It took five days for the disheveled, footsore Americans to cross the Delaware River into Pennsylvania near Trenton, a rearguard action designed to protect nearby Philadelphia. Eager to conduct his army to safety, Washington kindled large bonfires onshore, so that boats could ply the waters through the night; he later recalled this anxious time as one of “trembling for the fate of America.”2 His heart sank as he watched his men, supposed saviors of the country, acting like “a destructive, expensive, disorderly mob.”3 One observant spectator of the crossing was Charles Willson Peale, who had painted a younger and happier Washington and now served with the Pennsylvania militia. Studying this “grand but dreadful” sight, Peale noted the hazardous drudgery of ferrying horses and heavy artillery across the water.4 He characterized the spectacle as “the most hellish scene I ever beheld” and left an unforgettable anecdote to illustrate the sorry state of the begrimed troops. As Continental soldiers filed past him, “a man staggered out of line and came toward me. He had lost all his clothes. He was in an old dirty blanket jacket, his beard long and his face full of sores . . . which so disfigured him that he was not known by me on first sight. Only when he spoke did I recognize my brother James.”5
Acting with dispatch, Washington had his men scour the Delaware for sixty miles and commandeer or destroy any boats that might tumble into British hands. For future use, he had all sturdy boats secreted in nearby creeks or sheltered by islands in the river, laying special stress on the Durham boats, bargelike craft, some sixty feet in length, that ordinarily carried iron ore and other freight. These black boats, outfitted with two masts and sails, could be steered in inclement weather by huge eighteen-foot oars or pushed along by long poles—a feature that would make them a godsend on a snowy night a few weeks later. Washington also posted guards along the river to bar the passage not just of British soldiers but of any Pennsylvanians who might smuggle vital information to the enemy.
On December 8 General Howe and his army arrived in Trenton and exchanged fire with American troops on the Delaware. With twelve thousand men, Howe was tempted to snatch Philadelphia but, in true aristocratic style, he preferred to make a gentlemanly retreat for the winter to the softer haunts of New York City. To fortify Trenton, he left three Hessian regiments under Colonel Johann Gottlieb Rall. Howe was feeling, with good reason, that the tide had turned decisively in his favor, the British having reasserted their sway over three former colonies: New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. Panic had gripped Philadelphia, prompting many towns-people to padlock their homes and flee. On December 13 Congress abandoned the now-indefensible city and decamped to Baltimore.
To Washington’s credit, instead of simply dwelling on the misery of his situation, he spied a possible opportunity in British complacency. A cold snap in mid-December fostered fears that the Delaware might freeze over, inviting the British to cross and attack. To forestall any prospect of Howe snatching Philadelphia and as a tonic to his dejected compatriots, Washington began to think creatively. He was now endowed with the clarity of despair, which unleashed his more aggressive instincts and opened his mind to unorthodox tactics. On December 14 he predicted to Governor Trumbull that a “lucky blow” against the British would “most certainly rouse the spirits of the people, which are quite sunk by our misfortunes.”6 He was awakening from the mental torpor that had shadowed his footsteps since the Long Island disaster. With fresh plans stirring in his brain, he ordered Horatio Gates to bring his regiments, now encamped in northern New Jersey, across the Delaware.
