The Crossing

by Howard Fast

  It makes sense that Washington would know about the Durham boats, monster freight carriers, some of them as much as sixty feet in length, eight feet in the beam and three and a half feet in the depth of hold. They were shallow-water boats, loading fifteen tons of dead weight and still drawing no more than thirty inches of water. Because he knew about them, something of the world was changed.

  He met and talked with John Glover. There was no way he could reach Glover and very likely there was no way Glover could reach him. When they sat in the commander in chiefs tent during that wretched retreat, with the pouring rain beating at the canvas outside and falling from it in tiny droplets from the inside, they were no closer than before. Long-nosed, tight-lipped, Presbyterian by religion, New Englander by birth, fisherman by trade, merchant by instinct, tightfisted, hard-nosed, John Glover bristled at the very sight of the tall, gentle-spoken Potomac aristocrat. That they should be on the same side in the same army was miracle enough; John Glover of Marblehead, Massachusetts, could find no reason under God for liking the Virginian.

  Perceptive people like John Adams suggested that John Glover had saved the Virginian’s life and honor once too often for any love to exist between them. In a way it was true. After the debacle at Brooklyn, it was John Glover and his Massachusetts fishermen who plucked the remnants of the American army from the Brooklyn shore and bore them back to Manhattan. Up in Westchester, the only forces that opposed Sir William Howe’s landing were the same fishermen, and the same men, Glover leading them, took Washington and his army across the Tappan Zee into Jersey, and then the few survivors of Fort Washington out from under the noses of the British and across the Hudson River. Always, it was John Glover and his sailors and his fishermen—always when the “lousy, Papist” Southerners had dropped the whole mess into hot water.

  So it is not hard to imagine the conversation between the two of them, there in that tent:

  “I intend to cross the Delaware and hold the shore. I intend to run no more.”

  “Oh?” And then John Glover must have asked just how the general proposed to cross a river swollen like the very devil under this constant rain, and where would they find the boats? And even if there were a few rotten little scows, you don’t put an army across a river in rowboats, and did he know how long it would take to put this army across in the few boats they might find?

  “How long?”

  “A week.”

  “The British are ten miles away. We must cross the river in a matter of hours after we reach the bank.”

  John Glover’s temper hung on a thin thread. He would remind the Virginian that everyone else deserted. Even this general had desertions in his own precious lifeguards, but the fishermen stayed. But because they stayed you didn’t expect miracles from them.

  Then it would have taken the same path of all the other meetings with Glover. Washington would have flattered and cozened him, and finally, the Virginian would have spoken about the Durham boats.

  Glover might not have known about the Durham boats or ever seen one of them, because he was a New England man, and the Durham boats were used to freight iron down from Riegelsville, where it was smelted and cast at the Durham furnace. There was a whole fleet of the great Durham boats making the run between Riegelsville and Philadelphia, and Washington could not have spent the time he did in Philadelphia without seeing the big ore boats tied up at the wharves.

  He would have described the boats to Glover, and Glover’s eyes would have lit up at talk of—according to Knox—the only thing he loved or cared for, a ship or a gig or a boat. And he might have said:

  “If these Durham boats are what you say they are, and if you can gather together twenty of them, and if we can put thirty men or a pair of nags or a load of cannon into one of them, then I’ll take your army across the damn river, I will.”

  [10]

  HE HAD STATED ONCE—in his own curious manner—that his honor forbade him to have secrets from the Congress, and on December I, from his camp at New Brunswick, listening to the pouring rain, he wrote to Congress as follows:

  “I have sent forward Colonel Hampton to collect proper boats and craft at the ferry for transporting our troops, and it will be of infinite importance to have every other craft, besides what he takes for the above purpose, secured on the west side of the Delaware, otherwise they may fall into the enemy’s hands and facilitate their views.”

  His language to Congress was always formal, polite, and very often separated by an enormous barrier of manners from the reality of his situation. To “facilitate” the “views” of the enemy meant to permit the enemy to destroy him. His writing reflected nothing of the enormous change that had come about inside of him. He called into his tent two very hard-minded and dependable Virginia gentlemen whom he had known in the old times, Wade Hampton and General William Maxwell. Maxwell was a tough Irishman who had left the poverty and servitude of Ireland behind him to find meaning and purpose in America and his own soul in the Revolution. He was one of Washington’s close circle of personal friends, whom he leaned on and depended on. He asked them whether they knew what the Durham boats were.

  They had seen them.

  He then told him that he wanted those Durham boats.

  “Do we pay for them?”

  With what, he might have asked them. For months now, he and his friends had been paying out of their own pockets—when they had the money—for everything from food to information. Congress had no money. No, they were not to pay for the Durham boats. They were to take them.

  And the iron works?

  To hell with the iron works! he might have said, but even more richly, for there was no one who served under him who did not attest to his fine command of language. They were to take the boats. Oh, they could give paper for them, receipts, or kill anyone who tried to stop them or do whatever they damn well had to do, but they were to go with mounted men, and in three days he wanted those boats at McKonkey’s Ferry landing on the Jersey shore of the Delaware River.

