First of Men

by Ferling, John;

  Washington could not have been unaware of complaints behind his back. He was hardly a novice to the politics of command; besides, with the pernicious setbacks of the past ninety days, it was too much to hope that the doubters and the quick-fix artists would not be set in motion. But Reed? The man he had repeatedly beseeched to join him? This young man whom he had looked upon almost as a son? The man whose rise he had overseen from the status of an amanuensis to a colonel? This bright, garrulous young man with whom he had been so uncharacteristically informal during those long evenings outside Boston? If not Reed, whom could he trust? Was a conspiracy afoot? Was Lee, the hyperactive warrior now given so suddenly to immobility, part of a plot? He long since had concluded that Lee was fickle. But Reed?41 More hurt than angry, he forwarded Lee’s letter to Reed, accompanying it with a note of his own that must have been devastating for what was left unsaid:

  The enclosed was put into my hands by an Express from White Plains. Having no Idea of its being a Private Letter, much less suspecting the tendency of the correspondence, I opened it, as I have done all other Letters to you, from the same place. . . .

  This, as it is the truth, must be my excuse for seeing the contents of a Letter, which neither my inclination or intention would have prompted my to.

  I thank you for the trouble and fatigue you have undergone in your Journey to Burlington.42

  Dissatisfied with the nature of his post and desperately lonely for his wife, Reed had planned an imminent retirement from the army, vowing, in fact, to quit when that autumn’s campaign ended. But now it no longer appeared that the British would retire to winter quarters any time soon. Late in November the Earl of Cornwallis moved out in pursuit of the Continental army, and at Newark he nearly caught up with his prey, for the British army entered the north side of the village while Washington was exiting on the south side. The American commander reeled backwards, passing through New Brunswick and on to the south side of still another river, the Raritan. Reed did not wish to quit while fighting persisted. Moreover, to resign at the moment that his disingenuous and ambiguous behavior had been discovered, a time when Washington probably looked upon him as a blackguard, would constitute political suicide.43

  Thus, as soon as his business in Burlington was completed, Reed hurried north to see Washington. It must have been an awkward, painful meeting for both men, the one both embarrassed and heartsick at his unmasking, the other a proud but insecure man. Washington welcomed Reed back, yet the relationship was no longer the same. One man seemed too submissive, the other too wary. But Reed was only a part, a small part, of Washington’s troubles that December.44

  “The movements and designs of the Enemy are not yet understood,” General Washington reported to Congress a few hours before the assault on Fort Washington. Two weeks later he informed the legislators that the redcoats had crossed the Passaic and were “advancing this way,” that is, in the general direction of Philadelphia and the Congress. Necessity had compelled him to retreat, he added, as his force was “by no means sufficient to make a stand against the Enemy”; besides, his army was devoid of entrenching tools, a deficiency that would make a fight on this “dead Flat” terrain suicidal.45

  Whatever he had suggested in September after the debacle on Long Island, Washington’s decision to pursue a Fabian strategy of cautious retreat was made only after the collapse of the fortress on Mount Washington. He did not abandon Fort Lee and retreat quickly enough to avoid still another calamity, however. Nearly a week after the loss of the first bastion overlooking the Hudson, the British seized the second fort as well, taking that one without a fight; the Americans had removed some of their equipment before their adversary arrived, but still they lost all but two cannon, nearly three hundred precious blankets, and a huge quantity of flour.46

  Washington’s first step thereafter had been to cross the Passaic, lest he be caught between that stream and the Hackensack. At Brunswick he united his exiguous force with that under Lord Stirling. Almost every step of the way he had been appealing for militia reinforcements. And he had ordered Lee to move to the south. Again and again, in fact, he directed that capricious warrior to move out. “I confess I expected you would have been sooner in motion,” he wrote a week after sending his initial orders. Four days later: “I must entreat you to hasten your march.” After another forty-eight hours: “You will readily agree that I have sufficient cause for my anxiety and to wish your arrival as early as possible.” A week later: “Genl. Howe is pressing forward. . . . I cannot but request and entreat you . . . to march and join me . . . with all possible expedition.” The next day: “I must therefore entreat you to push on with every possible succor you can bring.” Three days later: “it is painful to me to add [another] Word upon the Subject. Let me once more request and entreat you to march immediately. . . .”47 Where was this indolent, torpid soldier?

