, advancing behind their skirling pipes with bayonets fixed, and on either side of them, the dreaded Hessians. The Hessians were led by Colonel Rahl, a fearless officer whom we will meet again. He was recognized, and his name added to the general terror.

  In a sense, Fort Washington collapsed under its own pervading fear. The Americans holding the outer earthworks expected an attack on the fairly level landward side. But Colonel Rahl had led his Hessians up the steep, brush-covered rocks that dropped down to the Hudson River on the west side of the fort. When they appeared at the earthworks with naked bayonets, the Americans abandoned their positions and fled to the main redoubt for protection. Suddenly, the central redoubt was a mass of panic-stricken soldiers who had neither the wit nor the desire to turn and face the enemy and fight.

  Hundreds of other Americans broke out of the fort, leaped past the earthworks and tumbled head over heels down the rocky slope to the Hudson. Some managed to cross the river and join the American army on the other side, but those were only a handful. Most of those who escaped hid in the thickets on the Manhattan shore, north to the Isham Heights, where a great and magnificent forest of tulip trees surrounded an old Indian village, a shelter as lonely and untouched as one could find. They hid in this forest and subsequently made their way north and homeward, deserting, as so many others were doing.

  But by far the majority of the garrison of Fort Washington were taken captive, over two thousand unwounded men in all. A dozen others were injured. And while tremendous tales were contrived later concerning the gallantry of the men who defended the fort, the bitter truth is that it was given away, with only twelve men killed among the defenders.

  Across the Hudson River, on the Palisades, General Washington and his brigadiers watched as the enemy flag was raised through the clouds of smoke that lay over the fort. What thoughts crossed his mind then, we will never know. But certainly he must have reflected ruefully that the first place ever named in his honor had made a speedy transit
ion. Possibly, he also felt that it might well be the last. And he might have thought to himself that it was high time he stopped taking the advice of others, for he wrote to his brother Augustine:

  “This is a most unfortunate affair, and has given me great mortification; as we have lost not only two thousand men that were there, but a good deal of artillery and some of the best arms we had. And what adds to my mortification is that this post, after the last ships went past it, was held contrary to my wishes and opinion …”

  Such was the chaos of the moment that Washington actually did not have the full figure of the loss. Sir William Howe, the British commander, ordered a count, and the total was 2,818 men and officers. By midnight, the count was finished, and the poor, damned men were marched off under guard to New York City, there to rot and die in the British prison ships.

  [7]

  THERE HE WAS, fox hunter and aristocrat and not too bad with cards and women; but he had nothing to boast about as a soldier or a leader of soldiers. He had ordered his own count on the Fourth of July, that hot, sunny, lovely day when 20,275 of his men paraded on the green in New York City. Now, on the twentieth of November, he took another count not by head, for his army was in three places, part of it at North Castle on the Hudson under the command of General Lee, part of it at Fort Lee, which was on the Palisades, across the Hudson River from Fort Washington and part of it with him at Hackensack a few miles from Fort Lee. So it was a count not by head but by addition, putting together what he hoped was left to him. The putting-together amounted to no more than eleven thousand men—and even that was dwindling away as he totaled his figures. Five months and ten thousand men gone.

  But at least let them be together. This was his main thought, as he wrote to General Lee: “… the public interest requires your coming over to this side of the Hudson with the Continental troops …”, writing respectfully, for General Lee was no dunderhead like himself but a professional military man, and he had not lost an army twice, as had a fox hunter from Virginia. In fact, General Lee was the darling of thousands of Americans, which goes to explain why they named the fort on the Palisades after him.

  But Lee ignored the letter, and then a message came from General Greene, who was in command at Fort Lee. The British warships had sailed up the Hudson, and now they were disembarking an army, thousands of men and guns and wagons of supply on the shore about six miles above Fort Lee. It was too late to stop them, for they already held the shoreline and the heights above it.

  Washington called for his horse, mounted and rode like the very devil for the fort. He rode so hard that Alexander Hamilton, his young aide who was under twenty, was put to it to keep up with him.

  But there was no sprig of hope at Fort Lee. Greene told Washington that scouts found that the British army was marching inland into Jersey, so as to cut off the Americans, pin them onto the Palisades, and make an end of them once and for all.

  “Then what in God’s name are we waiting for?” Washington demanded.

  Greene tried to explain. They had lost guns and supplies in Brooklyn, and more at Kip’s Bay and still more at Fort Washington. Now it would take at least four or five hours to load their supplies and to find horses to pull the guns.

  Within five minutes, the army was leaving Fort Lee. Let all be lost, all but the men. A naked man could be clothed and armed, but where was the gun that would find a man? Washington had come to realize the value of men, and he treasured them like some miser who had lost half his fortune. When the men marched, it was not enough for him, and he drew his sword and whipped them on with the flat of it. “Run! Run!” he shouted.

  “Run! Run!” his aides shouted.

  “Run!” the other officers shouted.

  “Run!” was the scream that went out.

  “Faster!”

  “Faster!” he yelled, bearing down on them with his big white horse, and many was the man who nursed the welts from the flaying sword of the Virginian.

