Now, with Philadelphia threatened in early December, Washington was reduced to begging. “Do come on,” he wrote to General Lee. If Lee came quickly, he might save the town, with its symbolic meaning for America. Lee didn’t believe that William Howe intended to attack Philadelphia, and though he consented to cross the Hudson he loitered along, making no determined effort to reach Washington’s camp. The excuses he offered were ones Washington could also claim: Lee’s roster of seven thousand men at White Plains had dropped to fewer than three thousand. With their enlistments about to expire, the troops of an entire New York unit went home just as Lee was preparing to cross into New Jersey. Like Washington’s troops, Lee’s men were badly clothed. Those without shoes were slaughtering cattle and wrapping their feet in the hides. And the people of New Jersey were as indifferent, even hostile, to Lee’s army as they had been to Washington’s. Despite strict orders, some of Lee’s hungry troops had turned to looting. Whenever they came across a sheep, a goose or a turkey, they went through a charade of challenging it to give the day’s countersign. When it didn’t answer, they roasted it for its Tory sympathies.
By December 8, 1776, Lee’s army had traveled fifty miles from its crossing on the Hudson, and he paused to rest at Morristown. He wrote to inform Washington that he could contribute more by raising a number of militia there than by hurrying to headquarters, and he made no attempt to conceal his disdain for the commander in chief. Lee had heard that Washington had towed along a fleet of heavy boats when he was forced across the Delaware, and he asked, “I am told you have the gondolas from Philadelphia with you; for Heaven’s sake, what use can they be of?”
John Sullivan had been exchanged for a British officer and had joined Lee’s troops. After a two-day rest at Morristown, General Lee moved his men eight miles to the village of Vealton. There he turned over the men to Sullivan and left camp for an evening of diversion. With a bodyguard of four officers and fifteen men, he rode to Basking Ridge, where an Irish widow named White kept a tavern. Mrs. White also had other women boarding at her establishment; during a long night, one of Lee’s officers was awakened by female screaming.
The next morning, Friday the thirteenth, General Lee was late coming down for breakfast. In an old blue coat and greasy leather breeches, he sat at the table writing a letter to Horatio Gates, who he knew shared his opinion of George Washington.
“Entre nous, a certain great man is damnably difficult,” Lee wrote. “He has thrown me into a situation where I may have my choice of difficulties. In short, unless something which I do not expect turns up, we are lost.”
He was finishing his letter with “Adieu, my dear friend! God bless you!” when an aide rose from the breakfast table and told Lee he’d better look out the window.
—
Banastre Tarleton, aged twenty-two and lately of Oxford but now of the British Sixteenth Regiment of Light Dragoons, had come to the war with one purpose. Since Charles Lee had once been a British officer, Tarleton considered his treason the more damnable, and the dragoons felt doubly betrayed because Lee had once commanded their regiment in Portugal. Earlier in the year, while passing through London on his way to America, Tarleton had stopped by the Cocoa Tree Club in St. James’s Street, where he had tapped his sword and vowed, “With this sword, I will cut off General Lee’s head!”
During the night Lee spent at Mrs. White’s tavern, Tarleton and thirty of the dragoons had been reconnoitering nearby for intelligence about Lee. The next morning they captured an American soldier, and, two miles farther on, some townspeople volunteered that General Lee was in the vicinity. Tarleton then picked up two of Lee’s advance sentries. To save themselves, they told about Mrs. White’s tavern and the general’s guard, which wasn’t large. Next the dragoons captured an American messenger carrying letters from Lee to John Sullivan, and he pointed out the tavern itself.
Reining up in front, Tarleton could see two American sentries standing at the tavern door. Shouting and waving their sabers, Tarleton and six dragoons rode at full speed up to the Americans, who panicked, dropped their weapons and ran off. Tarleton ordered his men to fire through every window and cut up the American troops inside. At that, an old woman appeared in the doorway and dropped to her knees. Begging for her life, she told Tarleton that General Lee was still there.