  Washington can be excused if he suspected the worst in Lee’s behavior. Given his discovery of Lee’s contentious comments to Reed, and now his apparent dalliance, it would not have been surprising had he believed some sinister motive lay behind his behavior. Yet, if he did think such dark thoughts he did not share them with anyone, and to Congress he simply, coolly, remarked on Lee’s absence, letting just a hint of his agitation show through. Actually, Lee’s failure to join Washington was innocent enough—up to a point. Some confusion initially occurred over Washington’s orders, not an uncommon phenomenon when commands had to be relayed by courier over hundreds of miles; then a shortage of shoes and blankets delayed Lee. Even so, his men were marching within five days of the receipt of Washington’s first directive. But when Lee entered New Jersey he took matters in his own hands, preferring to assault the rear of the pursuing redcoat army. There was logic to his idea, inasmuch as he hoped to induce the British to abandon the chase; if trouble occurred, moreover, he easily could reach the security of the Jersey highlands to the west. There was one problem, however. He was disobeying the orders of his commander.

  On December 13—Friday the 13th—matters were resolved. The night before, not wishing to remain with his army, Lee opted to sojourn in a tavern at Basking Ridge. He took along fifteen men to serve as his personal guard, but they were not enough. A British scouting party of twenty-five, tipped off to Lee’s whereabouts by some captured American sentries, surrounded the inn, overpowered his guard, and at 10:00 A.M.—two hours after his army had begun its daily march—captured the uncharacteristically stationary general. For good or ill Washington had not only lost Lee but was left with no choice but to elevate Lee’s second in command, General Sullivan. At least that officer brought his new army to Washington within a week.48

  If the mercurial Lee had moved slowly, Washington’s salvation may have been that his British pursuers acted with almost equal sluggishness. Cornwallis had been sent after Washington on November 18 with forty-five hundred men. Formally trained at the military academy in Turin, a man with considerable battlefield experience in the Seven Years’ War, Cornwallis seemed the perfect choice to shadow the elusive American general. Upon entering New Jersey his first target had been Fort Lee, and once it was taken he had moved out with dispatch in pursuit of Washington. It was a game of chase. Washington actually had more troops than his foe when Cornwallis’s stalking began; but many of the American soldiers looked forward to the expiration of their enlistments within only four or five days, and numerous others were untested militiamen. For a week Cornwallis pushed his men to the point of exhaustion, often marching them twenty or more miles a day; by then even his horses were weary, and without his equine corps he would be devoid of artillery and dragoons. On December I he reached New Brunswick just as Washington quit the town; the American’s destination now was Trenton.

  Cornwallis went no further. Not only did everyone need a breather, his orders were to break off the hunt at this point. The British force bivouacked in the little village for nearly a week, until Howe joined them, then they again set out after Washington. They almost bagged two Americ
an brigades at Princeton, but the Continentals barely slithered away just before the British arrived. Howe and Cornwallis entered Princeton, and, incredibly, they paused there; even more amazingly, they did not even resume their march until after 9:00 the following morning. Obviously Howe was back in command. When they finally got started the redcoats moved very slowly, partly because they feared an ambush, partly because the retreating Americans had laid waste to every bridge along the way. Howe finally arrived in Trenton at 2:00 P.M., just in time to see the last of his adversary escape across the Delaware River.49

