The Crossing

by Howard Fast

  Gates was also a British gentleman, and that night at the Keith house, Washington begged the Keiths’ indulgence for a dinner for two with his own silver and his own cloth and plate. And he sent his servants to find a decent piece of meat, turnips, parsnips, carrots, cheese, whatever the camp would yield that wasn’t camp food, for it had to be the best for Gates.

  Perhaps then at that moment, Washington believed even less in himself as he watched Gates react to his somewhat primitive Continental elegance, there in that cramped stone house that was his headquarters. Surely Gates must have known what was coming, and possibly Gates was certain in his own mind that the approach of the commander in chief would be as witless as he had anticipated.

  Then, the meal done, the second bottle of wine opened, Washington took him into his confidence. The plan was very simple and very direct. Washington proposed to Gates that they take all the forces at their command on the west bank of the Delaware River, plus every available man out of the Philadelphia Militia; that they divide these available forces, which numbered almost six thousand men fit for action, into three brigades, and that simultaneously the three brigades cross the Delaware River at three separate points and attack the Hessian outposts at Trenton and at Bordentown. He, Washington, would cross with one force at McKonkey’s Ferry, which was about nine miles above Trenton, and from that place he would march down the river on the east shore to attack Rahl’s encampment at Trenton. General Ewing with as many of the Pennsylvania Militia as could be put under his command would cross about a mile below Trenton. Arriving at their landing place, they would then march north and secure control of the stone bridge over the Assanpink Creek, which was a brook flowing along the south side of Trenton. From that position they could cut off any retreat of the enemy to the south while Washington’s army attacked in force from the north.

  The third part of the plan proposed that Colonel Cadwalader take all of the troops that were now guarding Philadelphia and cross the Delaware River below Burlington. From there, they would attack the southernmost Hessian encampment under Count von Donop. The plan was not yet fully composed. But in a general sense Washington knew exactly what he wished to do. He felt that the Hessians were secure in their encampments, that they were not expecting any attack, and that such an attack might not only have a very good chance of being successful, but might well turn the whole tide of war.

  To all of this, Gates listened. He was a large, heavyset man, and one can imagine him with his chair pushed back, his waistcoat unbuttoned, his flushed face dubious yet condescendingly agreeable. Among themselves he and his associates were fond of speaking of Washington as the “great man.” Now the “great man” was making an ass of himself. Afterward, Gates would tell his friends that he had given him enough rope to hang himself.

  It is not too difficult, knowing the character of each man and knowing what went on between them, to re-create what was said. Gates might have taken these points one by one, ticking them off on his fingers.

  Attack? My dear sir, to attack one needs an army. You don’t have an army.

  The Virginian would have tightened at that; there was just enough truth in it.

  Your troops go always in one direction. To attack requires the other direction.

  Then you have objections, the Virginian might have said. Whatever he said would be lame. He was at the disadvantage.

  Many.

  Would you specify them?

  Gladly. Gates would have shown the “great man” no mercy.

  Specific one: There are only eleven days before the enlistments run out. Your men will not attack a snowman before then. Why should they? They need only sit tight and go home.

  Specific two: To attack, one needs soldiers. Your men are not soldiers.

  Specific three: There is no way to cross the river and keep it from the Hessians. The crossing would take hours, and long before you ever got across, the Hessians would have their artillery on your boats. Those big Durham boats of yours make damn good targets; even a Yankee gunner couldn’t miss them; and those who are not shot to pieces will drown.

  Specific four: If you had twelve or eighteen thousand men instead of six thousand, you could not defeat the Hessians. The Hessians are European soldiers, the best, and you want to throw your rabble against them. Suicide.

  Specific five: Your fat, foolish Boston bookseller, Mr. Knox, has a handful of cannon left out of all the hundreds of guns we had a year ago. A proper army wants a gun for every fifty men. That means one hundred and twenty guns, not twelve. The Hessians will not have to use their bayonets. They will chew you up with grape and canister before you ever get near them.

  All reports have it that Washington maintained his temper and his goodwill. He asked Gates about a night crossing, and Gates threw up his arms in despair.

  Then Washington asked Gates what he, Gates, would do in his place.

  Retreat. When you cannot fight or hold a position, one retreats.

  To where?

  South of the Susquehanna River. We can hold at that river. We could build a permanent encampment there and recruit a new army.

  So much for what Gates counseled; and yet Washington contained himself and asked Gates whether, in spite of all he had said, he would remain with the army if indeed Washington undertook the crossing?

  How could he undertake it? Gates wanted to know.

  I shall, Washington said.

  No. You could not.

  But Washington pointed out that he was still the commander in chief, not yet Gates. What he felt inside, no one can know, but he was apparently unruffled, calm and very much with himself as he ushered Gates out of the Keith house, bidding him good night as he would any honored guest at Mount Vernon.

  For Washington, that night was a necessary catalyst. He made his decision. The following day, Gates and his aides rode off to Philadelphia. Washington had not relieved him of his command; he simply informed him that his little army of eight hundred men remained here in the encampment. As for Gates, he would go where he desired. He was still a brigadier; but his brigade was no longer his.

