The Crossing (16 page)

At the first sign of a Hessian response, the Americans ran away with all the speed of which they were capable. The whole affair lasted no more than two or three minutes. First there had been silence and snow falling, then the Americans dashed out of the night, firing their muskets almost point-blank at the Hessians, then the Hessians returned fire and then the Americans ran back into the night and the falling snow.

However, the brief American attack triggered the entire Hessian encampment into alertness. The Hessian troops ran to their defensive positions, and Colonel Rahl, whose horse was waiting, leaped onto the saddle and rode to the outpost that had been attacked. There he saw the three wounded and the three dying Hessians, but no Americans. Rahl dismounted and intensively questioned soldier after soldier.

The Hessians insisted that they had driven away the Americans with very heavy losses to the Continentals. But when Rahl ordered them into the woods to find the bodies of those they claimed to have slain, they returned empty-handed. They retreated into the contention that the Americans had carried away their dead. But this conflicted oddly with their description of the haste with which the Americans had departed, running from the Hessians as if indeed the devil were after them— and pausing to pick up nothing but their feet.

Rahl ordered the entire stretch of woods in front of the attacked outpost beaten and searched, and indeed Hessian scouts moved into the forest to a mile's distance from Trenton, searching the wet woods. But the search revealed no sign of Continentals. It was the kind of attack and subsequent flight that underscored Rahl's low opinion of the Americans as soldiers. He regretted the fact that he had lost three men, but at the same time he was absolutely delighted that the predicted crossing of Washington's army and the much touted American attack on Trenton had been so wretched in character and courage and so easily beaten off.

This flaw in Rahl's character—that is, his inability to understand the mentality of men so different from the Hessian mercenaries he led—proved his eventual undoing and led to his death. At this moment, however, he was relieved and delighted.

His junior officers gathered around him, and they argued in high spirits that since the icy rain was so intense that no soldier could keep his powder dry, would it not be realistic for them to give up any thought of standing guard for the rest of Christmas Day? Rahl responded to their argument in good humor: he declared that guard duty was over and that the troops could return to quarters and pick up their festivities, eat their feast, drink their liquor and relax fully, as though this were a safe and ordinary Christmas Day at home in Germany.

Now arises the most curious and mysterious question of the whole incident of the crossing. There is no doubt that Washington's little army was saved by this attack. One would think that since this fact was soon known to so many, the attackers would come forth to demand credit, and the people at the same time would be able to determine who made the attack. But this is not the case. To this day no one knows the identity of the band of Americans who assaulted the outpost.

A claim was made afterward by Captain Anderson of the 5th Continental Infantry that this party was an advance patrol sent out by Washington, but Washington himself denied this; and since the circumstances of the crossing are so well known, no such patrol would have existed without his knowledge. For one thing, it was not until two hours after the mysterious attack that the first boatload of Virginians landed on the east shore, and they immediately set out their sentry circle for the protection of the landing spot.

Colonel Joseph Reed, in his memoirs,
Life and Correspondence,
refers to this attack as being made by an advance party that was returning from the Jerseys to Pennsylvania. But he lets it go at that, without proof or identification. What advance party were they? Why were they in the Jerseys? Why were they returning to Pennsylvania? Why did they never contact Washington? Reed identifies no one who was a member of the party, and therefore his guess is no better than anyone else's.

From the Hessian side the following explanation is given, which is perhaps more reasonable. Johannes Engelhardt, a lieutenant of artillery, was with Colonel Rahl when Rahl was questioning various officers and trying to determine the true facts about the assault. Lieutenant Engelhardt heard a Captain von Altenbockum tell Colonel Rahl that the attack had been carried out by a few farmers who had gathered together out of their rancor against the Hessians and decided to annoy the Hessians on their own account. He also said that the British General Grant had warned him that such a party of farmers was wandering in the area between Princeton and Trenton, but that Grant was totally contemptuous of them as a threat and believed they could do no harm to anyone.

However, since Colonel Rahl refused to distinguish between American farmers and American soldiers—and in this perhaps there was more than a little truth—he clung to his decision that this was Washington's doing.

One might guess that when the attack failed so dismally, the small band of farmers, shamed by their cowardice, kept silent and went home. Because communication was so ragged and uncertain in those days, they never knew the full impact of their little attack, nor had they any particular leader who would claim credit.

At McKonkey's Ferry, the soldiers climbed off the boats onto the Jersey bank of the Delaware, calling out the watchword for the day: “Victory or death.”

But as midnight came and went—and half of the army was still on the other bank of the Delaware—it would appear that the prospects of victory dwindled, while those of death increased.

[20]

ABRAHAN HUNT, the richest man in Trenton, was a Tory. He had a fine house on the corner of King and Second streets. In his stables, directly behind the house, he kept a carriage and four horses. He was a man of substantial local position, and on Christmas Day of 1776, he felt that his social standing was confirmed. Christmas evening he gave a party. Like most parties it revolved around a particular guest of honor, in this case Colonel Rahl, commander of the German troops in Trenton.

Mr. Hunt and even more so Mrs. Hunt were devastated by the fact that the firing at the outpost kept Rahl away from the party until the late hours of the evening. However, when he joined his fellow officers and those few Trenton Tories who were in attendance at Abraham Hunt's house shortly before midnight, he proceeded to make up for lost time; and when the clock struck twelve, ushering in that very fateful day of the twenty-sixth of December, Rahl was at ease and enjoying himself hugely.

He had already put down several bumpers of hot flip—a colonial concoction of butter and rum—and had partaken of the good food, game, turkey, venison and baked pigeon and stuffed goose and fat roast ham, the good sweet cakes and the rich American pies that were so lovingly cooked and served for his appetite and approval. He relaxed in a chair, conversed with his host and the other Americans present in broken English, proved himself to be both charming and delightful and was quite happy that now, after all, Christmas in this strange, wild land would not be so different from what it might have been at home.

