Add to this want of provisions, hunger, thirst, frost, heat, dampness, anxiety, want, afflictions and lamentations, together with other trouble, as e.g., the lice abound so frightfully, especially on sick people, that they can be scraped off the body. The misery reaches a climax when a gale rages for two or three nights and days, so that every one believes that the ship will go to the bottom with all human beings on board. In such a visitation the people cry and pray most piteously.
But deprivation is nothing new to Benjamin Franklin. Earlier in 1776, he made his horrific journey to Canada and back, braving deep snows and numbing cold to further the cause of American independence. His lone souvenir from that arduous mission was a marten fur cap, which proved useful in warming his bald head.
Franklin in his famous cap
Now it is the end of this grueling journey from America to France, a passage so emotionally and physically draining that almost a decade later Franklin will still remember it vividly as the trip that “almost demolished me.”
The fur cap has come in handy during the many bitter cold days and nights on deck. It is fast becoming Franklin’s trademark—indeed, it will soon become the talk of Paris, igniting a fashion craze all its own.
But on this windy late afternoon, Franklin is a long way from Paris. He and his grandsons step off the small fishing boat and onto the streets of a fishing village named Auray.4 Franklin and the boys are just happy to be on land, and quickly send for a carriage so that they can continue their journey to the French capital.
Benjamin Franklin is a man with little to lose. His wife is dead, his daughter-in-law is dying from “accumulated distress,” and his illegitimate son is in prison.5 His adopted hometown, Philadelphia, has grown to a city of thirty thousand people, most of whom want Benjamin Franklin to do something for them. So, now, in a new country, the Doctor sees many possibilities.
Franklin’s only emotional anchors are his grandsons, William Temple Franklin and Benjamin Franklin Bache. By taking them to France, the Doctor hopes to protect them from the dangers of war, while simultaneously providing them with a traditional European education. Or, as he wrote to his son William prior to the trip, “This is the time of life in which you are to lay the foundations of your future improvement.”
Benjamin Franklin still grieves the heartbreaking loss of his once-beloved son William to the royalist cause. And each day, he lives with the knowledge that he has condemned his boy to a hideous life in prison. But now, in France, far away from the chaos of the American Revolution, he hopes that his grandsons will prosper. It is common knowledge that the British would gladly kidnap the relatives of the rebel leadership and hold them hostage.
France is Benjamin Franklin’s new life. The young grandsons, Temple and Benny, as he calls them, are now the only family that matters.
* * *
For his part, Reprisal captain Lambert Wickes is happy to see Franklin and his grandsons go. Soon, Wickes will sell the cargo he has acquired from the two British merchant ships, and the Reprisal will resume terrorizing any English vessels she encounters.6
Wickes is a daring captain and will now prowl the English Channel in search of confrontation.
Meanwhile, on French soil, Benjamin Franklin is being watched. British spies will soon inform London that he has succeeded in his journey. Although he is an object of derision in England, Franklin, King George knows, is a threat. He must not succeed in convincing the French to join the American fight.
But Benjamin Franklin has already succeeded, simply by arriving in Paris. His presence is proof that the Americans are willing to take their message of independence globally—and perhaps also to start a new world war in the process. This is a threat that the British take most seriously.
The killing of England now begins in earnest.
Yet, despite Franklin’s new age of diplomacy, nothing happens.
America, and George Washington, stand alone, powerless.
12
UPPER MAKEFIELD TOWNSHIP, PENNSYLVANIA
DECEMBER 15, 1776
1:00 P.M.
George Washington is desperate.
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” pamphlet writer Thomas Paine will soon write, summing up Washington’s seemingly hopeless situation.1
Now, a lone horseman gallops up the lane to the general’s headquarters in a Pennsylvania farmhouse.2 On this freezing morning, Washington is glad for the warmth provided by a stone fireplace taller than a man. Through the three large bay windows facing the main road, he can see that the rider’s boots and coats are slick with mud, the obvious result of a hard, cold gallop over winter roads. It is Sunday morning, normally a time of ease, but today fear and anxiety grip General Washington. These “express riders” seldom bring good news, so the mere sight of the messenger chills the colonial leader.