  For the moment Washington’s army was safe. He posted brigades at the four most likely river crossings; in addition, his men had secured or destroyed every vessel in sight, and every bridge across the river had been blown up. But Washington was not sanguine. He suspected that Howe planned to march on Philadelphia, and he told Lund Washington back at Mount Vernon that he had “no idea of being able to make a stand” to stop him. Howe could easily obtain vessels—there were plenty of boats left on the Raritan for British use, one generally reliable Loyalist later wrote, adding that there was enough wire and planks in Trenton to build a whole flotilla—and cross the river upstream. Or Howe could await a hard freeze and simply send his men over that natural bridge. “[W]e wander in a Wilderness of uncertainties and difficulty,” General Washington lamented, straits made even more troublesome by still another year-end recruiting crisis.50

  In the space of two weeks between late November and early December Washington’s force shrank by almost one quarter. The arrival of Sullivan helped somewhat, but it did not solve the problem. The commander summoned General Heath and his army from the Highlands; the Flying Camp also had been brought forward, and he requisitioned General Gates and some of the contingents that he had sent to Schuyler some months before. Congress sought to help too by offering bounties to those who enlisted in the Continental army. Mostly, however, the militia would have to be used to augment his army. Washington was not optimistic. Already he had called for help from New Jersey’s trainbandsmen, and the results had been spectacularly unsuccessful. In fact, he charged that if that state’s militia had turned out in adequate numbers he could have made a stand against the British advance either at the Hackensack or the Raritan. Nevertheless, Mifflin had garnered several Pennsylvania units totaling about two thousand men. Yet these actions were merely stopgap measures. In “10 days more ... an end to the existence of our Army” will occur, he reported on December 20, alluding to the end-of-the-year expiration date for most enlistments. Thereafter—if not before—Howe would take Philadelphia (“in truth I do not see what is to hinder him,” the general predicted). Surely, too, Washington conjectured, Howe would actively harass the Continentals, breaking down their supply lines and disrupting recruiting for 1777.51 This is what he would have done had he commanded the British army. But not Howe! Washington again had overestimated his adversary’s verve.

  At almost the same moment that the American commander meditated on the breakup of his army, Howe decided to end the campaign and order his army to winter quarters. To secure New Jersey he stationed troops in a line of seven cantonments stretching from Fort Lee to the Delaware; oddly, he assigned the fewest troops to the posts nearest Washington’s army. Howe placed a Hessian brigade of fifteen hundred in Trenton and about the same number at nearby Bordentown and Black Horse. Then he hurried back to New York, where he learned that a delighted George III had knighted him for his victory on Long Island.52

  Since the first week in December the Continentals had been strung along a twenty-five-mile line south of the Delaware, awaiting Howe’s attack. Gradually, however, Washington began to toy with the idea of seizing the initiative. From time to time since his retreat began in mid-November he vaguely had alluded to wheeling about and striking his pursuers. In fact, as events before Boston had indicated, such notions never were far from his mind, and in this instance he well may have remembered the success the Native Americans had enjoyed against his undermanned string of forts on the Virginia frontier twenty years earlier. Moreover, better than anyone else Washington could have deduced imperative reasons for launching a surprise attack. Civilian morale had sagged with each backward step he had taken especially since the ruinous hiding the army had suffered at Fort Washington. By now, in fact, even one signer of the Declaration of Independence had defected to the British. A vigorous action on his part might additionally impress potential allies in Europe, and it could not but help secure recruits for the campaign of 1777. Then there was Congress. Some members, he knew, had grown restless during the months of American retreats and defeats. That Congress had fled Philadelphia for Baltimore in mid-December was not likely to have won him any friends.53

  But there was more, too. If his urge to act was born somewhat of desperation—“I think the game is pretty near up,” he had remarked—it also grew from a temperament that boiled with rage and mortification. To have been “pushed . . . from place to place,” to have been “obliged to retire before the Enemy,” as he delicately put it, to have been compelled to act with “fatal supiness” rankled to the marrow. All his life he had prided himself on his enterprise and his pluck, and he had looked with favor on men of “Activity and Spirit”; yet, the recent humbling events had evoked a specter of possible vanquishment and lost esteem. He had endured a swift series of reproachful episodes, and he could sit still no longer. This man of pride would act, but he would not act capriciously. Venturesome he might be; suicidal he was not.54

