The Crossing (3 page)

But by far the majority of the garrison of Fort Washington were taken captive, over two thousand unwounded men in all. A dozen others were injured. And while tremendous tales were contrived later concerning the gallantry of the men who defended the fort, the bitter truth is that it was given away, with only twelve men killed among the defenders.

Across the Hudson River, on the Palisades, General Washington and his brigadiers watched as the enemy flag was raised through the clouds of smoke that lay over the fort. What thoughts crossed his mind then, we will never know. But certainly he must have reflected ruefully that the first place ever named in his honor had made a speedy transition. Possibly, he also felt that it might well be the last. And he might have thought to himself that it was high time he stopped taking the advice of others, for he wrote to his brother Augustine:

“This is a most unfortunate affair, and has given me great mortification; as we have lost not only two thousand men that were there, but a good deal of artillery and some of the best arms we had. And what adds to my mortification is that this post, after the last ships went past it, was held contrary to my wishes and opinion …”

Such was the chaos of the moment that Washington actually did not have the full figure of the loss. Sir William Howe, the British commander, ordered a count, and the total was 2,818 men and officers. By midnight, the count was finished, and the poor, damned men were marched off under guard to New York City, there to rot and die in the British prison ships.

[7]

THERE HE WAS, fox hunter and aristocrat and not too bad with cards and women; but he had nothing to boast about as a soldier or a leader of soldiers. He had ordered his own count on the Fourth of July, that hot, sunny, lovely day when 20,275 of his men paraded on the green in New York City. Now, on the twentieth of November, he took another count not by head, for his army was in three places, part of it at North Castle on the Hudson under the command of General Lee, part of it at Fort Lee, which was on the Palisades, across the Hudson River from Fort Washington and part of it with him at Hackensack a few miles from Fort Lee. So it was a count not by head but by addition, putting together what he hoped was left to him. The putting-together amounted to no more than eleven thousand men—and even that was dwindling away as he totaled his figures. Five months and ten thousand men gone.

But at least let them be together. This was his main thought, as he wrote to General Lee: “… the public interest requires your coming over to this side of the Hudson with the Continental troops …”, writing respectfully, for General Lee was no dunderhead like himself but a professional military man, and he had not lost an army twice, as had a fox hunter from Virginia. In fact, General Lee was the darling of thousands of Americans, which goes to explain why they named the fort on the Palisades after him.

But Lee ignored the letter, and then a message came from General Greene, who was in command at Fort Lee. The British warships had sailed up the Hudson, and now they were disembarking an army, thousands of men and guns and wagons of supply on the shore about six miles above Fort Lee. It was too late to stop them, for they already held the shoreline and the heights above it.

Washington called for his horse, mounted and rode like the very devil for the fort. He rode so hard that Alexander Hamilton, his young aide who was under twenty, was put to it to keep up with him.

But there was no sprig of hope at Fort Lee. Greene told Washington that scouts found that the British army was marching inland into Jersey, so as to cut off the Americans, pin them onto the Palisades, and make an end of them once and for all.

“Then what in God's name are we waiting for?” Washington demanded.

Greene tried to explain. They had lost guns and supplies in Brooklyn, and more at Kip's Bay and still more at Fort Washington. Now it would take at least four or five hours to load their supplies and to find horses to pull the guns.

Within five minutes, the army was leaving Fort Lee. Let all be lost, all but the men. A naked man could be clothed and armed, but where was the gun that would find a man? Washington had come to realize the value of men, and he treasured them like some miser who had lost half his fortune. When the men marched, it was not enough for him, and he drew his sword and whipped them on with the flat of it. “Run! Run!” he shouted.

“Run! Run!” his aides shouted.

“Run!” the other officers shouted.

“Run!” was the scream that went out.

“Faster!”

“Faster!” he yelled, bearing down on them with his big white horse, and many was the man who nursed the welts from the flaying sword of the Virginian.

The cooking kettles were abandoned with soup and meat bubbling smartly. The big iron guns, the tents and blankets and ammunition and stores of food, all were left to the enemy. And thousands of men were running headlong down that steep little dirt road that swept from Fort Lee to the meadows and across the meadows, past all the prissy little Dutch houses to the wooden bridge that spanned the Hackensack River.

Before all crossed the bridge, the British came into sight, hooting and deriding the dirty Continentals who knew nothing else but to run away.

There were a few cannon left in the encampment at Hackensack, and Hamilton had dashed out in front of the fleeing army and reached the encampment, where he and Henry Knox loaded a cannon with grapeshot and dragged it to cover the bridge. When the last fleeing American was across, Knox and Hamilton stood over their primed cannon with a flaming match, both of them weeping with vexation.

But the British remained beyond cannon shot and had a good laugh. The Scottish Highlanders strutted in their natty kilts, and the pipers swaggered back and forth, keeping the pipes skirling until late into the night.

[8]

CHARLES CORNWALLIS, who led the British army in New Jersey, was told by Sir William Howe to make a quick end of Washington, his army and the war. Lord Cornwallis had a reputation for ferocity that was perhaps deserved and a reputation for military intelligence that was unmerited. It was not that the British were unable to learn—albeit they learned slowly—but that having once absorbed the lesson, it took them so long to unlearn. Having discovered during the Battle of Concord that one did not march between stone walls that might shelter Continentals, they scouted every stone wall on a Jersey roadside before marching through. Having learned during the Battle of Bunker Hill that it did not pay to advance uphill against a position the Continentals held, they put a thin skirmish line over every hill before they mounted it. They never entered a wood without beating through it first, and they avoided swampy areas where they might have been entrapped.