So many enlistments were set to elapse by year’s end that it set an effective deadline for offensive action. Washington believed that British units, scattered along the New Jersey side of the Delaware, were “hovering” like vultures, waiting to swoop down after New Year’s Day. Unless every nerve was “strained to recruit the new army with all possible expedition,” Washington warned his brother Samuel, “I think the game is pretty near up.”7 He was more concerned by the accelerating decay of patriotic support than by Howe’s overwhelming military strength. Adding further pressure for quick attention-getting action was the extreme disarray of American finances. “We are all of opinion, my dear General,” Joseph Reed told him, “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.”8
Sensitive to public opinion, Washington knew that he had to act fast and he often seemed abstracted. “I saw him in that gloomy period,” recalled one officer, “dined with him and attentively marked his aspect; always grave and thoughtful, he appeared at that time pensive and solemn in the extreme.”9 By December 22 Washington’s army had been bolstered by regiments that had previously marched under Charles Lee and Horatio Gates, as well as some new militia units, boosting its strength to more than 7,600 men. Because of short enlistments, Washington had ten days to strike a mortal blow against the British; otherwise his troops would vanish into the woods. When Trenton residents reported to the Hessians rumors of an impending rebel attack, the foreign soldiers seemed incredulous. “We did not have any idea of such a thing,” said one Hessian, “and thought the rebels were unable to do so.”10
A timely spur to patriot spirits was the publication of a soul-stirring manifesto by Thomas Paine, who had been amazed by the Continental soldiers’ pluck during their dreary hundred-mile march across New Jersey. To honor the thirteen states, he published thirteen essays in a collection entitled The Crisis. Scratched out by candlelight and campfire, these essays appeared in pamphlet form on December 23, and Washington had them read aloud to small clusters of men up and down the Delaware. The shivering listeners surely glowed with pride at the words: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”11 Washington had befriended the radical firebrand during the Jersey retreat, and Paine now celebrated his stoic fortitude: “Voltaire has remarked that King William never appeared to full advantage but in difficulties and in action; the same remark may be made on General Washington, for the character fits him.”12
Washington and his generals decided to cross the Delaware on the night of Christmas Day and pounce upon the Hessian garrison in Trenton an hour before daylight as they slept off their holiday revels, gambling everything on one final roll of the dice. “For heaven’s sake, keep this to yourself,” Washington told Joseph Reed on December 23, “as the discovery of it may prove fatal to us . . . dire necessity will—nay must—justify any [attempt].”13 His men had braved hunger, fatigue, sickness, and defeat from personal loyalty to him. On December 24 Colonel William Tudor explained to his fiancée in Boston why he stayed with the motley crew gathered on the Delaware: “I cannot desert a man . . . who has deserted everything to defend his country, and whose chief misfortune . . . is that a large part of it wants [i.e., lacks] spirit to defend itself.”14 Crossing the Delaware, Washington knew, would produce either storied success or utter calamity, and he seemed ready to pay the price. Dr. Benjamin Rush encountered Washington during the tense evening before the operation. “While I was talking to him,” Rush recalled, “I observed him to play with his pen and ink upon several small pieces of paper. One of them by accident fell upon the floor near my feet. I was struck with the inscription upon it. It was ‘Victory or Death.’ ” 15 Rush had glimpsed the password of the secret operation, which summed up its desperate all-or-nothing quality.
ON THE FRIGID CHRISTMAS EVE OF 1776 Washington convened a dinner meeting of officers at the home of Samuel Merrick to plot their moves for the following night. In a group of inspired talkers, Washington was the peerless listener and had developed excellent working relations with his generals. After the five-day ordeal of crossing the Delaware into Pennsylvania, skeptics questioned whether the entire army could be rowed across in a single night. The tightly structured plans left little margin for error or slippage in t
he schedule. Reassurance came from Colonel John Glover, the maritime wizard behind the East River retreat, who reassured the gathering “not to be troubled about that, as his boys could manage it.”16 The grand strategy, orchestrated in minute detail, envisioned the main force of 2,400 men, along with Henry Knox and his artillery, crossing the Delaware at McConkey’s Ferry, nine miles above Trenton. Once across the river, this force would split into two columns: one marching under General Sullivan along a road hugging the river, and the second farther inland, along the higher Pennington Road, to be guided by Washington and Greene. These two columns would, in theory, rendezvous outside Trenton. Meanwhile, farther downstream, 700 militia led by General James Ewing would cross the river directly at Trenton, while 1,500 troops would cross at Bristol under Colonel John Cadwalader. Some historians have faulted Washington for the baffling intricacy of this nocturnal operation, but as it turned out, it gave him four separate chances to reach the Hessians at Trenton. Washington enjoyed the unified support of his generals, except for Horatio Gates, who showed his true colors by feigning sickness. While pleading that he was too sick to participate, he rode off to Congress to try to undermine Washington’s plan, a transparent betrayal that Washington regarded with contempt.
