George Washington's Surprise Attack

by Phillip Thomas Tucker

  In addition, Colonel Glover’s strict training and high standards forged an iron discipline that made the Marbleheaders into Washington’s most efficient soldiers, regardless of the task or battlefield situation. Consequently, the Marbleheaders performed splendidly on any assignment, on land or water. Most of all, they were determined that England would never “enslave” America. Washington fully realized, the well-honed discipline, work ethic, and efficiency of Glover’s men from years of service on the high seas were now critical for a successful Delaware crossing in stormy, winter conditions. These Marbleheaders had earlier taken orders without question, learning to immediately act upon a captain’s orders when out at sea: a blind obedience that was absolutely necessary for a ship’s and crew’s efficiency and even survival at sea, especially during a raging storm. This process early instilled an iron-like discipline into these mariners.

  Like Glover himself, the Marbleheaders looked back proudly to a humble ancestry of seafarers, who had also fished primarily for cod, and a vibrant, distinctive Celtic-Cornish culture that thrived along the scenic Cornish peninsula, bordering the Celtic Sea, and the rocky islands of Guernsey and Jersey in the English Channel. Spawned from a sea-toughened breed of Cornwall ancestors who hailed from a rugged land, where red sunsets dropped off the western horizon in America’s direction, the Marbleheaders were extremely “vigorous and active.” Drawing upon a rich cultural heritage and seafaring traditions, Glover’s Massachusetts boys possessed those qualities were now exactly what was most of all required to meet the stiff challenges of Washington’s dangerous nighttime crossing of the Delaware.

  Most significantly, these Marblehead men, long accustomed to adversity and harsh winter conditions, were well-honed for the arduous task of manhandling boats across the roughest waters. Living in their isolated maritime world, Glover’s men looked, thought, and talked very differently from their fellow Continentals who had never seen the ocean. Regardless of what class they hailed—from the lowest cabin boy to the more privileged members of the so-called codfish aristocracy—the Marbleheaders maintained their distinct, peculiar dialect, which contained idioms of speech that echoed the distant past of Elizabethan England. In their distinctive speech, therefore, Glover’s men sounded not unlike cockney Englishmen, who they had faced in battle, but more like rural Cornwall fishermen.

  From the beginning, Glover’s men were natural, ideal revolutionaries with a do-or-die attitude. This longtime antagonism and distinct sense of rebellion against authority was in the Marbleheader’s blood and part of their very being. Now a source of pride, the ancestors of Glover’s men had long ago defied a strict Puritan and Boston’s mindless theologic conformity that crushed the spirit of individualism and free-thinking. Like those distant ancestors who had thrived for generations in their little fishing villages along the rocky Cornish coast that looked so much like the rugged eastern Massachusetts coastline, the Marbleheaders were long distinguished by a defiant sense of nonconformity.

  For such sound reasons, Washington had based the launching of his ambitious Trenton battle plan of his main strike force on the absolute conviction that the Marbleheaders’ ample abilities, skills, and peculiarities would once again rise to the fore when needed the most.23 Washington’s bold gamble in staking “everything on one final roll of the dice” and going for broke was based upon what Glover and his Marbleheaders could first perform with their own strong arms, work ethic, and combined civilian and military experience. These Marbleheaders had been long at odds with not only nature and the sea, but also with any hint of arbitrary and dictatorial authority, Puritan, colonial, or British. A lifelong struggle against adversity and hardship began early when the average Marblehead male went to sea as a pre-teen “cut-tail,” sailing the more than one thousand-mile journey to the lucrative Grand Banks fisheries. Enduring unpredictable seas and harsh weather conditions, these hardy seamen engaged in the hardest work imaginable in the north Atlantic. Even though Grand Banks fishing was a summertime pursuit, weather conditions were often winter-like, when cold fronts and strong winds descended south with an icy vengeance from the Arctic. Life was dangerous, challenging, and hence often short for Marblehead seafarers during the months-long voyages to their ancestral fishing grounds.