It was then that the aide had looked out the window and seen the rest of Tarleton’s dragoons in their green uniforms charging down at the house from a nearby orchard.
“Here, sir,” he told General Lee, “are the British cavalry!”
Lee asked, “Where?” He quickly signed his name at the bottom of his letter to Horatio Gates.
“Around the house.”
Tarleton and the dragoons circled the inn and opened fire, hitting several of the guards. Lee watched in shock as a British soldier raised his saber and hacked through the arm of a sentry.
Tarleton shouted from outside that he knew General Lee was in the house. If he surrendered, he and his attendants would be safe. But if he didn’t obey immediately, the tavern would be burned and every person in it, without exception, put to the sword.
Inside, Charles Lee couldn’t believe that he had been captured. “For God’s sake,” he cried. “What shall I do?”
Mrs. White hustled him upstairs and tried to hide him in a nook between the chimney and the fireplace. But the space was small and Lee couldn’t squeeze into it.
They heard Tarleton give orders to set the house on fire. Still Lee hesitated, pacing the chamber as he tried to think of an escape. At last he saw he had no chance and sent down word that he would surrender.
Lee’s aide-de-camp, William Bradford, went to the front door. When he opened it, there was a fresh volley of shots. Bradford leaped back and shouted that his general was coming out. Charles Lee stepped forward and surrendered his sword. He said he trusted he would be treated like a gentleman. One of the dragoons agreed and ordered Lee to mount his horse. The British were far from their lines and eager to get their prize to headquarters. Lee asked for his hat and coat, and Captain Bradford went for them. Once inside, he snatched a servant’s shirt and substituted it for his uniform jacket. The excited British soldiers had eyes only for General Lee and didn’t notice the servant who handed over the general’s coat. As Lee was being led away, Captain Bradford slipped back inside. An aide to Horatio Gates, who had been waiting to return with Lee’s answer, escaped to a room that the British did not search, taking with him two pistols and the letter.
Tarleton’s men rode rapidly for thirteen miles until they forded a river and considered themselves safe from American pursuit. Tarleton thought the entire affair seemed like a miracle. He and his men had taken prisoner America’s most distinguished general and Britain’s foremost traitor. Riding almost without stop, they covered the remaining sixty miles and turned Lee over to Lord Cornwallis. That night there was wild celebrating in the British camp. Military bands played until dawn, and officers toasted King George until they couldn’t raise their glasses. From reports later, they fed so much alcohol to General Lee’s horse that it got as drunk as they did.
—
John Honeyman, a butcher from Griggstown, New Jersey, had been hated by his neighbors for his Tory sympathies since the war began. Just before Christmas, 1776, he was foolish enough to leave the safety of the Hessian camp at Trenton, driving a single cow in front of him. American scouts seized him and took him across the Delaware to George Washington’s headquarters.
Washington met alone with the prisoner for more than an hour. Then he ordered his cadre to lock up Honeyman in the log guardhouse. During the night, a fire broke out some distance from the guardhouse, and the sentries hurried there to put it out. When they returned to their posts, everything seemed quiet. In the morning, although the padlock was still secure on the cell, the prisoner was gone.
John Honeyman had been a spy, as his neighbors suspected, but for the Americans. A Scotch-Irish soldier who had been with Wolfe at Quebec, he had emigrated
to Pennsylvania and enlisted in the Continental Army when war broke out. General Washington had heard his accent and decided it would get him into places where flatter American tones might be suspect. When Honeyman agreed to pose as a loyalist butcher, his disguise was so convincing that Washington issued an order protecting the wife and children of the man he described as a “notorious Tory.”