CHRISTMAS DAY 1776 dawned cold but sunny, then grew overcast by late afternoon as the soldiers, ignorant of their destination, began to file toward the river. They paced more slowly than Washington had reckoned, their bare feet tracing bloody streaks in the snow. Delays threatened the demanding timetable for the crossing, which had to commence right after sundown. Once the men got across the Delaware, they needed to tramp nine miles to Trenton in pitch darkness and arrive by five A.M. Everything hinged on secrecy and faultless precision, and in his general orders Washington demanded “profound silence” during the operation, warning that no soldier was “to quit his ranks on the pain of death.”17
At sundown light rain began to fall. In advance of his men, Washington crossed the river and staked out a place on the Jersey shore, the dangerous side of the river, a vulnerable patch if news of the raid leaked out. With the future of the country riding on his shoulders, the Virginia planter displayed an indomitable tenacity. Quite simply, if the raid backfired, the war was likely over and he would be captured and killed. Washington, gathering up his courage, responded brilliantly to the challenge. Legend depicts him shrouded in a cloak against the biting wind, sitting perched on an empty beehive, barking orders at Henry Knox, who relayed his words to the boatmen. Knox’s resonant voice bellowed throughout the night, and Major James Wilkinson credited his “stentorian lungs” as essential to the operation.18
As always, Washington was the tutelary presence, never asking his men to take risks he didn’t share. As chunks of ice traveled swiftly down the Delaware, the question arose whether it was possible to negotiate tricky currents under such dreadful conditions. “Who will lead us?” Washington asked, and John Glover and his stout-hearted fishermen, aided by Philadelphia stevedores and local boatmen, promised to rise to the occasion. As was often the case, Washington attained his greatest nobility at times of crisis. “His Excellency George Washington never appeared to so much advantage as in the hour of distress,” wrote Greene.19
The night was darkened by a moon sheathed in clouds. As 2,400 men boarded the Durham boats to begin their 800-foot journey across the river, they were tightly wedged in: 40 standing men were sometimes squeezed into a single craft. The task of transporting skittish horses and eighteen field guns—nearly 400 tons of cumbersome artillery—on the Delaware ferries was a prodigious undertaking. The elements delivered a bone-chilling mixture of rain, sleet, and wind that soaked everything. Around eleven P.M., as a grim northeaster began to churn up the waters, snow and hail pelted men exposed in the boats—“a perfect hurricane,” in the words of fifer John Greenwood .20 Since most of the soldiers couldn’t swim, they must have experienced sheer terror at the thought of their boats capsizing. Along the shores, the river froze into such thick crusts that Washington said the “greatest fatigue” came from “breaking a passage” through them.21 The storm significantly retarded troop movements and heightened fears of arriving at Trenton after daybreak, jeopardizing the entire plan. But it also had the collateral advantage of muting sounds from the river and blinding the enemy to the army’s advance. Despite the delays, Washington made the momentous decision to proceed with the perilous mission, which had taken on its own irresistible logic. As he later wrote, “I well knew we could not reach it [Trenton] before day was fairly broke, but as I was certain there was no making a retreat without being discovered, and harassed on repassing the river, I determined to push on at all events.”22 It was brilliant daring, combined with a large measure of outright desperation.
Even though the army was supposed to scoot across by midnight, the last boat didn’t cross the river until three A.M. Not a single soldier died. On the Jersey shore, Washington remained a study in quiet resolve and concentrated force. Not until four A.M. was the assembled army ready to initiate its nine-mile march to Trenton. Washington didn’t know that the other two sections of his invading force, slated to traverse the river downstream at Trenton and Bristol, had been canceled due to an inability to pierce icy masses in the river. Colonel Cadwalader, who couldn’t get his artillery across, simply assumed that Washington had also aborted his plans on this miserable night.
