The Crossing

by Howard Fast

  [17]

  GENERAL HOWE WENT IN and out of the village of Trenton in a hurry. He did not enjoy the Delaware River Valley, and he was rather annoyed that here in the Jerseys it should be colder than it was in New York City to the north, even though his weather experts told him that it was quite natural for the frost to settle into a river bottom such as this.

  But New York was warmer in more ways than one. General Howe, who cherished women, found American ladies even more adorable than those he had left behind in England, particularly Mrs. Loring, blue-eyed, blond, gay, pretty, as addicted to cards as the general himself, and possessed of a most understanding husband. She became his mistress, his whist partner, and she kept his social schedule.

  The rebels had fled New York City, for the bitter lesson of the young lad Nathan Hale, hanged for espionage in full view of the population, had driven home the fact that the city was occupied by a most determined enemy. Rebels who still remained slipped out of the town, especially those people of substance, leaving behind them a city whose “better people” were of one heart with the British.

  Sir William Howe felt at home there, and on December II, he hastened back to New York, where Mrs. Loring’s social book held a listing of six major balls, fourteen small but elegant dinner parties and any number of luncheons, which was not at all bad for a provincial capital.

  In Philadelphia, not one ball. Even the flow of testimonial dinners for the members of Congress had dried up; the city was moody and depressed. And when Putnam and Reed decided that the Associators should leave the city and march up into Bucks County to join Washington, the city became even more depressed.

  The Associators were an urban phenomenon. They had come into being with the Association, which had been set up in 1774 as a compact of merchants who agreed not to import, export or use British goods until the British were willing to redress the grievances of the colonies. Out of this had come a small volunteer movement of merchants, clerks, warehousemen, storekeepers, printers and other city folk who organized themselves into marching companies they called the Associators. There were about a thousand of these volunteers in Philadelphia, three companies of which—numbering about two hundred men each—Colonel Joseph Reed took north to Trenton Falls.

  They were self-conscious city people, and they marched stiffly, for all of their training. But they had uniforms, brown trousers and blue coats, and they had real knapsacks and ammunition pouches and muskets. When they entered the American encampment, the bearded, long-haired regulars, clothed in rags and pieces of man-blanket and horse-blanket, stared at them dumbly. And Washington, so easily moved by kindness or help, was more disturbed than relieved. Here was the very life blood of Philadelphia city, given up to him, and he found that he could not in all conscience take these men away from the defense of the city. Instead, he put them under the command of Colonel John Cadwalader, with instructions to use these men to defend the river bank against a British crossing, from a point about ten miles south of Trenton down around the bend to Bristol, the part closest to Philadelphia that might still be crossed.

  [18]

  IN ALL TRUTH, Washington was puzzled, and he felt the desperate sense of entrapment that a blind man knows in a situation of grave danger. Not only were the two divisions of his army lost to him and apparently beyond contact, but he simply did not know what the British were up to. He had to know. Again he begged his general officers to buy information and pay the spies and informers whatever they asked, no matter how loathsome they appeared.

  Howe had marched his Highlanders and his British regulars in and out of Trenton village, hardly pausing for breath. Were they back in New York, as some informants assured him? Were they boarding ship again for an attack on Philadelphia? Suppose they landed in Delaware by night; they could be in Philadelphia in three days. Then what was holding them back? Mrs. Loring? The tall Virginian loved women with as much delight as William Howe, but do you leave a dying army alone to diddle a married woman who’s fair game for the field? Howe was no lovesick boy; he would not weigh a woman against a prize as rich as America.

  Putnam rode up from Philadelphia and told Washington that the key to the whole thing was in the weather. It was the coldest December in anyone’s memory, certainly in his, and anyone who knew the British realized that they would not march out against an enemy in weather like this. For one thing, they had no winter longcoats.

  At least it was something Washington could have a good laugh over, even though he was not convinced. Putnam told him that the Continental Congress wanted to get out of Philadelphia. They felt that Philadelphia was an open city and could not be defended. They wanted to move on to Baltimore, which they held to be a safer place.