  To his fellow officers, Washington said: “General Gates is ill and must go to Philadelphia and comfort himself.”

  [5]

  IN NEW YORK CITY, a small and dedicated circle of rebels had remained in the city, lived with the memory of Nathan Hale’s body swinging from the gallows and managed to keep Washington informed of most of the British movements. Now, fresh from his passage with Gates and committed to the “madness” of crossing the river, he received word from New York that Cornwallis had taken ship for England.

  Washington must have breathed a long sigh of relief. Cornwallis was the only British commander he really respected, and perhaps feared too, for there was something in Cornwallis’s cold and heartless determination that chilled one’s blood. With Cornwallis gone back to England and the very civilized Whiggish Sir William Howe in and out of bed with the pretty Mrs. Loring, he felt that Grant would botch his command. Grant’s forces were scattered all across southern Jersey.

  But if Washington respected Lord Cornwallis, the British general returned the compliment and felt that there was more to the skinny, slow-speaking Virginian than most men imagined. Sitting in his cabin in the great ship of the line that would convey him back to England, Cornwallis wrote a serious letter to Colonel Rahl, the Hessian commander at Trenton:

  Washington has been informed that our troops have marched into winter quarters and has been told that we are weak at Trenton and Princeton, and Lord Stirling has expressed a wish to make an attack upon those two places. I dont believe he will attempt it, but be assured that my information is undoubtedly true so I need not advise you to be on your guard against an unexpected attack at Trenton.

  We do not know how reliable was Cornwallis’s information as to Lord Stirling’s wishes, but it is interesting to note that he respected both these men, Washington and Lord Stirling, for all of the latter’s inclination to drink.

  A Mr. Bazilla Haines, a
Burlington County loyalist, who was engaged as an agent by the British, gave the following information, which Grant sent on to Howe in New York.

  Bazilla Haines sent out to procure intelligence on the Twenty-first of December, 1776, arrived at Mount Holly in the night and lodged in the Rebel camp there. Was informed that they had only two field pieces which he thinks were three pounders as he perceived them at the church. That all the Troops were drawn up in his view, that he walked round them and he thinks that there were not above eight hundred, near one half Boys and all of them militia, a very few Pennsylvanians excepted. That he knew a great many of them, who came from Gloucester, Egg Harbor, Penns Neck and Cohansey. They were commanded by Co. Griffin.

  And on the same day, the British General Grant wrote to Colonel Rahl, the Hessian commander, to reassure him that the American forces were no threat to his encampment:

  Brunswick, December 21st, 1776. Sir: I have this moment received your three letters of yesterday’s date. I am sorry to hear that your Brigade has been fatigued or alarmed. You may be assured that the Rebel army in Pennsylvania which has been joined by Lee’s corps, Gates and Arnolds does not exceed eight thousand men who have neither shoes nor stockings, who are in fact almost naked, dying of cold, without blankets and very ill supplied with provisons.

  [6]

  COLONEL JOSEPH REED, Washington’s good friend and secretary, was stationed down the river a day’s hard ride from the Keith house. There at Bristol, he guarded the river crossing closest to Philadelphia. He had heard about the meeting between General Washington and General Gates, and though he was close to the commander, he could hardly have surmised what had been discussed. Yet he could guess that hard words had been exchanged. If anything, Reed and many others on the staff of the Virginian knew Horatio Gates better than George Washington ever did, or at least better than Washington allowed himself to know the man. Possibly because he knew and despised Gates’s philosophy of retreat, Colonel Reed dispatched the following letter to General Washington:

  Colonel Joseph Reed to George Washington.

  Bristol, December 22, 1776.

  We are all of opinion, My Dear General, that something must be attempted to revive our expiring credit, give our cause some degree of reputation, and prevent a total depreciation of the Continental money, which is coming on very fast; that even a failure cannot be more fatal than to remain in our present situation; in short, some enterprise must be undertaken in our present circumstances or we must give up the cause. In a little time the Continental army will be dissolved. The militia must be taken before their spirits and patience are exhausted; and the scattered, divided state of the enemy affords us a fair opportunity for trying what our men will do when called to an offensive attack. Will it not be possible, My Dear General, for your troops, or such part of them as can act with advantage, to make a diversion, or something more, at or about Trenton? The greater the alarm, the more likely the success will attend the attacks. If we could possess ourselves again of New Jersey, or any considerable part of it, the effects would be greater than if we had never left it.

  Allow me to hope that you will consult your own good judgement and spirit, and not let the goodness of your heart subject you to the influence of men in every respect your inferiors. Something must be attempted before the sixty days expire which the commissioners have allowed; for, however many affect to despise it, it is evident that a very serious attention is paid to it, and I am confident that unless some more favorable appearance attends our arms and cause before this time, a very large number of the militia officers here will follow the example of those of Jersey and take benefit from it. I will not disguise my own sentiments, that our cause is desperate and hopeless if we do not take the opportunity of collection of troops at present to strike some stroke. Our affairs are hastening fast to ruin if we do not retrieve them by some happy event. Delay with us is now equal to a total defeat. Be not deceived, My Dear General, with small, flattering appearances; we must not suffer ourselves to be lulled into security and inaction because the enemy does not cross the river. It is but a reprieve; the execution is the more certain, for I am very clear that they can and will cross the river in spite of any opposition we can give them.