As the long column finally got under way in New Jersey, the road winding through the woods was steep and treacherous, slippery to man and beast alike. The slanting snow, sleet, and hail drove straight into the faces of men plunging forward in nearly total darkness. At least two exhausted soldiers tumbled into roadside snowdrifts and froze to death. At a place called Jacob’s Creek, the soldiers had to execute the risky maneuver of rolling artillery across a deep chasm. On horseback, Washington was directing their movements when the hind legs of his horse buckled and began to skid down the ice-covered slope. His men then saw the greatest horseman of his age perform an equestrian tour de force. Twining his fingers through the horse’s mane, Washington yanked its large head upright with all his might. At the same time, he rocked and shifted his weight backward in his saddle until the horse regained its equilibrium. The amazing feat happened in the blink of an eye, then the artillery movement continued.
It proved an agonizing ride for Washington. His army was only halfway to Trenton when the first sunlight wanly colored the sky at six A.M. One soldier remembered Washington speaking “in a deep and solemn voice,” cautioning his men, “Soldiers, keep by your officers. For God’s sake, keep by your officers.”23 Taking food and drink on horseback in the thin dawn light, Washington held an impromptu conference with his generals and they decided to proceed with their original plan, splitting the column and heading on to Trenton by both high and low roads. With his congenital penchant for punctuality, Washington pulled out his timepiece and asked the generals to set their watches by it. Taking the upper Pennington Road with Greene, Washington chose the more arduous route. As the parallel detachments plodded on through a new wave of sleet and swirling snow, a messenger from Sullivan informed Washington that his men’s sodden weapons were now useless. “Tell the general to use the bayonet,” Washington said.24 He then galloped along the lines, trying to speed the march’s tempo in the brightening morning light. “Press on,” he urged the men. “Press on, boys!”25
At around seven-thirty A.M., the operation was nearly derailed by a preposterous blunder committed by an old Washington colleague. General Adam Stephen had fought with Washington in Braddock’s campaign and vied with him for a seat in the House of Burgesses. The day before the Delaware crossing, he had dispatched a company of Virginians to scout enemy positions in Trenton. Now, as he neared the town, Washington was shocked to meet these fifty Virginians and learn that they had exchanged fire with Hessian sentries, raising the appalling specter that the Hessians had been alerted to the Continental Army’s advent. Under questioning, Captain George Wallis told Washington they had acted
under instructions from Stephen. Washington summarily hauled the latter into his presence. “You, sir!” Washington scolded him. “You, sir, may have ruined all my plans by having put them on their guard.”26 Those present were amazed by the vivid show of temper, but Washington soon regained his self-mastery and told the Virginians to fall in with his column.
The mythology of the Battle of Trenton portrays the Hessian mercenaries as slumbering in a drunken stupor after imbibing late-night Christmas cheer. In fact, Colonel Johann Gottlieb Rall had kept his men on high alert, and they felt frazzled and exhausted from constant drills and patrols. Quite shrewdly, Washington had worn them down by irregular raids and small skirmishes in the surrounding countryside. If the Hessians were caught off guard that morning, it was only because they thought the forbidding weather would preclude an attack. These tough, brawny hirelings, with a reputation for ferocity, inspired healthy fear among the Americans. But handicapped by their patronizing view of the Americans, they couldn’t conceive of something of quite the scale and daring that Washington attempted. “I must concede that on the whole we had a poor opinion of the rebels, who previously had never successfully opposed us,” said Lieutenant Jakob Piel.27 Having received multiple warnings of the surprise attack, Rall was so certain of the superiority of his men that he dismissed these reports with blithe bravado: “Let them come.”28
As Washington approached Trenton, he was astounded by the valor of his men, who had marched all night and were still eager to attack. Though a snowy tempest still whirled around them, the squalls now blew at their backs as they raced forward at a brisk pace. Intent on exploiting the element of surprise, Washington wanted his men to startle the Hessians. Emerging from the Trenton woods shortly after eight A.M., he divided his wing of the army into three columns and spearheaded the middle column himself, trotting forward in an exposed position. As his men surged ahead, he reported to Hancock, they “seemed to vie with the other in pressing forward.” 29 Washington heard artillery blasts exploding on the River Road, confirming that the two American wings had coordinated their arrival.