  Nothing so far was as bitter as this. For them, for Congress, it was over then, and each man for his own neck. Philadelphia was only the financial, the manufacturing, the commercial center of the thirteen colonies; it was only the most vital of any city in America to the war effort, and at least three-quarters of the food and supplies that were now coming through to the army originated there or were transshipped through the city. Whatever small navy the Americans had was based there, and it was the largest and busiest port in America, the largest shipbuilding center.

  Putnam repeated their demand. The Congress would not remain in Philadelphia; they were frightened. Better that he should suggest that Congress move to Baltimore than to have them scurry for safety, each to his own place, like hunted rabbits. That would be the end.

  Very well, he told Putnam. Let them go to Baltimore.

  So they did, without wasting an hour, and on the twelfth of December, 1776, they sent a message to Washington that said:

  “… that until they should otherwise order, General Washington should be possessed of all power to order and direct all things relative to the department and the operation of the war.”

  Well, he was now a military dictator of sorts. There appeared to be no end to the roles he would play.

  [19]

  THEN PART OF THE MYSTERY of what the British intended was solved. The British regulars left Trenton village; the Hessians marched in and occupied it, this time for the winter, settling down with the finality of men who had come to stay.

  The first to arrive in Trenton were the grenadiers, some six hundred strong, led by Colonel Johann Gottlieb Rahl, who would be commandant of the entire occupying force. These men wore dark blue uniforms and sported great brass shakos, and they had the reputation of having killed more Americans than any other unit on American soil. They also were famous for their corps of trumpet, French horn and drums, often conducted by the colonel himself. He loved music, particularly military music.

  The Knyphausen regiment followed Rahl’s grenadiers, and they were in more or less the same strength, some six hundred strong. They wore black uniforms with silver facings, and almost every man in the regiment had a fierce black mustache, waxed and thrusting out horizontally, like two sharp sword points.

  The two regiments took over the village methodically, in a practical and businesslike manner, but without any noticeable hostility toward those residents who had remained in their houses. About half of the village had fled; those who stayed, with some few exceptions, were Quakers, and their manner toward the Hessians was no different from the grave and courteous behavior they displayed toward anyone else.

  Upon arrival, the Hessians posted notices around town:

  SMALL STRAGGLING PARTIES NOT DRESSED

  LIKE SOLDIERS AND WITHOUT OFFICERS,

  NOT BEING ADMISSIBLE IN WAR WHO PRESUMES

  TO MOLEST OR FIRE UPON SOLDIERS OR

  PEACEABLE INHABITANTS OF THE COUNTRY,

  WILL BE IMMEDIATELY HANGED WITHOUT

  TRIAL AS ASSASSINS.

  In all fairness, it must be stated that the Hessians hanged no one during their occupation of Trenton, nor did they inflict any cruel punishment that we have record of.

  The following morning-Friday, the thirteenth of December-a company of fifty Jägers marched
into Trenton, to join the two regiments already in occupation. The Jägers wore bright green uniforms with red facings and cocked hats. The Jägers were the Hessians most feared by the Continentals, perhaps because the German regiments in the American army had a traditional terror of the Jäger regiments in Europe.

  In his own words, a Hessian appears far more human and understandable than as a historical memory, and what follows is an entry in a Hessian diary, made by one of the Jägers on the day they arrived in Trenton:

  We marched to Trenton and joined our two regiments of Rall [sic] and Knyphausen, in order to take up a sort of winter quarters here, which are wretched enough. This town consists of about one hundred houses, of which many are mean and little, and it is easy to conceive how ill it must accommodate three regiments. The inhabitants, like those at Princeton, are almost all fled, so that we occupy bare walls. The Delaware, which is here extremely rapid, and in general about two ells deep [90 inches], separates us and the rebels. We are obliged to be constantly on our guard, and to do very severe duty, though our people begin to grow ragged, and our baggage is left at New York. Notwithstanding, we have marched across this extremely fine province of New Jersey, which may justly be called the garden of America, yet it is by no means freed from the enemy, and we are insecure both in flank and rear. The Brigade has incontestably suffered the most of any, and we now lie at the advanced point, that as soon as the Delaware freezes we may march over and attack Philadelphia which is about thirty miles distant.

