by Howard Fast
“They are not well now,” Mercer said sourly.
Dysentery was epidemic in the camp; yellow jaundice, or hepatitis, as we call it today, hundreds of swollen livers, colds, quinsy throat, pneumonia, venereal disease and most of all a thing they called linenflame. This last was the result of the fact that two-thirds of the army were clad only in knee-length hunting shirts over knee-breeches. In many cases, the knee-breeches had simply disintegrated, leaving the men with only the shirts, their naked legs sticking out below. They would tie around their legs whatever pieces of cloth, blanket, felting they could get, but they had nothing between their skin and the linen hunting shirts. These shirts were made of tough linen that dried poorly and slowly, and when it was wet for too long a time—as it had been for the past two weeks—a nasty, itching deposit would form on the men’s skin. They dreaded this deposit and believed that it caused the ulcerated open sores and the fever from which so many of them suffered, as perhaps it did, for we have no exact knowledge of the malady.
This and more Mercer specified, and he must have put his medical problems to Washington as everyone else in the army was putting problems with no solution to the commander in chief. It was one thing to pile the sick into wagons as you ran away; it was another thing to have them here now with winter coming on. His total medication consisted of a few hundred pounds of Glauber’s salts, and in the entire encampment there was not a single set of bandages fit to use. Suppose they had to fight the British now? Would the wounded stop the bleeding with their own hands? Or would they simply bleed to death? There were no spirits, no oils—and the two dozen doctors who had remained with the army were being worked beyond endurance.
Washington was an antidote to anger and frustration. People who met him for the first time—having heard stories of his colorful language and towering rage in certain situations—were always astonished at the mildness of his voice and the gentleness of his manner, his blue eyes slightly perplexed, his attention fixed on every complaint or demand, no matter how small or pointless or potentially irritating.
He had heard from the Moravians in Bethlehem. Did Mercer know about the Moravians?
Didn’t the general know that Bethlehem was forty miles away?
He knew that. At the same time, they had the wagons, and if the badly sick and wounded were put in the wagons and moved without haste, they could be in Bethlehem in less than three days. The Moravians were kind, good and generous people. They had a large functioning hospital, and they were willing to take the sick and wounded and feed and care for them.
Washington stressed that. The Moravians would feed the men, and the sick would be safe there, miles away from the center of action.
So each one had to be dealt with, and in the end it always came back to him. Not that his general officers were not good men; they were as distinguished and bright and interesting a group as one could find in any military establishment in the world—and more so, for most of them were civilians turned soldier, but only he could make the decision. Only he could decide whether the game was played out or not. The soldiers around their fires plagued their officers with questions: Do they build permanent quarters? Is this the winter encampment? Was the war over? Would they fight again, or would everyone go home? And the general officers plagued him.
His own calm covered a situation of chaos and madness. His quartermaster general was Thomas Mifflin, a successful Philadelphia merchant, and Washington called him in and told him that they needed a warehouse center for storage of food, clothes and ammunition, a central collection point. And Mifflin regarded him as if he were out of his mind.
Something in this manner: “Sir, we have no supplies to warehouse. We have no food. We have no ammunition. We have no clothes. What in God’s name do we need a warehouse for?”
To Mifflin as to others, he stated his position very simply. An army without supplies cannot endure. He proposed to endure. Therefore, what was needed would be found. He was in the midst of a war, and he had no intentions of abandoning the cause to which he had committed himself. All this in very low key, for that was his way.
He had hardly awakened that first day in Pennsylvania before news was brought to him that the British had embarked an army in New York City and had set sail southward. Where to? Actually, to be landed on the Jersey shore, but Washington’s first thought was of Philadelphia, and he wrote to Congress, simply and directly:
“There is not a moment’s time to be lost in assembling such a force as can be collected, as the object of the enemy cannot now be doubted in the smallest degree …”
He had lost an army. Very quietly, he announced his decision to assemble another one.
[14]
IT PRESSED UPON HIM hotly. Sunday afternoon on the eighth of December, he lay down for a little while in the bedroom at the Barclay house, and his servants tried to protect him. He was still in the clothes he had crossed the river with; but a messenger came, and young Hamilton, his aide, agreed that he must be awakened.
The messenger told Washington that General Howe’s army had just entered Trenton—ten miles away—but was making no preparation to stay. Six, ten, fifteen thousand of them. The messenger was a spy or a patriot or an observer or a man out to make a dollar. Had he also informed the British that Washington was across the river? And with how many men?
How do you know he won’t stay?
Because they pitched their tents in the meadows north of the town. Howe was riding the river bank with his staff.
Knox was there, in the crowded Barclay sitting room. Why weren’t his cannon on the river?
They were.
Where?
Where they crossed, Knox told him—Knox, the fat, almost prissy young bookseller from Boston, who adored Washihgton—and must tell him now that there were eleven guns, no more.
Glover was there. Hell, no, he will not cross, was Glover’s opinion. There were no boats on that bank, only hatred from the Jersey fishermen and ferrymen whose boats had been smashed to kindling.