  In three days? Didn’t he understand that it was impossible in three days or six or ten?

  He understood nothing of the kind; and furthermore, he told them, they were to destroy every other boat on the river, up the river thirty miles, down the river thirty miles—every boat on the Jersey shore was to be smashed to smithereens, beyond repair. Burn them, warm yourselves on the damn boats. Washington wanted only the Durham boats on the river.

  Suppose the people were to take their boats over to Pennsylvania?

  If they could trust them.

  So something had happened to the man who led them, and he was different.

  He told them to take a hundred men on horseback.

  Do, we have a hundred horses?

  They would damn well find a hundred mounted men, or he’d know the reason why. They were to take the men on horses and keep on moving, and the commander in chief could not care less whether they slept and whether they ate, but they were to keep on moving and get the boats. That was all he cared about at this moment—the Durham boats.

  Without the Durham boats it was all over.

  [11]

  MEN WHO PERFORM SMALL MIRACLES are frequently too occupied to note the circumstances properly. Hampton and Maxwell got the Durham boats, at least twenty of them and possibly as many as thirty; we are not sure of the precise number. They didn’t do it in three days, but by the fifth of December, the first boats were steered into the ferry landing, where Colonel Glover and his men were putting together a crude embarkation dock. An hour after daylight on the seventh of December, the vanguard ranks of the beaten, shivering Continental army came into sight, and they were hustled into the big Durham boats by the New England fisherman. Whatever John Glover put his hand to, he did well, and this crossing was no exception.

  The first boat pushed off, thirty men as passengers and a dozen fishermen at the poles and sweeps; and the next boat began to load. It was Saturday, but Reverend McWhorter, a Presbyterian minister from Newark who had attache
d himself to the army as a sort of general chaplain, hastened the Sabbath and put up his folding lectern and prepared for services. The rain had stopped, and it was a sunny, glorious winter morning. Since there was nothing much else to do while waiting for their turn to cross over, the Reverend found himself with the largest congregation of his career and with the satisfaction of knowing that a considerable number of Methodists and Baptists were included in his audience, as well as a sprinkling of Papists, Jews, Quakers and Free-thinkers. He preached the sins of the British, and if there was a good deal of talking and hooting in his congregation, there was also considerable amazement. It was said afterward that this was the first time on the American continent that a Presbyterian minister preached without noting sinfulness in his own congregation—although in the back rows, there were over two hundred bedraggled women, camp followers most of them, who had stuck with the army through better and worse, mostly worse.

  By late afternoon of the following day, the army was across the river and safe—at least for the moment—in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The New England fishermen and their leader, John Glover, had taken them across in the huge Durham boats as nicely—as one of them put it—as any load of codfish. It is said that even as the last boat was pushing off, the skirling of Lord Cornwallis’s pipers was heard in the distance, those whom the Reverend McWhorter called “Papist Highland barbarians,” ignoring the fact that most of them were of his own faith. And it is also said that the Americans fired their muskets and gave the colonial equivalent of a Bronx cheer to the kilted Highlanders. But it is more probable that the entire army was safely across before Cornwallis reached the river bank, even though Cornwallis had marched his men on the double for five hours once he finally realized that the “old fox,” as they had begun to call the stubborn Virginian, had dug up something larger than river skiffs.

  Too slow and too late, though Cornwallis understood it not at all. If he had come on five hours earlier, he could have pinned Washington and the dying army to the Jersey bank, and there, the river behind them, the fierce Highlanders and Hessians in front of them, the war might have been over.

  But from Cornwallis’s point of view, it was already finished. The sight of the Continental army in full flight down the road from Fort Lee to Hackensack would linger long with the British officers, and one might think of them, sitting their horses on the bank of the Delaware River in the early winter sunset and saying, good riddance to bad rubbish, for no army was left, no threat and surely no hope for the rebel cause.

  And they might have said all this with reason, for safe across the river, able to breathe deeply and slowly for the first time in four months of defeat and flight, General Washington took stock of what he had rescued out of disaster:

  Four months ago, he had had twenty thousand men—and better, all of them healthy enough to march and fight.

  Now he had somewhat over six thousand men by count. But of the six thousand, almost seven hundred were unable to walk, so sick from disease and wounds that they had to ride in carts or be carried by their comrades; and a thousand more were ambulatory ill, differing from the stretcher cases only in that they could still drag their sick bodies with no more help than a crutch or a comrade’s arm.

  A hundred miles to the north of him, about a thousand of his men were under the leadership of General Horatio Gates. Washington had left Gates with seven depleted regiments to guard the Hudson River Valley for a while. But then when he needed those men, Gates ignored him, pretended not to receive his messages and would not come to him. And somewhere in western New Jersey was another part of his army, some two thousand men under the leadership of General Charles Lee. And Lee too had disappeared with his army and ignored messages, and might well have been destroyed for all that Washington knew. Both these sections were under the leadership of professional British officers, who had deserted the British for whatever gain or riches or fame might lie with the American cause.