LEGEND HERE
Washington does not know how much more bad news he can take.
It has been a year and a half since His Excellency assumed command of the Continental Army. After the early promise of his success in Boston, the past three months have seen one setback after another. In a disastrous battle on November 16, British forces captured the vital stronghold of Fort Washington, overlooking the Hudson River, taking 2,800 rebels prisoner. Three days later, the British crossed the Hudson to capture a second waterfront citadel, named Fort Lee, sending Washington’s army into full retreat to escape annihilation.3 The rebel troops did not halt until they had pulled back all the way across New Jersey, over the Delaware River, and into the thick woods of the Pennsylvania countryside.
Right now, George Washington desperately needs his top commander, General Charles Lee, to march his army south from the center of New Jersey to reunite with Washington’s command. Lee claims to have thousands of men at his disposal, so the combined numbers of their troops might be enough for the rebels to launch a surprise offensive into British lines.
After the disastrous New York campaign, such thinking is foolhardy, but Washington believes that now is the time for daring—this despite the fact that his own command is smaller than Lee’s. Alarmingly, hundreds of Washington’s troops are deserting, returning to their homes rather than endure another freezing night in a makeshift camp, and sure death at the hands of the approaching British.
Throughout the colonies, it is becoming a common belief that the war is lost. Just two weeks ago, on November 30, the British offered a complete pardon to all colonists who would pledge their “peaceable obedience” and complete allegiance to the king. Thousands of citizens are coming forth to take this pledge, putting Washington and the Continental Army in the dangerous role of possibly being the enemy to their own countrymen.
But George Washington refuses to give up. He has no definitive reconnaissance, but he believes that his longtime adversary, General William Howe, stands poised on the opposite side of the Delaware River, ready to invade Pennsylvania. Washington has taken the extraordinary step of destroying boats on the New Jersey side of the river for sixty miles up and down the Delaware, but still he fears that Howe will find a way to cross. A heavy freeze has just set in, with the promise of a hard storm from the northeast soon to bring snow and frigid temperatures. Should the Delaware harden to ice, as it is does each winter, Howe will simply march his men and cannon across the frozen surface.
Then comes good news.
American troops under General Lee are on the march, headed toward Washington. When Lee arrives—today, it is hoped—the colonial forces will be doubled. Indeed, an optimistic Washington is even pondering a surprise offensive when that reunion takes place.
“We have three thousand men here at present,” Lee wrote to Washington just days ago, once again finding a way to slow down his march. “But they are so ill-shod that we have been obliged to halt these two days for lack of shoes.”
Washington is impatient for Lee’s arrival, but just as aware that blending the two commands will bring headaches. The British-born Lee considers himself superior to Washington,
and often ignores orders. Over the last week, Washington has repeatedly pleaded for Lee to make haste for his headquarters, but the general has not listened, and has complained about Washington in letters to other American leaders.
As of five days ago, their forces were just fifty miles apart. Just yesterday, Washington sent a messenger to Lee: “I have so frequently mentioned our situation, and the necessity of your aid, that it is painful to me to add a word upon the subject. Let me once more request and entreat you to march immediately.”
Now, with the sun already fading in the early afternoon, the lone rider dismounts. Shaking off the cold, he tethers his horse and marches up the steps and into the farmhouse, where he hands a missive to a member of Washington’s staff. The message is then hand-delivered to Washington, who is sitting inside.
The news could not be worse.