The messenger wanted the center of attention again, and he said that there was enough sawn wood piled in Trenton to build a whole fleet of boats. Glover laughed. You don’t build boats because wood is available; you need boat-builders. Anyway, the rumors were very strong that Howe would wait until the river froze over. Everyone had an opinion. There were other local people present, who had knowledge; but the messenger who brought the first news was paid off.
The commander in chief gave him money out of his own pocket and probably guessed that the man was taking money from the other side as well. That was the way it worked. For him, New Jersey was a land of spies, most of them double agents, hundreds of them moving freely in and out of the American and British encampments. Often enough, this movement was known by and earned the toleration of both sides. There had to be movement, buying and selling, purchase and delivery of supplies; allegiance was a fluid thing, and frequently the morning patriot became the evening Tory. Yet sometimes men totally identified with one cause or another attempted to move into an encampment, and sometimes they were caught and hanged, as Nathan Hale had been captured and executed by the British in New York City a few months before.
Still, they were paid. In those days particularly, Washington believed that their very existence depended to some extent upon knowing what the British were up to, and he and his general officers paid spies out of their own pockets—as indeed they paid for so many other things. Sometimes the information was true, and more often it was false, but they always bought it.
Since the general had been awakened, William Alexander—the one so frequently called General Lord Stirling—thought that he might talk to the men of the neighborhood. They had come to wait upon him, and they were offering their house. Truly, Washington wondered. He was very moved at this. They were Quakers, most of them, by nature for the rebel cause, men who were honored to take his hand. He was now in their land, in Pennsylvania, which he must accept as his own place. One by one, they introduced themselves, Samuel Merr
ick, John Hayhurst, Robert Thompson, Dr. Chapman, plain men plainly attired who lived in the beautiful stone houses that stood on the gentle knolls of Bucks County. Some of them he had met in Philadelphia, and they reminded him of that meeting with such sincere affection that tears came to his pale blue eyes.
[15]
MONDAY, ON THE NINTH OF DECEMBER, he wrote letters with no address. When he wrote to General Gates, begging him to come, he told the messenger that Gates was somewhere between the Delaware River and White Plains in New York. And to General Charles Lee, he wrote:
“Philadelphia, beyond all question, is the object of the enemy’s movements, and nothing less than our utmost exertions will prevent General Howe from possessing it. The force I have is weak, and utterly incompetent to that end. I must, therefor entreat you to push on with every possible succor you can bring.”
The three thousand men with Lee and Gates had suddenly become the most desirable and wonderful fact on the face of the earth. He could play a game with what he had—as indeed he did—but above all he needed new men who were not sick and starved and broken.
He had already instructed his general officers to divide the men who remained on their feet into three categories: observers or sentries who would watch the bank; guards who would build little forts out of rocks and dirt and man these forts; and patrols, who had horses of one sort or another, or at least one horse to three men, and who would move along the river’s edge. In a day’s ride up and down the Delaware from where he was at Trenton Falls there were eight functioning ferries, Sherwood’s, Coryell’s, McKonkey’s, Yardley’s, Howell’s, Kirk-bright’s, Beatty’s and the Trenton ferry. Earthworks at the ferries. He called to him the general officers whose brigades were in the best condition, Stirling, Stephen, Mercer and Fermoy, and told them about the ferries, the bank and Philadelphia, that they must hold the bank if the British tried to cross. Or die here.
To him, at least, everything had become simple, clear. The four men who faced him were as different from each other as four men could be. Lord Stirling claimed a Scottish title, more to irritate the British than for any other reason, although he appears to have had some legal right to noble rank. As William Alexander, he had been born in New York in 1726. When he was nine years old, his father, James Alexander, a fine lawyer, was retained in the Peter Zenger case and played an important part in freeing Zenger. All his life, William Alexander had been a civil libertarian, and it was a natural turn of events that made him into a rebel.
Adam Stephen, on the other hand, was a man described as having only two admirable qualities, his courage and the fact that he was a Virginian. He was quarrelsome, short-tempered and he drank too much. But he commanded a brigade of Virginia volunteers, 479 men, 70 officers, consisting of the 4th, 5th and 6th Regiments of Virginia Infantry, Washington’s own people and those the commander felt were the most dependable soldiers he had.
General Hugh Mercer, at fifty-one, was much like a father to Washington, and the big, Scottish physician led five regiments of Connecticut, Massachusetts and Maryland Militia. Fermoy was a French soldier of fortune, whose brigade consisted of only two regiments, but both of them dependable, the Ist Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania German Regiment, the Germans being as reliable as any soldiers in the army. As for Lord Stirling, his was a catch-all brigade of Virginia, Delaware and Pennsylvania volunteers.
But these were only a handful of soldiers, and they could accomplish little that could turn the tide. He needed a new army, and he told his secretary, Joseph Reed, to go to Philadelphia and find him five thousand men if he had to pick them up off the street.
Tall, charming, persuasive, Reed was a lawyer and a gentleman. He had been born in the little village of Trenton, across the river, and he knew every foot of this ground; and like Knox and Hamilton, he adored Washington. The pain of the dying army and its leader was his own. What should he tell them in Philadelphia, Reed asked, that the cause was dying?