  Pardon the freedom I have used. The love of my country, a wife and four children in the enemy’s hands, the respect and attention I have to you, the ruin and poverty that must attend me and thousands of others will plead my excuse for so much freedom.

  Your obedient and affectionate humble servant

  Joseph Reed

  The condition described so emotionally and urgently by Colonel Reed was specified on the same day by Samuel Brown, an American who sold information to the British, in the following report of December 22, 1776:

  “General Washington’s whole army does not consist of more than eight thousand men, about five thousand of them troops formerly enlisted, partly brought from Jersey by Washington and partly by Sullivan; the rest are new raised militia. That the time of enlistment of Ewing’s brigade of six hundred men all expire the first of Jan. next and that the officers and men and Gen. Ewing himself have declared that they will serve no longer. That the New England troops who came with General Washington it is generally believed from their declaration that they will not serve longer than the term of their enlistment, which expires also the First of Jan’y next; that these troops compose the main part of Washington’s army.”

  [7]

  REED HAD WRITTEN HIS LETTER, and Washington had made his own commitment; yet the obstacles that faced them now were enormous. If they were to go across the river, they would have to take three or four days’ supply of food with them; and the food would have to be bought. Men would have to be paid. The need for money plagued Washington as much as the British did; his pleas to Congress on that score went unanswered. And what printed paper money remained with General Mifflin had become almost worthless.

  The difficulty the Americans faced in the purchase of food is reflected in this comparison of prices in British and American money. The farmers sold their produce to both, and often more eagerly to the British, who could pay with gold.

  A ton of hay could be purchased by a British quartermaster from a local farmer for sixty shillings. A bushel of oats could be purchased for three shillings. It would take five hundred dollars in Continental money to buy the same amount of hay and fifty dollars to buy the oats. The British paid three shillings and sixpence for Indian corn. The Americans, using Continental dollar currency, paid twenty times as much, and for wheat, flour, bran and pork and beef, the difference was even greater.

  The British made a habit of paying in gold and silver, not because British paper money was not valued by the American farmer who sold to them, but because the psychological effect of hard metal currency was so destructive to American credit—simply by the instant comparison that was forced between gold or silver and the almost worthless Continental paper. Even the Pennsylvania farmers of Bucks County, who were so much in sympathy with the American cause, went to extraordinary efforts to get their produce across the river so that they could sell it to the British for gold and silver.

  Loyalty was one thing; but a little bit of hard money for hard times to come was something else entirely. Such was the speed with which the fiscal position of the Continental Congress deteriorated that everyone who looked to the future thought in terms of British hard money and had contempt for Continental dollars.

  [8]

  WITH THE OFFICIAL ARRIVAL of winter, the health of the army was no better. By December 22, the two military hospitals, one at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and the other at Newtown, Pennsylvania, were so crowded that sick and wounded men were sleeping shoulder to shoulder on the floor. The stink in these hospitals as described at the time was overwhelming, the sanitation nonexistent and the rate of death horrifying.

  Taking the army as a whole, six out of every ten men were sick, and out of these six, three would never recover. Bronchitis, pneumonia and that curse of every army, dysenter
y, were the most common ailments; but there was also a plenitude of syphilis, gonorrhea, ulcers and liver ailments. One comes across constant mention of yellowing of the young soldiers, the skin condition that we call jaundice. Mentions of swollen bellies suggest that hepatitis was epidemic.

  The army rollbooks for December 22, 1776, showed a full count of 679 officers and 10,804 enlisted men, but from this total 5,319—about half of them—were wounded, sick or on leave, leaving 6,164 fit for duty.

  To reconcile figures from this period and get them to match accurately is almost impossible; also, fit for duty included anyone who could stand roll call. The regimental rolls were poorly kept. Desertions were so frequent that to record them accurately was impossible; and the reassignment of fragments of disintegrating companies and brigades to other commanders went on constantly.

  At best Washington could order troop counts and proceed on the basis of the count on the same day as the count was taken. That he had six thousand effective men is possibly close to fact; but if he were to carry on with his plans to attack the Hessians on the other side of the river, he could by no means call upon the services of all the six thousand men. For one thing, the two hospitals had to be guarded, otherwise they could easily be overwhelmed by one of the many small detachments of British dragoons that roamed the countryside. There were precious stores to be guarded, and some sort of minimum force had to be maintained in Philadelphia to preserve civic order.

  [9]

  IT IS TO BE PRESUMED that most of that day of Sunday, December 22, was spent by General Washington in planning details of the attack he had in mind. It would be a three-pronged crossing of the river, and an enveloping attack upon both Hessian encampments, the one at Trenton and the second Hessian encampment at Bordentown under the command of Colonel von Donop.