Thus Washington and his army were saved for the moment. It was not that Cornwallis was afraid of the Americans; quite to the contrary, he had the utmost contempt for them and saw no reason to lose a single man to this rag-tail, dying army. He was content to march after them, waiting for the moment when he could bring the frightened rabble to bay on a proper battlefield, and then destroy them.

Washington, on the other hand, desired only to survive. Each day that he awakened with an army still in existence was a particular triumph, and for the moment he asked no more. Desertions were going on at the rate of about one hundred men a day, and he saw no way to halt them, short of turning the guns upon his own men. This he would not do—although some of his general officers advised it—and it is likely that if he had attempted to halt desertions by musket balls, his entire army would have disintegrated.

Turning and twisting, destroying every bridge he crossed, Washington covered over a hundred miles between Fort Lee and the Delaware River just north of Trenton, and early on Saturday, December 7, 1776, he reined his big white horse down the steep slope to the banks of the river. The road was muddy and treacherous, for it had rained on and off for days, and in good part the wretched weather accounted for the fact that they had come safely through the past seventeen days of retreat. The British could not move faster than their great supply wagons, their big artillery pieces—some of them shipboard thirties mounted on giant carriages—and their heavily loaded caissons. Again and again, the iron-wheeled vehicles were mired in the mud, holding up the entire army. On one day, driving his men to their limit, Cornwallis managed to cover twenty miles, but this exhausted the army so that it hardly moved the following day, waiting hours for all the stragglers to appear; and generally speaking, their progress was no more than ten miles a day. This, together with the need to rebuild bridges before rivers could be crossed, saved Washington. And even if it had crossed Cornwallis's mind to break loose from his guns and baggage and simply sweep down on Washington with musket and bayonet alone, he knew that such a radical departure from British military technique might well destroy him—for if he failed, no plea in his own behalf would be accepted.

Tom Paine was with the army during this retreat from Fort Lee. He was a sort of civilian-soldier—for the line between the two was very uncertain then—and though he carried a musket, he was not attached to any brigade, but existed rather in the way of a war correspondent, perhaps the first of the line. His
Common Sense
was the most widely read book in the colonies, and his name was known everywhere. Washington liked him, and they spent hours together discussing the war and what hope and meaning—if any—might be extracted from it then.

Afterward, in his first
Crisis
paper, Paine wrote:

“With a handful of men, we sustained an orderly retreat for near a hundred miles, brought off our ammunition, all our field pieces, the greatest part of our stores, and had four rivers to cross. None could say that our retreat was precipitate, for we were three weeks in performing it that the country might have time to come in. Twice we marched back to meet the enemy and remained out until dark. The sign of fear was not seen in our camp; and had not some of the cowardly and disaffected inhabitants spread false alarms through the country the Jerseys had never been ravaged.”

In his enthusiasm, Paine was a little less than forthright. They had not brought their stores from Fort Lee, but had left everything to the enemy. They had retreated for seventeen days, not three weeks, and at times their retreat had been utterly precipitate. But Paine's purpose was to recruit, not to further disintegration.

[9]

IT WAS WASHINGTON HIMSELF who held onto the reality, who remained calm and was thoughtful and gentle from day to day. In his own quiet way, he noticed and remembered things, and used them when they had to be used. Casting about desperately for some way out of their predicament, some path to survival, he remembered the Durham boats and began to build a concept around them. This time, he asked for no one's counsel, but proceeded on his own.

It makes sense that Washington would know about the Durham boats, monster freight carriers, some of them as much as sixty feet in length, eight feet in the beam and three and a half feet in the depth of hold. They were shallow-water boats, loading fifteen tons of dead weight and still drawing no more than thirty inches of water. Because he knew about them, something of the world was changed.

He met and talked with John Glover. There was no way he could reach Glover and very likely there was no way Glover could reach him. When they sat in the commander in chiefs tent during that wretched retreat, with the pouring rain beating at the canvas outside and falling from it in tiny droplets from the inside, they were no closer than before. Long-nosed, tight-lipped, Presbyterian by religion, New Englander by birth, fisherman by trade, merchant by instinct, tightfisted, hard-nosed, John Glover bristled at the very sight of the tall, gentle-spoken Potomac aristocrat. That they should be on the same side in the same army was miracle enough; John Glover of Marblehead, Massachusetts, could find no reason under God for liking the Virginian.

Perceptive people like John Adams suggested that John Glover had saved the Virginian's life and honor once too often for any love to exist between them. In a way it was true. After the debacle at Brooklyn, it was John Glover and his Massachusetts fishermen who plucked the remnants of the American army from the Brooklyn shore and bore them back to Manhattan. Up in Westchester, the only forces that opposed Sir William Howe's landing were the same fishermen, and the same men, Glover leading them, took Washington and his army across the Tappan Zee into Jersey, and then the few survivors of Fort Washington out from under the noses of the British and across the Hudson River. Always, it was John Glover and his sailors and his fishermen—always when the “lousy, Papist” Southerners had dropped the whole mess into hot water.

So it is not hard to imagine the conversation between the two of them, there in that tent:

“I intend to cross the Delaware and hold the shore. I intend to run no more.”

“Oh?” And then John Glover must have asked just how the general proposed to cross a river swollen like the very devil under this constant rain, and where would they find the boats? And even if there were a few rotten little scows, you don't put an army across a river in rowboats, and did he know how long it would take to put this army across in the few boats they might find?