* * *
Two days earlier, General Charles Lee is sitting down to breakfast at ten o’clock in the morning. It is Friday the thirteenth, and the tavern in which he has spent the night smells of last night’s spilled beer and unwashed patrons. A dozen men stand guard outside to protect Lee. Nineteen-year-old major James Wilkinson, an aide to American general Horatio Gates, stands near the window, waiting impatiently for Lee to complete a letter to Wilkinson’s superior so that the young man might return with it to Gates’s headquarters. The general is on the march now from the Hudson River Valley south to Washington’s location.4
But the widow White’s tavern is three long miles away from his army. Lee left his troops last night in search of paid female companionship, which he found at the tavern. The weather has turned brutally cold, with snow flurries and frost covering the ground at night. So even as Lee’s soldiers, many barefoot and ill, huddle close to their campfires to keep from freezing to death, their leader has slept in a warm bed. He has enjoyed the hot meals, fine Madeira wine, and other pleasures of this small roadside inn. And rather than rise at dawn to resume his march toward Washington, he slept until Wilkinson roused him at 8:00 a.m.
Although refreshed, Lee is in a foul mood, having just spent an hour lambasting an ineffective group of cavalry officers from Connecticut who showed up for their meeting in dress uniform and ceremonial wigs, a situation the crusty Lee found foolish under the circumstances. A half-written letter to his confidant, American general Horatio Gates, lies on the table before him. Lee’s white shirt is open at the neck, wrinkled and yellowing. The general wears slippers but not a hat, and instead of his uniform jacket, he is covered with a thick “blanket coat” to keep warm.
In his letter to Gates—also not a fan of George Washington—Lee labels His Excellency as “damnable deficient.”
“He has thrown me into a situation where I have my choice of difficulties,” Lee tells Gates. “If I stay in this province, I risk myself and army; and if I do not stay, the province is lost.”
Suddenly, Major Wilkinson cries out in surprise. “Here, sir, are the British cavalry.”
“Where?” Lee demands, hastily signing the letter.
“Around the house,” Wilkinson replies in terror, witnessing for himself that a group of British soldiers has quickly charged up the lane and surrounded the tavern.
“Where is the guard?” Lee demands. “Damn the guard. Why don’t they open fire?”
But two of the guards are already dead. The rest are running for their lives.
The British cavalry opens fire on the tavern “through every window and every door,” in the words of one of their junior officers, an impudent twenty-two-year-old dragoon from Liverpool named Banastre Tarleton. The British commander, Lt. Col. William Harcourt, has ordered his men to “cut up as many of the [American] guard as they could.”5
The widow White, fearful that her tavern will be destroyed, runs to the door and screams to the British that Lee is inside.
Harcourt immediately orders his men to cease fire, wanting to capture Lee alive. “If the general does not surrender in five minutes, I will set fire to the house,” he informs the widow. “I give my solemn oath.”
Two minutes later, not even taking the time to get properly dressed, General Charles Lee gives himself up.
A cowering Wilkinson, who has found a place to evade capture, bears witness. “Lee, mounted on my horse, which stood ready at the door, was hurried off in triumph, bareheaded, in his slippers and blanket coat, his collar open, and his shirt very much soiled from several days’ use.”
A month later, when word of Lee’s capture reaches London, bells will be rung in joyful celebration. The Hessians in America will celebrate as well, believing Lee “the only rebel general we have cause to fear.”
It is the news of Lee’s capture that General Washington receives at 1:00 p.m. on December 15. Almost immediately, a thoroughly disheartened Washington takes quill to paper to put his fears into words.
“The game,” Washington admits to his younger brother back home in Virginia, “is pretty near up.”6
* * *
Word of Lee’s capture is immediately messaged to Gen. William Howe. Believing that the rebel army is now shattered, and knowing that winter would make roads impassable and encampment unhealthy, he quartered small garrisons in a number of towns in New Jersey along the main route from New York to Philadelphia, then removed his own headquarters to New York City. There, Howe’s blond, blue-eyed mistress from Boston, Elizabeth Loring, awaits him; and he is eager to return to her. Saturday morning, one day after Lee’s capture and a day before Washington gets the news, General Howe saddles his horse for the trip to New York. He is accompanied by his top general, Charles Cornwallis, who plans to sail home to England to be with his ill wife until hostilities resume in the spring.