  But Washington had no real hope on December 7 that these two bodies of men could elude the British forces on the Jersey side of the Delaware River. He had no other hope than the ragged, beaten army he still led.

  [12]

  BUT WHEN WASHINGTON AWAKENED, the following morning, after a few hours of sleep, it was to the friendly sound of church bells tolling in a place where his shattered army would be sheltered and protected. New York and New Jersey had been a jungle, both colonies torn by inner strife and often by what amounted to civil war. There were whole counties in New York and New Jersey that belonged to the Tories, where rebel families had been rooted and driven out, tarred and feathered and sometimes shot or hanged. Bands of Tories conducted their own warfare with bands of rebels, and every fence or tree could hold a friend or an enemy or highwaymen and bandits who were both.

  Unlike New England, both Jersey and New York had been in large measure parceled out by the Crown in big estates, great manors of many thousands of acres. Bucks County in Pennsylvania was something else entirely. Originally explored by the Dutch, who only established a few trading posts, it was first settled by Swedes, who built log houses and laid down the log-cabin pattern for part of early America. Then the Dutch returned and took the land by right of conquest. But there was no friction between them and the Swedes, and they both prospered in the fertile valleys. In 1681 a grant was made to William Penn, and two years later he built his magnificent country residence at Pennsbury Manor near Tullytown. A diverse and interesting population of Swedes, Dutch, German immigrant farmers, English Quakers and suburbanites from Philadelphia settled in Bucks County.

  In 1727, the Durham Mine Furnace was established, mining the ore they smelted from Rattlesnake Hill and from Iron Hill—and then Welsh charcoal burners moved into the neighborhood to provide fuel for the smelting—and in the first years of the furnace, Robert Durham designed and built the first Durham boat.

  Not only was Bucks County well settled, well civilized and liberal in thought and action, but for the first time in months, Washington could feel that he was among his own people. All around him were the homes of cultured and friendly inhabitants, who were not only loyal to the cause he espoused but who had played major roles in bringing it into being.

  It made a difference. The day before, he had been hounded like a hare before the pack; now, at noon, he sat at lunch with four of his general officers at the home of Thomas Barclay at Trenton Falls and once again, like a civilized man, found himself eating hot, risen bread and commenting on the quality of the Madeira wine, which Barclay knew he was fond of and had managed to get in anticipation of his coming.

  A commander in chief needs a headquarters, even when his army is dying and his cause is perishing; and Thomas Barclay begged him to make it here, at his home. It was a big, commodious house, spacious enough for Washington and his servants, and Barclay was a man of substance, a merchant, and only too eager to go into his own pocket for the needs of these men who had come across the Delaware. Jersey and New York might be lost, but it was impossible for Barclay and his neighbors to believe that Pennsylvania, with its great, prosperous center of Philadelphia, could be given up. Six thousand men were still quite a number, and all one had to do was to look out of one of the windows in the Barclay house to see them milling about, gathering firewood, building fires, leading horses to and fro, and— where they could enlist the help of others in barbering—shaving.

  It was a clean-shaven time, but here was a whole army with whiskers, a wonderful, amazing array of whiskers that no one had the time to crop, and along with the whiskers, long hair. It was well enough for the rich to cut their hair close and have a wig stand of a dozen pieces; a plain man used his own hair and kept it shoulder length in the ordinary course of things. But now, especially among the youngsters, the hair was waistlong, yellow and red and brown and black, and many of them, just to keep the hair in place, had taken to wearing it in one or two fat braids.

  Hearing the reports over the past months, the people of Bucks County, like the people in so many other parts
of the colonies, might well have surrendered the cause to defeat. Yet here was the army, battered, shrunk—yet in being.

  [13]

  DURING THOSE FIRST FEW DAYS after the crossing, the army was stunned. Their lives had been fixed in a pattern of retreat and defeat; then what now—except to count the days? Of those who remained, seventy-five percent were enlisted for one year, 1776. It was the eighth, the ninth, the tenth of December; three weeks and the year would be over, and then, without ever being deserters, they could give it up and go home. Great men make wars; they also lose them. It would be spring soon and time for planting. The young boys, fourteen, fifteen and sixteen years old–and there were hundreds of them–wept now when they thought of their homes.

  If the tall, skinny Virginian wept, he did so alone. Those who knew him well said that the only passion in his life was his lovely place at Mount Vernon. There are adventurers and there are householders; and those who imagined that Washington was an adventurer understood him very little. He knew every foot of his land, every board in his house.

  There is a special kind of pain for the householder. When he goes away, he leaves a part of himself behind, and he is then split and filled with an aching desire for his home. He was not so different from the young soldiers. His was a homesick, broken and tired army.

  His friend General Hugh Mercer was also a physician, a big, shambling man, who had studied medicine at Aberdeen College and had once been a surgeon in the service of Charlie Stuart, pretender to the throne of England. Mercer came to him with the table of sickness, and it did no good for Washington to protest weakly that they were well enough a few months before.