  In Trenton, as elsewhere, the ability of the Quakers to maintain themselves as they did during the Revolution is a testimony, not only to the Quaker faith, but to that quality so rare in war, compassion, which never entirely disappeared during the Revolution. The entire community of Quakers suffered uniquely during the war. Uncomfortably situated, poignantly conflicted by religion, ideals and principles, they were in their great majority entirely sympathetic to the American cause. Among many of them this sympathy was so deep-felt and profoundly religious, that in spite of their faith they took up arms in the Continental cause. But the majority of them adhered to their faith, bore the insults and taunts of both sides patiently and without bad will, and when the opportunity offered, provided food, shelter and medical aid to both the rebels and the British.

  When the war began, the immediate reaction of Americans from those areas of the country where there were few or no Quakers was to regard them with suspicion and often with hatred and contempt. But as the war went on, these feelings changed to respect and admiration. The militant Protestant ideologies provided much of the impetus for the Revolution, and to religious people, the sense of the Quakers as Christians was hard to reject.

  Yet, a Quaker meetinghouse was fair game for men who would think twice before defiling a church. Twenty members of the 16th Regiment of the Queen’s Light Dragoons quartered themselves in the Friends’ meetinghouse on Third Street in Trenton, filthied and damaged the place, and, on occasion, stabled their horses there.

  [20]

  ON SATURDAY, which was the fourteenth of December, one week after Washington led his beaten army across the Delaware, the Hessians completed their occupation of the little village of Trenton with the arrival of Colonel von Lossberg’s Fusilier Regiment. Their drums shattering the morning silence, their leggings chalked white, their coats bright red, they marched proudly into the village and quartered themselves in the Methodist and Episcopal churches. Later the same day, Colonel Rahl established his brigade hospital in the parsonage of the Presbyterian church. Dr. Elihu Spencer, the Presbyterian parson, was an avid book collector, and he complained afterward that the Hessians had used his books to light fires and to clean their boots.

  With the arrival of the Fusilier Regiment of Hessians in Trenton, Sir William Howe completed his plans for the containment of Washington’s shattered army until the Delaware River froze solid within a few weeks. He stationed his British troops in the rear, where they could easily join the Hessians when the time came for a general advance against the Continentals: a thousand Highlanders at Amboy, a thousand red-coats at New Brunswick and a thousand more at Princeton.

  The Hessians—who were armed not only with their guns but with their reputations—were at the river bank itself, somewhat more than fifteen hundred men at Trenton and about the same number at Bordentown, some ten miles downstream and toward Philadelphia. Thus six thousand men were considered by the British as ample to deal with what remained of the American army. The rest of the troops were quartered in New York City for that interval—a short one they were certain—before the war ended.

  [21]

  THIS DESCRIPTION of the Hessian soldier is taken from Dunlap’s History of the American Theater:

  “A towering brass fronted cap; mustaches colored with the same material that colored his shoes, his hair plastered with tallow and flour, and tightly drawn into a long appendage reaching from the back of his head to his waist; his blue uniform almost covered by broad belts sustaining his cartouche box, his brass hilted sword, and his bayonet; a yellow waistcoat with flaps, and yellow breeches, met at the knee by black gaiters; and thus heavily equipped he stood as an automaton, and received the command or cane of the officer who inspected him.”

  The flamboyant, colorful, peacock dress of the Hessian soldier was by no means unusual in Continental Europe. There the uniform of the soldier had social as well as sexual—and often homosexual—significance. Its popinjay qualities were not without reason but served a very necessary purpose during the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Recruited most frequently from among the peasants, and often enough from the serfs, the Continental European soldier experienced a very significant change of character and position upon entering the army. From the very lowest rung of society he was elevated to a position of great subjective and even considerable objective importance; he was dressed in a colorful and striking uniform, and he was given the right to strut and parade his peacock feathers for the edification of the urban woman, whom he had always desired, even though she were maidservant or prostitute.

