Crossing the ice-choked Delaware at night in three different places, and then marching in the dark to Trenton to surprise a professional Hessian military unit (among the finest in Europe) was an act of absolute desperation.
Some of the desperation was captured in the password for that night: “Victory or death.” Washington understood this was potentially the last gamble of the Revolution.
Washington also understood the importance of morale and the power of a small number of determined people. Therefore he had Thomas Paine’s new pamphlet, The American Crisis, read to his men as they boarded the boats that night.
One of the most interesting characteristics of the American Revolution is the wide range of personalities engaged. From the permanently optimistic Ben Franklin, to the disciplined John Adams, to his fiery cousin Sam Adams, to the intellectual Virginia planter Thomas Jefferson, there was an extraordinary diversity of personalities and backgrounds brought together in response to the perceived threat of British tyranny.
There may have been no greater contrast than that between General George Washington and the gifted propagandist Thomas Paine. Paine was from the poor neighborhoods of London. He was a natural revolutionary, deeply resentful of the wealthy and secure. Washington was probably the largest landowner in the colonies; a man of impeccable rectitude, considerable formality, and an intense, disciplined work ethic.
The two could hardly have been more different in their background and temperament, and yet they came together in a moment of need to inspire a movement of determined men with the energy, the conviction, and the courage needed to win despite all the odds.
No one should underestimate how great the odds were against Washington, the Founding Fathers, and the American Revolution succeeding.
There was no reason to believe the American Revolution would survive.
There was no reason to believe it would find a leader so patient, so determined, so disciplined, and so noble that his men would stick with him through defeat after defeat and that a Republic could be built on the shoulders of his moral force.
George Washington faced an almost impossible task, and the odds were overwhelming that he would lose. The British had grown used to winning. They had crushed the last Irish rebellion in 1693. They had crushed the last Scots rebellion in 1745. They were used to peasant uprisings in rural England and routinely used the army to suppress the rabbles who dared break the law.
British arrogance and self-confidence had been vastly strengthened by the triple realities of commercial mercantile wealth, the even greater wealth of the early industrial revolution, and by having the most powerful navy in history.
The commercial mercantile revolution itself was a byproduct of the dominance of the Royal Navy. From sugar plantations in the West Indies, to the African slave trade, to the spices of Asia, the British merchant fleet was the largest and most profitable in the world. It existed in the protective shadow of the Royal Navy’s dominance over all other navies combined.
The wealth, which had been coming from trade, was in the eighteenth century rapidly being augmented (and then overshadowed) by the enormous opportunities of the industrial revolution. From the early eighteenth-century invention of the steam engine (applied initially to pump water out of coal mines) to the rise of railroads, which were initially horse drawn, as efficient methods of moving coal, to a huge canal system (which still exists and on which Steve Hanser has navigated on vacation with great enjoyment) there was an explosion of practical invention and production, which was rapidly making Great Britain the wealthiest and most productive country in the world.
Finally there was military power.
The British Empire was at its peak. Just a decade earlier (in 1763) its French rival had conceded defeat in a seven-year world war. From North America (where Washington had played a role) to India to Europe and across the world’s oceans the British and French Empires had collided in an all-out struggle for supremacy.
After a period of defeat the British switched leaders and elevated William Pitt, the Great Commoner, to be wartime prime minister. In a brief intense period of extraordinary leadership and decisive risk-taking (comparable to Churchill in World War II, but stunningly more successful), Pitt gambled again and again on brave leaders who forged victory. In 1759 Britain won a series of miraculous victories in India, Canada, and in the West Indies; terming it the Annus Mirabilus.
After the extraordinary worldwide exertion of the Seven Years’ War, the British Parliament and taxpayers felt entitled to have a little help from the Americans. The London elites reasoned that they had spent all that money building an army and navy to protect North America. Now that the French had been defeated and had surrendered Canada to Great Britain, the Americans were safe.
It was now time for the American colonists to pay for their own safety.
There have been few moments of misunderstanding more decisive and more radical than that between the British elites and their American colonists in 1770.
The elites in London felt they were, well, “elite.”
The colonists in America felt they were “free and equal Englishmen under the law.”
The British elites sought to impose their will on the colonists in what they thought was a reasonable action by a naturally governing empire.
The American colonists resisted what they saw as a mortal threat to their very freedom and identity.
Modern cynics find it hard to understand the moral power of the American Revolution.
This was not just a fight over economics.
This was a fight over fundamental rights.
This was a battle of life and death over the nature and meaning of the American personality.
“Live free or die” was not just the slogan of New Hampshire. It was the way many——not all, probably only a third, but a deeply committed one third——Americans felt about what was happening.
It was this sense of fighting for their lives and their very freedom that impelled the colonists to more and more extreme measures.
The British elites believed this was a conflict about money and about minor irritations. They simply could not believe the colonists were serious about their rights as free men and women.