At the same time, nine miles to the north of Trenton, on the Jersey shore of the Delaware River, the twenty-sixth of December began for Rahl's enemy, General George Washington. Six hours before this, when he first began to move his troops across the river, word came to General Washington that Colonel Cadwalader considered the crossing to be very difficult, if not impossible. Before leaving the Ferry House to cross the river, Washington scribbled these few cold words to 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 diversion as possible.”

The icy, impatient fury of the commander in chief of the American forces comes bitterly alive. He made his own crossing almost matter-of-factly, and now six hours after he had crossed the river himself, Washington was standing on the east bank, wet through to the skin, his boots sodden with the icy rain that had now replaced the sleet, unhappily contemplating the fact that a large part of his army still remained on the west bank. By midnight of December 25, it appeared that his bold scheme had turned into a disaster.

All his hopes and fine calculations had been wrong. He had not been able to anticipate the quantity of the ice in the river, and above all it was the ice that made the crossing so difficult, crashing against the Durham boats and driving them downstream. Neither had he been able to anticipate the difficulty of poling the great Durham boats upstream once they were forced off course to the south. In a larger sense he had misjudged every other detail of the crossing, and now as midnight passed, he stood amidst the ruins of his plans, his dreams and possibly his country's future.

By midnight the snow and sleet had turned into cold, driving rain, and with all the necessity for the army to see, the night had become as dark as hell itself. Washington stood on the overturned beehive and directed the formation of the brigades on the Jersey side. Whatever anyone else might feel, he was so totally committed that even if all the rest of his army failed him, he alone on his chestnut-sorrel horse, a tall, skinny Don Quixote, sword drawn, war cry thrown at the dark sky, would have stormed down on Trenton, if need be, and fought his battle alone.

Several times that evening, Glover came to him and asked whether he wanted to change his plans or cancel the rest of the crossing. His response was a silent grimace to the negative. Let the army cross, there was no change in plans. Seeing him thus, the men did not question him, indeed no officer dared do so. The crossing continued, and by a half hour after two o'clock in the morning of December 26, the entire army of twenty-four hundred men and eighteen cannon and perhaps two hundred horses had been moved over from the west to the east bank of the Delaware.

If Washington had tragically miscalculated the time it would take to load the men, cannon, gun carriages, baggage carts, horses and supplies, and again to unload them in the darkness across the river, he had nevertheless accomplished a task that seemed impossible. And in a sense, the whole army was aware of the incredible achievement that night, as if indeed each soldier was threaded onto the commander's nervous system and thereby connected to his implacable determination.

[21]

IT WAS THREE O'CLOCK in the morning, and in three hours more, it would be dawn. There was no possibility now of a surprise attack upon the Hessians at night in the darkness or even in the early morning hours while the entire Hessian encampment slept. But for Washington the issue was already decided. They would march and they would attack.

He was not alone in his determination to move south. With him and of his mind were his beloved friend Hugh Mercer, General Sullivan, General Nathanael Greene and that rock of a man upon whom he leaned so often, William Alexander, Lord Stirling, and, of course, Johnny Stark of Vermont.

Colonel Stark was hopping with excitement and purpose. Already, the evening before, during the Meeting of Decision, he had denounced the use of troops to dig ditches and wield pickaxes. Soldiers, Stark had said, were for fighting, and now he turned to the commander in chief and demanded to know how soon they marched. Hugh Mercer, wracked with rheumatism and arthritis, living with his own conviction of impending death, joined his question to Stark's, and Sullivan, too, demanded that they march. At that moment Glover himself, perhaps because he would prefer to die rather than face the river again that night, echoed the suggestion to move south.

Glover's son John, Alexander Hamilton, James Monroe, Winthrop Sargent, young William Washington and a dozen other young officers in their teens and in their twenties let out a shout of enthusiasm, a wild Indian holler. Then the troops caught the mood, and they would have walked into hell itself if the big, skinny Virginian had demanded it.

The last boat to cross carried two pieces of the artillery, which had been reserved for the rear guard, and also four horses and ninety cannonballs. The boat was overloaded and almost went down in mid-river; the good fortune of its survival gave additional heart to the troops.

During the next hour, Washington divided the army into two sections and gave his final instructions to the commanders of the section that would march along the River Road without him. He himself would lead the other half of his troops along what was then known as the Pennington Road. No more than a few miles would ever separate the divided troops. The River Road section would be under the leadership of General Sullivan, with Colonel Stark of Vermont beside him and in a sense sharing his command. Colonel Glover would be with them, leading the 14th, 3rd, 19th, 23rd and 26th Continental regiments, all of them part of what were commonly known as Glover's Marblehead fishermen. Most of Sullivan's section consisted of New Englanders, men from Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.

By his own side Washington kept his brilliant aide, Alexander Hamilton. Three close personal friends, Greene, Stirling and Mercer, remained with his column, as did General Stephen, who led the Virginians.

At about four o'clock in the morning the march began. The first stage would be inland to the tiny hamlet of Birmingham, about three miles' distance. Birmingham was no more than a crossroad, with a handful of houses around it, but it was the point where the River Road and the Pennington Road separated. On a clear evening a night march is slow, and even lightly armed troops in good health can average no more than three miles an hour. Here, if the men marched two miles in an hour, they would be continuing a miracle, for the troops were burdened with all they owned and with three days' food as well. And as we noted before, many of them were barefoot and most of them were exhausted after the crossing, soaked to the skin and shivering with cold. They had little energy left. Weeks of hunger and bad diet and dysentery had woefully sapped their strength.