  Criminal or peasant, he had once belonged to the least powerful element of society; now a musket was put in his hand and he was given the right, under certain conditions, to kill. This enlargement from subjugation to what was the ultimate power gave him a very distinctive and particular place in society.

  The American soldier, on the other hand, was a world apart from this uniformed robot. Except for a few city companies of prosperous volunteers, the Continental had no other uniform during the year of 1776 than the clothes he wore when he had enlisted in the army either as a regular soldier or as a part of the militia. The whole symbolic significance of the uniform was lost upon him. Instead of the polished, bemedaled and brightly colored garments upon his own back, he saw them only upon the enemy and as a quality of the enemy. The popinjays were the others, not himself. He was recruited neither from the criminal classes nor from the serfs, but most frequently from the most advanced and educated elements of American society. What romance of warfare he might have gathered from storybooks had long since been dissipated by the bitter reality, and now soldiering in the army was to him and his fellows a common curse that had to be endured but never enjoyed. The only loyalty he had was to his cause, and this too was the only reason for existing as a soldier. He looked forward not to any rewards of cash, sex or plunder, but to that day when the unspeakable torment of the war would be over. Peace was paradise lost, the beloved condition in which he had once existed.

  As for the Hessians, the American soldier despised them doubly. For one thing, they were the enemy; for another, they were foreigners who had been bought and paid for to fight in a war that the American felt was as unjustly directed against him as ever an armed movement was unjustly directed against defenders of their native soil. The Englishmen were strangers from overseas who had come to take his lands, burn his home, spoil his crop and put him into what he considered profoundly–if emotionally-a condition of virtual slavery; y
et he could comprehend the motives of the English, since he could remember them historically as owners of the country when they first took it for the Crown.

  He had no such comprehension of the motives of the Hessians; and along with lack of comprehension went the ugly memory of what the Hessians had done to the raw, unsoldierly, American boys on Brooklyn Heights and on Manhattan Island.

  [22]

  GENERAL CHARLES LEE was a strange and misunderstood man, who put himself outside of our history and outside of some balanced comprehension of the situation in which he found himself at the time. For that reason he was damned beyond reason and perhaps beyond his deserving. Mrs. Mercy Warren, a charming and perceptive woman of the period, writing to Samuel Adams, said the following of Lee, who was an acquaintance of hers: “… Plain in his person to a degree of ugliness; careless even to unpoliteness; his garb ordinary; his voice rough; his manners rather morose; yet sensible, learned, judicious, penetrating.”

  He was not a man whom women found attractive. Another woman of the time called him: “A crabbed man.” He was given to introversion, silences and too much alcohol, and he always resented the aristocratic airs of Washington and Washington’s circle—unself-conscious though these airs might be—and felt that Washington’s friends regarded him, an Englishman, as more renegade than recruit.

  On December 12, he led his two thousand soldiers out of Morristown, New Jersey, and marched them eight miles to Vealtown, for what reason we do not know. It was in response to no commands or orders from Washington; nor was Lee such a person as to take others into his confidence. At Vealtown, he instructed General Sullivan, who was his second in command, to supervise the making of a temporary camp for the men.

  Sullivan, an intelligent man and a lawyer, then thirty-six years old, followed Lee’s orders only because he had a deep, ingrained respect for the military acumen of his commander. He knew all the unpleasant personal characteristics of General Lee, but at the same time he recognized Lee’s incisiveness and his brilliance. In the year of war Sullivan had seen, he had experienced enough American blunders to make him slow to judgment and criticism, even though he knew Lee as an opportunistic soldier of fortune. In any case, they were not Lee’s blunders. A profound supporter of the Continental cause, Sullivan had been a delegate to the First Continental Congress. He was at the siege of Boston, and he fought gallantly at the battle of Brooklyn Heights, where he had been captured by the Hessians. He was then exchanged for a British officer and was able to rejoin General Lee’s command.