Inform them that the need is very great—in effect Washington’s summation of their condition. He became very soft of voice and very gentle when it was all stretched on a tight thread that the slightest shock might part. “Only find me men.” The plea became a refrain. Old Israel Putnam, fifty-eight years old, the plainest of Yankees, a good farmer and a brusque and narrow man, old before his years, cruel and heartless, as some said, his whole body twisted with the pain of arthritis—even he had learned to respect this tall, slender aristocrat, George Washington of Virginia. Washington sent him to defend Philadelphia.
How?
Somehow, he told Putnam. Yet he needed men for himself. Reed would find the men; he might leave Putnam none at all. Yet he must defend a city that was indefensible. Mifflin would go with him to search for supplies.
Billy Smallwood, general of the Maryland Rifles, came to him. “Bullet stopper,” they called him, so shot up that he could barely drag himself on crutches, with lead in his legs and his belly. It was his men who made up the smartest brigade in the army, one thousand Maryland Rifles, in long, fringed hunting shirts and white three-cornered hats. When they came marching through Philadelphia the year before, with fifty fifes playing and fifty drums beating, they were the proudest sight that city ever saw, as several citizens put it. Then they were caught in Brooklyn Heights by the Hessians, and 261 of them died there, pinned by bayonets when they could not reload their long rifles; and 200 more bore the wounds of that day. Now only 211 remained out of the original 1,000, and Brigadier William Smallwood came pleading to his commander in chief that he might be permitted to ride to Maryland and raise a new command, that surely there were a thousand more riflemen in Maryland who would rally to the cause and avenge all the fine lads who had died and whose corpses were rotting unburied in the woods in Brooklyn.
It must have been a moving scene, Washington telling him that he could not ride anywhere in his condition.
But he could. His good men lifted him onto his horse. The devil took his own legs; but he had the horse’s legs.
Riflemen? Didn’t he understand that riflemen were no good for fighting a war? Didn’t he remember what had happened in Brooklyn and again in New York?
It was an accident. A rifleman was the finest fighting man on earth. His Maryland Rifles could hit a bee’s eye at a hundred yards.
In the end, Washington let him go. It took two men to lift Billy Smallwood onto his horse, and off he rode to Maryland to find men for the army, his face full of pain and his heart full of hope. Yet he found some men, and came back not with a thousand but with a full hundred.
Perhaps the Virginian understood Smallwood full well. In a manner of speaking, he was wracked with his own pain; yet he had done what a man can do. If he had reached the bottom ground of his existence, it was not all bad; he had learned something about love and comradeship, and perhaps he was more content than we might imagine. He was defending his native land with no hope of gain, and the tedious argument of right and wrong that the politicians played was no longer his burden or concern. He understood the unexplainable, that the only holy ground is that place where a man lives and breathes, his mother the earth, which he must defend. The only award that still awaited him was either the loneliness of a British jail or the shameful ignominy of a gallows tree, depending upon the mood of those who pronounced sentence upon him. He was more imaginative than many of his friends believed, yet he could not conjure up any real hope of ever again being what he loved most, a peaceful householder in his beautiful home on the Potomac. The things that had mattered so deeply to him and which had made life a warm and generous thing, the riding to hounds, the designing of his gardens, the planting and transplanting, the gambling at whist, the flute that he practiced for hours behind closed doors—all of this was gone and most likely forever.
Yet he had a sort of repayment. He had stood face to face with eternity, and he was still alive and alert and surrounded by people who loved him.
[16]
WHEN OLD ISRAEL PUTNAM ARRIVED in Philadelphia on the nex
t day, Tuesday, the tenth of December, he was told that carts were being loaded in front of the lodgings of practically every member of the Continental Congress—in spite of the fact that newspapers the same day carried indignant denials by Congress that it might be preparing to flee.
Putnam confronted them. Like so many men in the thirteen colonies, the members of Congress had a conviction that they were first on the British list of “those traitors promptly to be hanged.” It was one thing for John Hancock to write his name so large on the Declaration of Independence that King George could read it without his glasses. That was in the warm summer days of July, when twenty thousand men stood to arms under the leadership of Washington; it was something else entirely in the cold December, with only a few thousand shivering men on the banks of the Delaware standing between Congress and the gallows. But then they were not alone in their self-esteem. Hundreds of others shared their conviction of a high priority on the British hanging list, and they demanded of Putnam what he intended to do.
He answered to the effect that he would do his duty.
Would he defend Philadelphia?
If it could be defended.
And if it could not?
Then he would do what a man could do, Putnam answered sourly. He would not run away. He had made his peace with the Almighty, and that was all that a man could do. Jehovah asked no more.
The congressmen felt that it was all very well to talk about Jehovah in Massachusetts or Maine, which was more or less His natural habitat, but this was Philadelphia. But Putnam would not be shaken. They would do well to unload their baggage. He would have no more talk of abandoning the city to the British. And he would like them to offer a substantial bounty for enlistments, for while it was all very well to talk about a man’s patriotism, it never hurt to add a dollar or two to the persuasion.