  In the Marbleheaders’ unforgiving world, simply making a living from the sea often resulted in higher casualties than suffered by the typical eighteenth-century regiment in combat. During the fatal year of 1768, nine Marblehead sailing ships and their sizeable crews were lost to raging storms on the open seas: a tragic loss of more than 120 Marblehead sailors, who had sailed off during the summer fishing season and never returned to their beloved home port. Even on routine voyages to the Grand Banks, fathers, sons, and brothers had been swept over the ship’s sides by sudden ocean swells, disappearing forever into the deep blue. So many open sea deaths left Marblehead with a disproportionate large percentage of widows and orphans. This brutally high attrition of hard-working seamen attempting to support families was followed by another fourteen lost vessels the following fatal year of 1769. But losses in 1771 were even higher for the long-suffering, stoic Marblehead community. So many ships were lost at sea that the town officially appealed directly to the Massachusetts government for relief to provide for the multitude of widows and orphans.

  Paradoxically, Colonel Johann Rall’s Hessians now stationed at Trenton had seen the Marbleheader’s fishing grounds more recently than Glover’s men, having sailed across the Grand Banks to America’s shores during the third week of June 1776. Here, they had felt the same northeast winter-like gales as Glover’s Marbleheaders had long experienced. Even more ironic, the Hessians had caught codfish—much-needed nourishment that Glover’s hungry men would have now relished for a late dinner along the Delaware’s west bank instead of their meager rations of salt pork and “firecakes” now carried in well-worn, leather knapsacks.

  As if to compensate for notoriously short lives, the Marblehead mariners lived fast and hard. Either in wooden fishermen’s cottages, built by ship’s carpenters, or in the town’s taverns, they socialized, smoked long clay pipes, and drank till the early morning hours. The Little Jugg Inn, Three Codds Tavern, The Foundation Inn, Aunty Bowen’s Tavern on Gingerbread Hill, and the appropriately named The Bunch of Grapes, were Marblehead’s most popular drinking establishments. After drinking too much rotgut rum, these experienced seafaring men often fought each other in Marblehead’s dingy drinking houses, dark alleys, and crooked streets over real or imagined slights. Curving along the lengthy, rocky peninsula-ridge upon which perched Marblehead, these narrow, twisting dirt avenues had been christened with colorful names such as Frog Lane and Cradleskid Lane.24

  Fortunately for Washington, these Marbleheaders were always at their best when the odds were the greatest. Glover’s seamen were destined to play leading roles in overcoming three formidable opponents in the next twenty-four hours: the raging Delaware River, an angry Mother Nature, and an elite brigade of Hessians. As a confident Colonel John Fitzgerald, who knew that Washington’s supreme faith placed in Glover and his mariners was well-founded, penned in his diary on December 25: “Colonel Glover’s fishermen from Marblehead, Mass., are to manage the boats just as they did in the retreat from Long Island.”25

  Most importantly along the Delaware’s west bank, the high quality of Glover’s officers and men strengthened the overall sinews of Washington’s ranks in terms of confidence and a sense of accomplishing the impossible. Personable, gregarious, and intelligent, Ireland-born Colonel Stephen Moylan, a polished Irish Catholic (like Colonel Fitzgerald from Alexandria, Virginia) and from a leading Irish merchant family of Philadelphia, matched Glover’s men in determination. Like the large number of Gaelic warriors in Washington’s ranks, this former Philadelphia merchant, who had been born in Cork and finely educated in Paris, had early advocated for America to embark upon “the glorious Cause” of independence, thanks in part to Ireland’s own lengthy struggle for freedom against England’s domina
ting might. In a September 27, 1776 letter to Congress, Moylan reflected upon the narrow, August 1776 escape to Manhattan Island from Long Island that saved thousands of troops by the seafaring skills of Glover’s men. This last-minute salvation for so many of Washington’s soldiers provided invaluable experience that was now about to pay high dividends for the arduous Delaware crossing. In Moylan’s words: “Perhaps there does not occur in History a Sadder retreat, so well Concerted, So well executed, than was made from that Island.” The “merry,” good-natured Moylan, now a respected Washington aide and part of his revered “family” of young staff officers, had already made timely contributions in rushing supplies to Washington’s Army and in hurrying Generals Lee and Gates’ reinforcements south to join Washington in time to undertake the daring offensive against Trenton.26

