The Crossing

by Howard Fast

  As far as we can gather, Lee looked at the few houses available around Vealtown and rejected all of them as “pious holes.” The plain fact of the matter is that they were houses of Methodist and Lutheran families, and thus without liquor; and Lee wanted desperately to get drunk. He wanted to be away from righteous Americans.

  Therefore he left his troops, taking with him only a guard of six mounted men, and rode to Baskingridge, three miles away, where he took up his quarters at the local inn. The amiable innkeeper at Baskingridge agreed that while General Lee could have a room upstairs, his six troopers must make their beds on the floor in the main room by the fireplace, a practice not unusual in those days and infinitely preferable to the open field.

  Only minutes after Lee and his escort had left the encampment of the two thousand Continental soldiers at Vealtown, Major Wilkinson arrived with messages from General Horatio Gates to General Washington. Major Wilkinson was then nineteen or twenty years old—like other facets of Wilkinson, his age was hard to pin down—and from what others had to say about him, which was never laudatory, he was not an extremely trustworthy person. So far as one can put the pieces of his character together, he was a young man of opportunist tendencies and quick intelligence. As so often with men of that type, his ambition outran his store of common sense, and he all too frequently mounted the wrong horse at the wrong time.

  On the other hand, he did subsequently write a journal of experiences in the Revolution, and the journal does provide a good deal of information that cannot be found elsewhere. Unfortunately the information, like the man, is not wholly to be trusted, and the central hero of whatever event described is always Major Wilkinson.

  Wilkinson had been dispatched by General Horatio Gates who, with an army of between eight and nine hundred men, had been detained from joining Washington by an unseasonable snowstorm near the Wallpack River in New Jersey. His orders were to find Washington. It would appear that he had also been instructed by Gates to interview General Charles Lee and have an off-the-record discussion with him before he, Wilkinson, found the commander in chief.

  Wilkinson rode from Gates’s camp to Morristown, where he certainly had little expectation of finding General Washington but every expectation of finding Charles Lee. There he learned that Lee had gone on to Vealtown. Wilkinson rode there and spoke to General Sullivan and was now informed that Lee was spending the night at the inn at Baskingridge.

  When Wilkinson got to Baskingridge, the inn was asleep. But he felt that his mission was important enough to awaken everyone in the house, and he hammered at the door. A sleepy innkeeper guided Wilkinson to Lee’s bedroom. The night before Lee had had too much to drink, and now his response to being awakened was a furious outpouring, well-spiced with four-letter Anglo-Saxon words. It was the second time Lee had been disturbed that night. Earlier, a Tory had come to the inn to complain to Lee that a horse of his had been stolen from him by Continental army deserters. When Lee had cursed out the Tory roundly and thrown him out of the inn, the Tory swore he would get even.

  Wilkinson, knowing nothing of the Tory incident, bore the abuse and delivered to Lee General Gates’s letter, which had been intended for Washington. Apparently Lee was pleased to have a letter addressed to the commander in chief, and he read it immediately, without ever questioning the propriety of either Wilkinson’s action or his own. Lee refused to comment on the letter or to say anything about his own circumstances at the inn. Instead he told Wilkinson that he would see him in the morning light and that he should get the devil out of his room.

  Wilkinson went down to the main room of the inn and spread his blanket in front of the fireplace, where several people were already sleeping, among them the six Continental soldiers who had come along from Vealtown as Lee’s bodyguard. It was now about five o’clock in the morning. About an hour later, as the first hint of daylight came into the sky, five mounted Connecticut Militiamen rode up to the inn and banged at the door until they were admitted. They made enough noise to awaken Lee, and soon he came down into the main room of the inn, still in his slippers, with a coat over his wrinkled shirt. He was unshaven, and his shirt was dirty, so dirty that its condition was remembered and remarked upon not only by Wilkinson but later by the British as well.

  Lee asked Wilkinson some questions about Gates’s force, which Wilkinson had left not too long before. Wilkinson answered Lee’s questions. Then Lee made some bitter and pointed comments about the lack of intelligence in Washington’s movements, and he also commented unfavorably upon Washington’s qualities as a leader.

  The Connecticut Militiamen had been listening carefully. When they realized who Lee was, they approached him as a representative of Washington’s staff and demanded back pay, forage and provisions. One of them also wanted his horse shod.

  The Connecticut Militiamen were not a part of Lee’s command, and certainly there was no way in which he could oblige their demands, but he represented the military authority and he was a general officer, and he was there.

  Lee, British-born and educated, had no great love for Americans, but of all Continentals, he liked least the rustic Connecticut Militiamen, who were the opposite of his former British public school companions. Now he lost his temper completely and using his quirt drove the Connecticut soldiers out of the inn. Returning to the big kitchen, he continued to rage, his anger now directed toward his own guards, who were also New Englanders and possibly Connecticut men as well. Unwilling to withstand his fury or talk back to an officer, they slipped out of the inn and went around to the back of the building, facing the rising sun. There, wrapped in blankets, they sat and warmed themselves as best they could in the early winter sunlight and discussed their varying but similar opinions of General Charles Lee.