Thus when they sought to impose a tax on tea the British elites thought they could cleverly reduce the burden by granting the East India Company a monopoly so the price of tea would actually drop.
It was an enormous shock in London when Samuel Adams and his friends launched the original Tea Party in December 1773 and threw the tea into Boston Harbor.
Principle, not price, was the American objection to the tea tax.
No taxation without representation was a serious, life or death belief of those colonists who were finding themselves increasingly at odds with London.
The second great threat to American liberty was the power of the British judges and the dictatorial way in which they wielded that power.
Anger over the judges and a demand for trial by jury (so local citizens as jurors could set aside the judge’s power) was the second greatest demand of the colonists.
This objection to the arbitrary power of the British elites grew gradually.
It was said that Benjamin Franklin went to London as an Englishman and after years of living there came back to Pennsylvania as an American. He had concluded that the British aristocracy would never admit him to their ranks and never treat him as an equal. He would spend the rest of his life teaching them how wrong they had been and how expensive arrogance and haughtiness could be.
The colonists initially had no thought of independence. They saw themselves as Englishmen defending their historic rights against a dictatorial government. Had the British elites listened to the complaints and analyzed the logic behind them they might have found a constitutional compromise in 1774. However when they decided to disarm the Americans by marching to Lexington and Concord to seize the militia’s arms, they began a process of alienation, which seemed to inexorably lead to a crisis of ident
ity.
In 1775 the Americans were frightened and threatened by the British military response, but they still responded as loyal subjects petitioning the king to intervene and create a new framework for peacefully living together.
However at each stage, as the British increased their military presence, the Americans increased their preparations for resistance.
The British occupation of Boston led to an outcry in all thirteen colonies. If the British could militarily occupy Boston and suspend the rights of Englishmen they could occupy any part of the Americas.
The threat to one had become a threat to all.
In response to the British challenge in New England, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia sought a unifying symbol. They found that symbol, and the instrument that would lead to victory, in the only man in the Congress who was wearing a military uniform.
Colonel Washington of the Virginia militia was one of the tallest men in the Continental Congress. He did not offer to be the military leader, but he did wear his uniform every day. He exuded calm and confidence. He had quite a remarkable number of experiences in the West (meaning western Virginia and western Pennsylvania) during the French and Indian Wars (as the Seven Years’ War was known in America).
Colonel Washington had read quite a number of books on military matters. A leader as a young man he was now at the peak of his physical strength. Widely known as the best horseman in the colonies, Washington was so strong he could break a walnut between his thumb and first finger.
Washington represented stability, discipline, calm, determination, and martial knowledge. He also represented Virginia, which was the most important colony. If he went to New England he would single-handedly symbolize the resolve of all the colonies to come to the aid of New England.
In the months after the British occupation of Boston, the patriots went from exhilarating victory as the British sailed away, to exhausting administrative detail, to a brilliant forced march to Long Island (where he had correctly deduced the British would come next).
And then defeat after defeat and calamity after calamity.
It is at the nadir of the Revolution, the depth of defeat and despair, on a cold winter night during a bleak Christmas that we join General Washington and his diminished and demoralized but determined army on the banks of the Delaware.
CHAPTER ONE
Christmas Night
McConkey’s Ferry, Pennsylvania
Nine Miles North of Trenton, New Jersey
December 25, 1776
4:30 P.M.
Cold.
It is so cold, so damnably cold, he thought, pulling his hat lower in an attempt to shield his face from the wind and the driving rain.
His woolen cape was soaked through, water coursing down his neck, his uniform already clammy. Though his knee-high boots were of the finest calfskin, they were soaked as well and his pants sopping wet halfway up the thigh as a result of his having slipped several times walking along the banks of the flood-swollen Delaware River.
Another gust of wind out of the east kicked up spray that stung his face, and he turned his back as it swept by, roaring through the treetops and up the ridge on the Pennsylvania side of the river.
“This damn storm will play hell with moving the artillery across.”
General George Washington, commander of what had once been so valiantly called the Continental Army of the United States of America, turned toward the speaker, his artillery chief, Colonel Henry Knox. Rotund at what had to be three hundred pounds and powerful looking, towering several inches over Washington’s six foot, two inches, the artilleryman was shivering, his spectacles misted by the rain. Knox looked pathetic, this bookseller turned warrior who should have been in his store in Boston, resting by a crackling fire rather than out on an evening such as this.
“They’ll cross. They have to cross,” Washington replied calmly. “This wind is just as cold for the Hessians as it is for us. They may not be very good at picketing in this kind of storm.”
He wondered if Knox and the others gathered nearby, Generals Stirling and Greene, their orderlies and staff, were waiting for the most obvious of orders on a night like this, just waiting for him to sigh and say, “Return the men to their encampments.”