  Even the escalating winter northeaster seemed like a good omen to some of Washington’s more optimistic soldiers, who saw the bright side of nature’s wrath. Indeed, the wintery screen now provided Washington’s task force was reminiscent of the army’s good fortune when a thick layer of fog of late August had masked the stealthy withdrawal across the East River from Long Island to Manhattan Island, providing Glover’s rescuers with a timely screen. Glover’s men had saved thousands of Washington’s soldiers from almost certain annihilation by utilizing muffled oars in rowing across the fog-shrouded East River during one of the war’s most brilliant small-scale amphibious operations. And now the sinewy Marbleheaders busily prepared to ferry around 2,400 soldiers, horses for artillery, a company of Philadelphia cavalrymen, and all eighteen cannon across a swollen river at night for the first time in this war: a more daunting challenge. Back in more halcyon days than this Christmas evening, Washington had overseen the entire late August evacuation operation from Long Island to Manhattan Island, and then the crossing the Delaware from Trenton to the safety of eastern Pennsylvania only two weeks ago, gaining more valuable experience that he now put to good use.

  Most importantly, the steady calm and confidence of Glover and his men had a significant psychological impact on Washington’s troops at this key moment of heightened tension and anxiety. Just the mere sight of the stocky, self-assured Colonel Glover, the army’s maritime operational master, inspired confidence. Here, at the muddy landing of McConkey’s Ferry, he now wore a Scottish broadsword that the mid-April 1746 slaughter at Culloden, Scotland, survivor General Hugh Mercer, born in Scotland, certainly appreciated, and two finely crafted silver pistols. Glover and his lean, muscular soldiers now bolstered the can-do attitude of Washington’s Continentals as never before. Most importantly, Glover’s men now possessed a strong sense of team spirit, camaraderie, and esprit de corps, which prepared them for stern challenges posed by nature’s harshest winter offerings and the Delaware’s high waters.

  By way of a strange osmosis, this calm, reassuring certitude of Glover and his hard-bitten mariners radiated a quiet outward confidence that lifted optimism among young Continental soldiers about to climb into the rain-soaked Durham boats. Just as Glover overcame his small stature and his humble origins by his own accomplishments and willpower to infuse a spunky fighting spirit that was a hallmark of his elite Massachusetts regiment, so he and his Marbleheaders, who carried the essence of the sea wherever they went, immeasurably fortified the determination of Washington’s soldiers to cross the unruly Delaware. Around 2,400 young men and boys now depended solely upon what this resilient band of seasoned mariners could accomplish on the swirling, rain-swollen river that stretched around eight hundred feet.

  Worst of all, the rampaging Delaware was now full of ice floes that promised to damage the hulls of wooden vessels if not skillfully handled by Glover’s men. Below-freezing conditions of the recent thaws and the recent bright sunshine just before the nor’easter struck had broken up much of the ice lining the river banks upriver. These rapid temperature fluctuations now left the Delaware full of bobbing chunks of ice.