  The cooking kettles were abandoned with soup and meat bubbling smartly. The big iron guns, the tents and blankets and ammunition and stores of food, all were left to the enemy. And thousands of men were running headlong down that steep little dirt road that swept from Fort Lee to the meadows and across the meadows, past all the prissy little Dutch houses to the wooden bridge that spanned the Hackensack River.

  Before all crossed the bridge, the British came into sight, hooting and deriding the dirty Continentals who knew nothing else but to run away.

  There were a few cannon left in the encampment at Hackensack, and Hamilton had dashed out in front of the fleeing army and reached the encampment, where he and Henry Knox loaded a cannon with grapeshot and dragged it to cover the bridge. When the last fleeing American was across, Knox and Hamilton stood over their primed cannon with a flaming match, both of them weeping with vexation.

  But the British remained beyond cannon shot and had a good laugh. The Scottish Highlanders strutted in their natty kilts, and the pipers swaggered back and forth, keeping the pipes skirling until late into the night.

  [8]

  CHARLES CORNWALLIS, who led the British army in New Jersey, was told by Sir William Howe to make a quick end of Washington, his army and the war. Lord Cornwallis had a reputation for ferocity that was perhaps deserved and a reputation for military intelligence that was unmerited. It was not that the British were unable to learn—albeit they learned slowly—but that having once absorbed the lesson, it took them so long to unlearn. Having discovered during the Battle of Concord that one did not march between stone walls that might shelter Continentals, they scouted every stone wall on a Jersey roadside before marching through. Having learned during the Battle of Bunker Hill that it did not pay to advance uphill against a position the Continentals held, they put a thin skirmish line over every hill before they mounted it. They never entered a wood without beating through it first, and they avoided swampy areas where they might have been entrapped.

  Thus Washington and his army were saved for the moment. It was not that Cornwallis was afraid of the Americans; quite to the contrary, he had the utmost contempt for them and saw no reason to lose a single man to this rag-tail, dying army. He was content to march after them, waiting for the moment when he could bring the frightened rabble to bay on a proper battlefield, and then destroy them.

  Washington, on the other hand, desired only to survive. Each day that he awakened with an army still in existence was a particular triumph, and for the moment he asked no more. Desertions were going on at the rate of about one hundred men a day, and he saw no way to halt them, short of turning the guns upon his own men. This he would not do—although some of his general officers advised it—and it is likely that if he had attempted to halt desertions by musket balls, his entire army would have disintegrated.

  Turning and twisting, destroying every bridge he crossed, Washington covered over a hundred miles between Fort Lee and the Delaware River just north of Trenton, and early on Saturday, December 7, 1776, he reined his big white horse down the steep slope to the banks of the river. The road was muddy and treacherous, for it had rained on and off for days, and in good part the wretched weather accounted for the fact that they had come safely through the past seventeen days of retreat. The British could not move faster than their great supply wagons, their big artillery pieces—some of them shipboard thirties mounted on giant carriages—and their heavily loaded caissons. Again and again, the iron-wheeled vehicles were mired in the mud, holding up the entire army. On one day, driving his men to their limit, Cornwallis managed to cover twenty miles, but this exhausted the army so that it hardly moved the following day, waiting hours for all the stragglers to appear; and generally speaking, their progress was no more than ten miles a day. This, together with the need to rebuild bridges before rivers could be crossed, saved Washington. And even if it had crossed Cornwallis’s mind to break loose from his guns and baggage and simply sweep down on Washington with musket and bayonet alone, he knew that such a radical departure fr
om British military technique might well destroy him—for if he failed, no plea in his own behalf would be accepted.

  Tom Paine was with the army during this retreat from Fort Lee. He was a sort of civilian-soldier—for the line between the two was very uncertain then—and though he carried a musket, he was not attached to any brigade, but existed rather in the way of a war correspondent, perhaps the first of the line. His Common Sense was the most widely read book in the colonies, and his name was known everywhere. Washington liked him, and they spent hours together discussing the war and what hope and meaning—if any—might be extracted from it then.

  Afterward, in his first Crisis paper, Paine wrote:

  “With a handful of men, we sustained an orderly retreat for near a hundred miles, brought off our ammunition, all our field pieces, the greatest part of our stores, and had four rivers to cross. None could say that our retreat was precipitate, for we were three weeks in performing it that the country might have time to come in. Twice we marched back to meet the enemy and remained out until dark. The sign of fear was not seen in our camp; and had not some of the cowardly and disaffected inhabitants spread false alarms through the country the Jerseys had never been ravaged.”

  In his enthusiasm, Paine was a little less than forthright. They had not brought their stores from Fort Lee, but had left everything to the enemy. They had retreated for seventeen days, not three weeks, and at times their retreat had been utterly precipitate. But Paine’s purpose was to recruit, not to further disintegration.

  [9]

  IT WAS WASHINGTON HIMSELF who held onto the reality, who remained calm and was thoughtful and gentle from day to day. In his own quiet way, he noticed and remembered things, and used them when they had to be used. Casting about desperately for some way out of their predicament, some path to survival, he remembered the Durham boats and began to build a concept around them. This time, he asked for no one’s counsel, but proceeded on his own.