  If he could use the element of surprise he would have an advantage over his adversary. Moreover, in contrast to those Hessian cantonments across the Delaware, he would have manpower superiority. But what of his troops, by now mostly militiamen? Scholars are familiar with Washington’s ceaseless grumbling about his soldiery, especially his militiamen. Even while he planned to act during that cold December he groused about his “want of good Troops,” and he predicted that the militiamen would “prove the downfall of our cause.” What often is overlooked, however, is that he used these men, not with timidity, and not because he had no choice, but in a manner that signaled more confidence in their abilities than his pronouncements implied. He concocted intricate plans for these inexperienced soldiers, and he threw them at his foe when there were safer, more cautious avenues he could have taken. And he was profoundly certain of his own abilities, as only one who once had grappled with and overcome his innate sense of worthlessness could be. (In his subsequent report to Congress on the action he now was contemplating, he used the pronoun “I” thirteen times in two brief paragraphs, in phrases such as: “an enterprize which I had formed,” “I ordered,” “I threw,” “I well knew,” “I determined.”)55

  One of Washington’s officers later remembered that the commander had spoken of attacking Trenton as early as December 10 or 11. It seems reasonable. Even though Howe did not leave that Jersey village until December 15—a fact that Washington learned that very day, thanks to his efficient and generally reliable intelligence network—he had told Gates the day before that if he could “draw our forces together . . . we may yet effect an important stroke. . . .” And that same day he wrote Connecticut’s Governor Trumbull that if he secured adequate reinforcements he might “attempt a Stroke upon the Forces of the Enemy, who lay a good deal scattered,” and who he knew, thanks again to his spies, had lowered their guard. During the next week the general quietly discussed the idea with his men; day after day his field officers arrived at headquarters, a thirteen-year-old stone farmhouse about four miles back from the river, to mull over the plan. One visitor found the commander moody and depressed, and he noticed that Washington was doodling as his officers debated the wisdom of an attack; upon a closer look the visitor found what Washington had scribbled on his notepad: “Victory or Death.” By the time Reed wrote Washington on December 22 urging that “something must be attempted to . . . give our Cause some degree of Reputation,” the commander’s plan had taken shape. Like Reed, he believed that “even a Failure ca
nnot be more fatal” than inaction.56

  Washington’s plan was put into motion three days before Christmas. Six hundred men of the Flying Camp crossed into Burlington County, New Jersey, hoping to harass and distract the Hessians at Black Horse and Bordentown. Their activity did get the Germans’s attention, but it also attracted the notice of the British posted to the north, very nearly wrecking the remainder of Washington’s scheme; fortunately for the American commander, the British high command did nothing more than dispatch orders exhorting their allies to greater vigilance.

  On Christmas afternoon Washington began to implement the heart of his plan. He divided his army into three contingents: he posted a detachment of Pennsylvania and New Jersey militia under Brigadier General James Ewing directly across the river from Trenton; Colonel John Cadwalader took a second force, which included both Continentals and state troops, down river, a bit south of Bordentown; Washington took command of the remaining twenty-four hundred men, all Continentals, and began to move upstream. Washington planned to cross the Delaware about nine miles above the little village; he would wait until night had fallen before he crossed, then he would strike out for Trenton. If all went well he would be in position to launch an attack at 5:00 A.M. The timing was crucial, he thought. “They make a great deal of Christmas in Germany,” one of his aides noted in his diary that night; surely the Hessians would be sleeping off “a great deal of beer” at that early hour, he added. While Washington was on the march, Ewing and Cadwalader were also to be active. Ewing was to cross later in the evening, then he was to march toward Trenton and endeavor to plug the mercenaries’ exits on the south side of town; Cadwalader, likewise, was to cross into New Jersey, his objective being to tie up the Hessians southeast of Trenton.57