He shook his head, shoulders hunched against the spates of rain, which were turning to sleet.
He looked across the river, to the east, to the Jersey shore.
In his haunted memories, memories that did indeed haunt, he could see that other river bordering New Jersey sixty miles to the east . . . the Hudson, and just beyond the Hudson . . . the East River.
Merciful God, was it but five months ago we were arrayed there in our proud defiance?
Another gust swept across the Delaware, but this time he did not turn away from it.
How hot it had been during those days of August. How proud we were. How proud and confident I was, he thought. He shook his head at the memory of it. Our victory at Boston and the British withdrawal from that port had misled all of us into an absurd overconfidence. We had marched to New York in anticipation of the next British move with the satisfaction of having driven off the army of the most powerful country in the world and were expecting to do so again with ease.
On the very day that the Declaration was read publicly for the first time, the vanguard of King George’s reply was coasting Long Island, bearing toward New York’s outer harbor.
He had second-guessed the move months before, and so had moved his army, fresh from their triumph at Boston, on the long march south to defend New York.
Filled with confidence, so many had boasted that if the British and their hireling Germans, commonly called Hessians, did attempt to return there, this new army of America would make short work of them.
Arriving in New York the Continentals had set to work with vigor, building bastions, fortifications, and strongpoints, ringing the harbor with hundreds of guns and near to thirty thousand troops.
Most of the troops he had commanded during the long siege of Boston had been New Englanders. It had been a difficult command and one, at first, not easily accepted. The men of Massachusetts felt one of their own should be in command, for, after all, was it not their state that had stood up first, and was it not their state where the battle was being fought?
It had taken the utmost of tact to manage them in a situation that would have caused any regular officer of the British army to howl with rage or derision or both. Yet manage them he did, slowly earning their begrudging respect.
As they set to work building their fortifications around New York Harbor, reinforcements flooded in from the other states, transforming the army. There were tough backwoodsmen from the frontiers of Pennsylvania, western New York, Virginia, and the Carolinas joining spit-and-polish regiments from the tidewater of Chesapeake Bay and unruly militia by the thousands from Jersey, lower New York, and Connecticut.
His army swelled until there were more men than the entire population of Philadelphia, America’s most populous city. The worry then, added to when the invasion would strike, was simply keeping so many men fed, housed, and healthy and not at each other’s throats. As to the feeding and housing, the need had been met, for the countryside was rich; supplies could be floated down the Hudson Valley and drawn in from the fertile Jersey countryside. As to health, that soon broke down as it would in almost any army that stayed in camp. Smallpox struck thousands, and hundreds perished, but such was to be expected even in the best tended of armies. As to stopping the men from going at each other’s throats, that had proven near impossible at times.
Though he would never admit it within the hearing of a single living soul, the New Englanders struck him as a haughty and ill-bred lot, lacking in the refinements a gentleman planter of Virginia expected of them. He was not the only person in the command to carry such feelings, and nearly all others expressed them openly, vocally, and at times violently. He actually started to pray that the British would return, and soon, for, if not, the army might
very well rend itself apart.
And they had come, as if in answer to that prayer, and proved reality a curse.
In the first week of July the vanguard appeared; in the next weeks, more and yet more——ships of the line, frigates, fast sloops and brigs, supply ships——and then the transports brought regiment after regiment of England’s finest. How ironic that with each passing day he could ride down to the narrows between Long Island and Staten Island and with telescope watch the ranks disembarking onto Staten Island. Regimental standards he remembered with such admiration from the last war floated on the breeze, and when the wind came from the west he could even hear their bands playing. And alongside men who were once old comrades were the blue uniforms of the regiments from Hesse and Hanover, men who at first were merely scorned, but soon would be feared by every man in his army.
The Howe brothers, Richard in command of the navy, William the army, had made their arrangements in a ponderous, leisurely fashion, the intent obvious, to overawe before the first shot was fired. There had even been diplomatic protocols observed, of offers of reconciliation if only Washington and his rabble would ground arms, renew allegiance to the king, and return peaceably to their homes.
The offers, of course, had been met with scorn and contempt. Officers around him had boasted that once swords were crossed, it would be the British who begged for mercy; before summer was out the entire lot of them would be sent packing to their humiliated master, George the Third.
Another gust of wind swept in from across the frozen plains of New Jersey, racing across the river, causing him to shiver again as the frigid rain lashed his face.
Few boasted now, few indeed.
This day, Christmas Day, had dawned clear and cold, the ground frozen, dusted with a light coating of snow. With a moon near full tonight, the weather at first appeared to be perfect for this move, roads frozen solid, light from the moon to guide them . . . and then by midday the harbingers of what was coming appeared. Glover’s Marblehead men, checking their boats, would raise their heads and in their nearly incomprehensible New England dialect pronounce that a regular “nor’easter was comin’.”
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