But George Washington knows nothing of these movements. New Jersey is so rife with Loyalists that his spy network is unable to send him reliable reconnaissance. So, rather than settle into a winter camp of his own, he maintains his defensive stance, believing that his army is all that prevents the British from capturing Philadelphia. Congress is also convinced of this and has already fled the city to conduct business in Baltimore.
When Washington finally receives word of Howe’s departure from the battlefield, he doesn’t accept it. Instead, reflecting on the stealthy British tactics used on Long Island, Washington thinks Howe’s retreat is a ruse—he knows that a Hessian force numbering almost fifteen hundred men still remains on the opposite side of the Delaware, defending the city of Trenton.
Even when the remnants of Lee’s army, now numbering just two thousand men, finally arrive to join his force, Washington frets. The terms of the Continental Army’s enlistment contracts stipulate that every single soldier will be free to return to his home as of January 1, 1777. With the war going badly, there will be no reason for his troops to risk their lives by reenlisting. In effect, George Washington is just two weeks away from having no army at all.
He must, therefore, find a way to keep the rebellion alive. He knows he must accomplish a “brilliant stroke [to] rouse the spirits of our people, which are quite sunk by our misfortunes.”
* * *
Throughout the United States of America, and in London and Paris, the thoughts of men, women, and children now turn to Christmas. It will be a time to set the war aside, if only for a day, to celebrate goodwill, hope, and love.
But General Washington is not of that mind-set. As the days until Christmas count down, he hatches a bold plan.
Instead of goodwill, hope, and love, George Washington foresees a Christmas full of carnage, mayhem, and brutal death.
The battle password to be used by the Continental Army consists of three short words that summarize not just Washington’s state of mind but the very future of the nation: “Victory or Death.”
* * *
On Christmas night, a hard winter gale lashes George Washington as he steps into the black Durham boat that will carry him across the Delaware River. It is just past midnight, and Washington’s plan is to launch a surprise attack on Trenton, ferrying his e
ntire army across the swift and wide waterway in the dead of night, then marching ten miles to the Hessian lines. Spies have already informed the enemy of Washington’s plans, but the attack is so far-fetched that the Hessian commander, Col. Johann Rall, is making no plans to oppose the crossing.
“Let them come,” he has responded to the spy. As usual, Rall is drinking and playing cards as he assesses the situation. “We will go at them with the bayonet.”
Unlike in Brooklyn, where men fought to get into the boats in their eagerness to retreat, Washington’s soldiers now wait patiently for their turn to climb aboard the large vessel and begin their assault. Many stand by campfires, burning every available piece of wood to keep warm. “When I turned my face to the fire, my back would be freezing,” one soldier would write. “By turning round and round I kept myself from perishing.”
The Delaware River is filled with jagged chunks of ice carried along by a raging current. Under normal conditions, that hazard would be difficult enough. But “a perfect hurricane” also now blows, stinging the men’s faces with snow, sleet, and rain. The soldiers will stand in the flat-bottomed boats, squeezed tightly together as they are rowed across by the same Massachusetts seamen who saved them after the debacle in Brooklyn. Normally used to carry ore, these high-sided boats are strong enough to hold forty men per load—indeed, artillery pieces and horses will also make the crossing. But should one of the Durhams strike ice or otherwise be tipped by the abominable conditions, every man aboard will perish. The water is simply too cold and too fast to attempt a rescue.
Washington is among the first to cross. He stands in the pointed bow of the boat throughout the journey, his black cape pulled tightly around his shoulders. When the boat reaches the other side, he sits down on a frozen beehive to supervise the unloading of his men. The Continental Army is crossing in three different locations up and down the river, with his group at McKonkey’s Ferry, north of Trenton.
Killing England Page 12