  With an ominous will all their own, the ice floes moved unimpeded downstream with the surging, dark current, posing a serious threat to impede Washington’s crossing and sabotage his delicate timetable. This more precarious situation on the Delaware could not have been fully anticipated by Washington. After all, such typical wintertime conditions on the Potomac around Mount Vernon, well below the fall line and tidal, were very different this time of year, with saltwater mixing with freshwater to negate such heavy ice floes as now carried by the dark currents which moved rapidly down the Delaware above the fall line.27

  First and foremost, the discipline, teamwork, and sheer determination of Glover’s experienced mariners had to overcome the serious threat posed by these ice floes during the seemingly endless hours of the long night that lay ahead. One aristocratic Pennsylvania officer, Alexander Graydon, of Irish descent from Philadelphia and a member of Colonel John Shee’s Pennsylvania militia battalion, marveled at the discipline of Glover’s ever-unorthodox New England regiment. He described how although “deficient perhaps, in polish [like their flinty, independent-minded commander, Glover], it possessed an apparent aptitude for the purpose of its institution, and gave a confidence that myriads of its meek and lowly brethren were incompetent to inspire.”28

  Long overlooked by traditional historians, yet another significant factor differentiated Glover’s Massachusetts soldiers from the majority of their fellow Continental comrades: a rarer open-mindedness about race. After all, these seafarers and fishermen from Massachusetts’s north shore had long served on sailing ships together with African Americans and Indians. This more liberal attitude among Glover’s men reflected the longtime ethnic composition of New England’s culturally diverse fishing communities that proportionately represented the ethnic diversity found on sailing vessels. Therefore, Marbleheaders of various races now served side by side in the ranks of America’s first truly integrated military unit.

  Therefore, on this blustery Christmas Day, Glover’s regiment was Washington’s most racially diverse command. What was most upsetting to the less tolerant Southern gentleman officers and elitist planter’s sons from Virginia’s upper-class world was the fact that so many black mariners now served as proud fighting men in Washington’s most indispensable Continental outfit. In the summer of 1776 when Washington’s Army first arrived in New York City, Alexander Graydon, who conveniently overlooked his own humble Irish immigrant roots, was shocked by the sight of “a number of negroes,” who were treated as equals deserving of fair treatment and respect in Glover’s ranks.29

  Continuing a tradition of enlisting free blacks and Indians in New England units, including Rogers’ Rangers, during the French and Indian War, African-American soldiers also either now, or had earlier, served in the other four New England regiments of Glover’s mostly Massachusetts brigade of General John Sullivan’s Division. Along with African-American comrades like Scipio Dodge, Nathaniel Small, Hannibal, and other black soldiers, Private Pompey Blackman, around age twenty, served in Colonel Loammi Baldwin’s Twenty-Sixth Massachusetts Continental Regiment, which was now part of Washington’s task force. Freed by his dying master, Nathan Wyman, of Woburn, Massachusetts, Blackman then settled down in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1773 as a free man. At Lexington, which sent eight other of her patriotic African-American sons to the front as fighting men, Blackman lived in the home of a white man who had “taken” him in. Blasting away with his trusty flintlock as a Massachusetts Minuteman, Blackman had harassed the withdrawing British column on the road back to Boston’s safety after the initial April 1775 clashes at Lexington and Concord.30

  The Twenty-Sixth Massachusetts Continental Regiment had been raised in early 1776 and consisted of 113 men on this Christmas Day of destiny far from New England. They had been initially uniformed in brown coats, which served as a natural camouflage amid autumn’s hues, in contrast to the traditional Continental blue. Ironically, these crack soldiers of the grenadier companies of Baldwin’s veteran regiment wore tall miter caps, distinctive headgear comparable to Rall’s H
essians. Because grenadiers were generally taller than other regimental members, these men stood out from their comrades of the Twenty-Sixth Massachusetts, which now served in Glover’s New England brigade of four Massachusetts and one Connecticut regiment. The elevated brass front piece of this Hessian-style mitre cap worn by Baldwin’s elite grenadiers was distinguished by the fancy scroll letters, “GW,” which appropriately stood for George Washington. Baldwin’s highly disciplined regiment, therefore, was known as the “George Washington Regiment.” Even more ironic, these Bay State soldiers now carried English muskets, stamped with the royal crown, which had been captured by a wide-ranging Marblehead privateer, which had surprised a British ordnance store ship in November 1775.31