  At this point, Colonel Scammel, who was second in command under Sullivan, arrived at the inn. Sullivan had sent Scammel to Lee for orders concerning the morning’s march.

  Lee listened absent-mindedly to Scammel, who could not quite disguise his reaction to the tall, skinny, dirty, pockmarked Englishman whose breath was sour, whose beard was of two days’ growth and whose hair was uncombed and unwigged. Observing Scammel’s attitude, Lee became petulant. What did Sullivan want of him? He had no maps. Had Scammel brought maps? How could he plan a march without maps?

  Scammel had a map case on his saddle, and he went out to where his horse was tethered, got his maps and brought them to Lee.

  Lee sat down with the map and traced with his finger a route from Vealtown to Pluckamin, and from there eventually to Princeton. He then traced an alternate route from Bound-brook to Brunswick. He did this consciously as if he were performing for the people in the room, spelling out the routes for everyone to hear and follow his movements.

  Both Wilkinson and Scammel knew full well that Lee’s orders were to cross the Delaware at Alexandria and join General Washington. Here in this little company, three officers, an innkeeper and a waitress, Lee was parading his defiance of his commander in chief. He went on with this charade for a little while, and then he turned to Scammel and said sharply:

  “Tell General Sullivan to move down toward Pluckamin; that I will soon be with him.”

  At this point Lee was intimating to Scammel and to Wilkinson that he would attack the British force at Princeton. Even if there had been some possibility of success in such a plan, the fact of his broadcasting it at the inn undercut and negated any element of surprise.

  It was ten o’clock before Lee had properly dressed himself. Lee, Wilkinson and Scammel sat down together for breakfast, during which Lee could not refrain from a steady flow of caustic comments on Washington. The two younger officers listened quietly, and insofar as we gather from Wilkinson’s memoirs, neither of them joined the attack on the commander in chief nor did they defend him.

  After breakfast, Lee pushed the dishes aside, shouted for paper and ink and began a letter to General Gates. He had already arranged for Wilkinson to abort his mission of finding Washington and instead carry back w
ith him to Gates Lee’s own letter.

  “The ingenious maneuver of Fort Washington,” Lee wrote, “has completely unhinged the goodly fabric we had been building. There never was so damned a stroke; entre nous, a certain great man is damnedly deficient. He has thrown me into a situation where I have my choice of difficulties: if I stay in this province, I risk myself and my army; and if I do not stay, the province is lost forever.”

  While Lee was writing this letter, Scammel had mounted and was well on the way to Sullivan at Vealtown. Major Wilkinson, however, waited for the letter to be completed, so that he could take it back to Gates. He stood at the window of the inn overlooking the road, while Lee wrote.

  We go back to the Tory Lee had thrown out of the inn the night before. Determined to revenge himself, this Tory rode eighteen miles through the night to the British encampment at Brunswick, where he gave them the information about Lee being at the inn. At first they were ill disposed to believe the man, but when he finally convinced them that a general officer of the Continental army was asleep and almost alone at the inn at Baskingridge, a Colonel Harcourt took a troop of dragoons and followed the Tory back to the inn.

  As the dragoons approached the inn, Lee’s guards, sitting behind the inn in the sunlight, saw them coming and guessed what they were after. They responded to the approach of the British by taking off across the fields as fast as they could run, their instinct for self-preservation larger than any desire to fight and die for Charles Lee.

  Wilkinson was standing at the window. When he saw the British cavalry troop approaching in the distance, he shouted to Lee that British dragoons were there.

  Lee, finishing the letter to Gates about Washington’s inabilities, leaped to his feet and cried out, “Where?”

  Wilkinson shouted that they were everywhere and in a moment would be all around the house. The letter was in Lee’s hand, and Wilkinson snatched it and bolted. Lee began to shout for the guards and fired his pistols at the British and missed. The British were now in the house, and Lee was their captive.

  Wilkinson claims in his memoirs that he drew his pistols and would have fought the British if there had been any hope of prevailing against a force of a dozen dragoons. But the fact of his escape makes it more likely that Wilkinson dived for the nearest hiding place and remained there until the British had departed.

  In any case, Wilkinson must have hidden himself well, for the British took Lee, searched the house and rode off without ever finding him. Wilkinson claimed that the British shouted that if Lee did not surrender they would burn the house down, but this is at odds with the British account of the incident, which stresses the fact that they wanted Lee alive. They sought the great easy victory of capturing a Continental general, and here they got one of the four top general officers.

  After the British had departed, Wilkinson saddled his horse and rode back to Vealtown to Sullivan’s encampment. It was late in the afternoon when he arrived there, and Sullivan had already begun to march his men toward Pluck-amin, in accordance with Lee’s orders. Wilkinson told General Sullivan what had happened at the inn, and Wilkinson’s excitement was such that he simply took it for granted that Sullivan, being second in command to Lee, would also be a part of the ripening cabal against Washington. Quite certain of this, he turned over the letter that Lee had intended for Gates to Sullivan.