On this night, Honeyman had brought the best news Washington could receive. With Philadelphia apparently in his grasp, William Howe was suspending military operations for the winter. Washington had heard that rumor but mistrusted it. He was sure that when the Delaware froze solid, Howe would march his troops across to fight in Pennsylvania. But Honeyman assured him that the British general was withdrawing his army to winter quarters on Staten Island and Manhattan, with some units going to Rhode Island. Howe’s motives were mixed. He knew that enlisted men in a professional army were fighting less from zeal than to make a living and that few of his officers cared to wage war during the harsh Pennsylvania winter. Also, both General Howe and his brother the admiral disapproved of Lord North’s policies. Howe thought a successful campaign of pacification might save thousands of British and American lives. He had asked for fifteen thousand more troops for a new campaign in 1777, and he expected loyalist sentiment to sweep across New Jersey and keep the state safe for the king. And, finally, it was hard to overestimate William Howe’s craving for comfort.
Preparing to return to New York, Howe planned to leave a garrison of German soldiers behind at Trenton. Those soldiers had been sold into England’s service by their princes and were commanded by a fifty-year-old colonel named Johann Gottlieb Rall. They were the first mercenaries to arrive in New York and had been in America only three months. Catherine of Russia had refused to sell Britain twenty thousand soldiers, as had Frederick the Great of Prussia. In England, Lord North’s government cited precedents to show that in every war England had resorted to paying foreigners to fight for her. Lately, recruiting for the British Army had been slow, and conscripting civilians to fight in America would have inflamed the country.
The German nobility sold their subjects at different prices—the average ran to four shillings fourpence for each grenadier. A prince received that same amount whenever one of his soldiers was killed or when any three were wounded. The mercenaries came from various German principalities, but since the landgrave of Hesse-Cassel sent the bulk of them, all Germans became Hessians to the Americans. Colonel Rall’s grenadiers wore dark-blue uniforms and bristled with mustaches stiffened with boot blacking. Working heavy tallow into their scalps, they gathered their long hair into queues that reached nearly to the waist. Johann Rall had proved his courage at the battle for Fort Washington, but he spoke no English and fellow officers found him flighty and self-pleased. He also drank.
William Howe thought that Trenton, which was spread across open country and easily reached by river, was vulnerable. One Hessian colonel urged him to treat the town merely as an outpost, with a guard of a hundred and fifty men. But Colonel Rall hungered for glory, and he arranged a meeting with General Howe and an interpreter. After a night of drinking, Rall usually lingered in his bath until 10 or 11 A.M., but that morning he was up early and persuaded Howe to leave three regiments in Trenton and put them all under his command. General Howe had directed Rall to dig in at Trenton and to set up artillery around the town, but Rall hadn’t seemed to pay attention. “Let them come!” he answered when his lieutenants proposed building the fortifications. “We want no trenches! We’ll at them with the bayonet!”
In place of trenches, Rall kept one regiment on alert each night and sent men to patrol the roads a mile into the countryside. What he had seen so far of the American rebels had invited contempt for them. Now, with Christmas approaching, he intended to celebrate with his troops in the traditional German way. He had never taken much interest in such details as whether the men kept their muskets clean, but he loved music and prided himself on his reputation as a fine host at a party. When Rall’s best British spy showed up at camp a few hours after escaping from an American guardhouse, his information gave Rall no reason to reconsider his holiday plans. John Honeyman assured the colonel that in their present demoralized state Rall had nothing to fear from the Americans.
—
George Washington needed a victory. Thomas Paine had tried to soothe the nation by comparing Washington to Fabius the Delayer, but Washington’s temperament was as bold and aggressive as ever, and he hated delay. The weaknesses that surrounded him—his troops, his shortages of supply—had led him to hesitate and had cost him Fort Washington. His troops were depressed by the months of disaster, and the calendar reminded them that time was running out. The enlistments of many of the militia would end on December 31, and few of them seemed willing to extend their service. But they still owed General Washington one more week.