  However, Sullivan appeared to be undisturbed at the news of Lee’s capture. He read the letter that Lee had written to General Gates without comment, returning it then to Wilkinson, suggesting that he take it along to Gates, for whom it was intended.

  Wilkinson did not attempt to define Sullivan’s attitude, but one can surmise that it was one of contempt. Sullivan then dispensed with Lee’s orders, changed the direction of his march and set out to join his army to Washington’s on the other side of the Delaware.

  An hour later, Sullivan and his troops heard the British guns firing in celebration of the capture of an American general.

  [23]

  ON THE DELAWARE, as well as in the Jersey hinterland where Lee had been captured, the thirteenth of December was a frigid and dismal day, a mixture of rain and sleet. On the Delaware, the Americans were cold, despondent and miserable. In Philadelphia, the mood was one of impending disaster. A rumor raced through the town to the effect that General Washington and his staff had come to the decision to burn every building in Philadelphia to the ground, thereby providing no winter shelter for the British army. The reaction to this rumor by the citizens of Philadelphia, who so cherished their beautiful homes, was one of total dismay. A feeling of panic took hold of the city. The rumor appeared to be founded in fact, for the Congress had left Philadelphia the day before; and from the ragged army on the banks of the Delaware River came no note of hope or encouragement, nor was there any word in the newspapers of Lee’s or Gates’s army.

  Early on the thirteenth, a messenger brought word of this harrowing rumor to the much-harassed General Washington, who immediately instructed General Israel Putnam to deny it emphatically. By the afternoon of the same day Putnam’s heralds were reading aloud in Philadelphia the following statement of his military government:

  “The General has been informed that some weak or wicked men have maliciously reported that it is the design and wish of the officers and men in the Continental army to burn and destroy the city of Philadelphia. To counteract such a false and scandalous report he thinks it necessary to inform the inhabitants who propose to remain in the city, that he has received positive orders from the honorable Continental Congress and from His Excellency, General Washington, to secure and protect the city of Philadelphia against all invaders and enemies. The general will consider every attempt to burn the city of Philadelphia as a crime of the blackest dye, and will, without ceremony, punish capitally any incendiary who shall have the hardiness and cruelty to attempt it.”

  Such was Israel Putnam’s reputation for determination and for dedication to the cause he had espoused that any plot that might have existed to burn the city was quickly abandoned by the plotters. Philadelphia stood, in spite of the fact that everyone realized that its defense was impossible. There was no army to defend it, and neither was there at this moment any real determination among the leaders of the rebellion to defend Philadelphia, except for General Washington and his staff; and even they were not wholly committed.

  And the panic passed, particularly since the Council of Safety refused to abandon the city—as the Congress had—and remained in session, seriously considering every request from the army, no matter how unlikely it was that they could ever fulfill it. As for example the following plea from General Lord Stirling:

  “You will please therefore, to forward to me immediately, such clothing as you have ready, to the number of two hundred and eighty suits. They want shirts, shoes, breeches, waistcoats, coats and stockings.”

  [24]

  HOUR BY HOUR, the mystery of the whereabouts of Lee’s army deepened—and Washington’s hopes sank. On the fourteenth of December, Washington decided that somehow or other he must contact Lee, and he turned to his old and trusted friend, William Alexander, Lord Stirling.

  Alexander was then fifty years old and not in good health. His joints were stiff with arthritis, and he was suffering a bad cold. Charitably, his drinking was an attempt to drown the pain of arthritis, yet there was rarely a night when he was not drunk—so long as his personal kegs of rum lasted. But he had once been surveyor general of New Jersey, and in that capacity knew every road and footpath in the entire state. The fact that he had a legitimate claim to a Scottish title led Washington to believe that perhaps Lee, always a snob, would be open to persuasion by him. Stirling, agreeing with Washington about the urgency and necessity of finding Lee’s army, departed from the camp early on the fourteenth and rode north into Jersey.

  As Washington had expected, his knowledge of the roads bore fruit, and before nightfall he met with Sullivan and the army on their way to the Delaware. Stirling then sent a mounted messen
ger back to Washington to inform him that the army was safe and whole and would join him very soon.

  That morning, Washington had shifted his headquarters from Thomas Barclay’s house to the home of William Keith in Makefield township, four miles north of Newtown, Pennsylvania. Washington considered this house to be better located in terms of the position of the army, stretched out as it now was in defense of the river bank.

  The rate of desertion had increased, and on the same day Joseph Reed, Washington’s secretary, sent the following plea to the Council of Safety in Philadelphia:

  “It is of the greatest importance that all the arms should be taken from the soldiers who are leaving the army.”

  The arms were needed desperately, for the new recruits drawn from the Pennsylvania countryside were young farmboys, without guns. General Thomas Mifflin took the whole day of December 14 to visit every Pennsylvania village within a dozen miles of Washington’s headquarters, holding meetings everywhere, pleading in each place for volunteers. As a result, about a hundred men were brought into camp.

  Then Mifflin went on to Philadelphia, where he was able to persuade Colonel John Cadwalader to take a few hundred more of the Philadelphia Associators out of the city and lead them to the defense of the bank of the Delaware.