On Christmas Eve, Washington called together his ranking officers at Lord Stirling’s quarters. Washington’s tactics had been criticized as too elaborate, and the new plan he was outlining seemed also to rely on an unrealistic degree of coordination. He proposed an ambitious variation on the Indian raids he had seen during his days with Braddock. He would ferry three elements of his army back across the Delaware River. They would march to Trenton, surround the two or three thousand Hessians, and attack them at three different points. The plan also resembled the strategy the British had used at Fort Washington. If everything went perfectly at Trenton, the haul of prisoners might match the American losses from that fiasco.
To Joseph Reed, his adjutant away in Philadelphia, General Washington wrote, “Christmas Day at night, one hour before day, is the time fixed for our attempt on Trenton.” He added, “For Heaven’s sake, keep this to yourself, as the discovery of it may prove fatal to us; our numbers, sorry I am to say, being less than I had any conception of: but necessity, dire necessity, will—nay, must—justify any attempt.”
Reed answered from Philadelphia that Israel Putnam, the city’s commander, could spare only five hundred militia to assist in the battle. Washington decided to go ahead all the same. On Christmas afternoon he sent twenty-four hundred men from his Continental regiments to McKonkey’s Ferry, about nine miles upstream on the Delaware River from Trenton. Downstream, Colonel John Cadwalader of the Pennsylvania militia, with eighteen hundred men, and Brigadier General James Ewing, with another six or eight hundred, were ordered to time their crossings so that they could cut off any Hessian attempt to escape from Washington’s main attack.
—
Late on Christmas Day, General Washington led his men along the west bank of the Delaware, following hills that would conceal their march from German scouts across the river. A cold and windy darkness fell as the men began preparing large cargo boats for the crossing. Washington was ready to mount his sorrel horse and supervise the embarking when a messenger arrived with a paper.
“What a time is this to hand me letters!” Washington said. By this time in his life, his self-control was so thorough that the messenger thought only that he sounded solemn. He had been sent by General Horatio Gates, he explained, to take charge of an American post at Bristol.
“By General Gates?” Washington asked. “Where is he?”
“I left him this morning in Philadelphia.”
“What was he doing there?”
“I understood him that he was on his way to Congress.”
“On his way to Congress!” Washington repeated.
Gates was claiming ill-health, but his absence was a reminder that, as Washington was launching his desperate gamble, intriguing among his fellow generals had moved from Philadelphia to Baltimore.
At 6 P.M. Washington paused to write a message from McKonkey’s Ferry to Colonel Cadwalader downstream at Bristol. Despite the limited support he could expect, Washington told Cadwalader, “I am determined, as the night is favorable, to cross the river and make the attack upon Trenton in the morning. If you can do nothing real, at least create as great a divers
ion as possible.”
The night before, Washington had spent Christmas Eve brooding over the state of an army dressed in tatters and preparing to leave him within the week. He had come up then with the countersign for tonight’s attack on Trenton, and he issued it on the riverbank, to be passed along the ranks. It was “Victory or death.”
The boats were ready. Washington began sending his troops across the Delaware. The current was rough, and ice crashing in the river made the crossing dangerous and slow. The campaign’s logistics had been turned over again to Colonel Henry Knox, the Boston bookseller who had overseen the dragging of cannon from Fort Ticonderoga. Knox, who stood six foot three and weighed two hundred and eighty pounds, had a deep bass voice that carried over the roar of the Delaware. Amid fumbling and slips, he managed to get eighteen artillery fieldpieces aboard their carriers, most of them Durham boats used in peacetime to carry iron ore and grain into Philadelphia. Each boat was forty feet long and eight feet deep. With four or five men rowing and pushing them forward with poles, they could carry fifteen tons. Washington had hoped to have his men, artillery and horses across the Delaware by midnight, but it was becoming clear that the passage would take much longer. When his advance guard had reached the other bank and was holding the landing site, Washington boarded one of the boats. Soldiers were amused that the sharp wind had turned his nose bright red. Otherwise, the buoyant mood of the march had given way to foreboding. Few men were dressed for the bitter chill, and sleet was threatening to dampen their ammunition. But General Washington was determined to be cheerful.
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