The Crossing (6 page)

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 next 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.

[17]

GENERAL HOWE WENT IN and out of the village of Trenton in a hurry. He did not enjoy the Delaware River Valley, and he was rather annoyed that here in the Jerseys it should be colder than it was in New York City to the north, even though his weather experts told him that it was quite natural for the frost to settle into a river bottom such as this.

But New York was warmer in more ways than one. General Howe, who cherished women, found American ladies even more adorable than those he had left behind in England, particularly Mrs. Loring, blue-eyed, blond, gay, pretty, as addicted to cards as the general himself, and possessed of a most understanding husband. She became his mistress, his whist partner, and she kept his social schedule.

The rebels had fled New York City, for the bitter lesson of the young lad Nathan Hale, hanged for espionage in full view of the population, had driven home the fact that the city was occupied by a most determined enemy. Rebels who still remained slipped out of the town, especially those people of substance, leaving behind them a city whose “better people” were of one heart with the British.

Sir William Howe felt at home there, and on December II, he hastened back to New York, where Mrs. Loring's social book held a listing of six major balls, fourteen small but elegant dinner parties and any number of luncheons, which was not at all bad for a provincial capital.

In Philadelphia, not one ball. Even the flow of testimonial dinners for the members of Congress had dried up; the city was moody and depressed. And when Putnam and Reed decided that the Associators should leave the city and march up into Bucks County to join Washington, the city became even more depressed.

The Associators were an urban phenomenon. They had come into being with the Association, which had been set up in 1774 as a compact of merchants who agreed not to import, export or use British goods until the British were willing to redress the grievances of the colonies. Out of this had come a small volunteer movement of merchants, clerks, warehousemen, storekeepers, printers and other city folk who organized themselves into marching companies they called the Associators. There were about a thousand of these volunteers in Philadelphia, three companies of which—numbering about two hundred men each—Colonel Joseph Reed took north to Trenton Falls.

They were self-conscious city people, and they marched stiffly, for all of their training. But they had uniforms, brown trousers and blue coats, and they had real knapsacks and ammunition pouches and muskets. When they entered the American encampment, the bearded, long-haired regulars, clothed in rags and pieces of man-blanket and horse-blanket, stared at them dumbly. And Washington, so easily moved by kindness or help, was more disturbed than relieved. Here was the very life blood of Philadelphia city, given up to him, and he found that he could not in all conscience take these men away from the defense of the city. Instead, he put them under the command of Colonel John Cadwalader, with instructions to use these men to defend the river bank against a British crossing, from a point about ten miles south of Trenton down around the bend to Bristol, the part closest to Philadelphia that might still be crossed.

[18]

IN ALL TRUTH, Washington was puzzled, and he felt the desperate sense of entrapment that a blind man knows in a situation of grave danger. Not only were the two divisions of his army lost to him and apparently beyond contact, but he simply did not know what the British were up to. He had to know. Again he begged his general officers to buy information and pay the spies and informers whatever they asked, no matter how loathsome they appeared.

Howe had marched his Highlanders and his British regulars in and out of Trenton village, hardly pausing for breath. Were they back in New York, as some informants assured him? Were they boarding ship again for an attack on Philadelphia? Suppose they landed in Delaware by night; they could be in Philadelphia in three days. Then what was holding them back? Mrs. Loring? The tall Virginian loved women with as much delight as William Howe, but do you leave a dying army alone to diddle a married woman who's fair game for the field? Howe was no lovesick boy; he would not weigh a woman against a prize as rich as America.

Putnam rode up from Philadelphia and told Washington that the key to the whole thing was in the weather. It was the coldest December in anyone's memory, certainly in his, and anyone who knew the British realized that they would not march out against an enemy in weather like this. For one thing, they had no winter longcoats.

At least it was something Washington could have a good laugh over, even though he was not convinced. Putnam told him that the Continental Congress wanted to get out of Philadelphia. They felt that Philadelphia was an open city and could not be defended. They wanted to move on to Baltimore, which they held to be a safer place.

Nothing so far was as bitter as this. For them, for Congress, it was over then, and each man for his own neck. Philadelphia was only the financial, the manufacturing, the commercial center of the thirteen colonies; it was only the most vital of any city in America to the war effort, and at least three-quarters of the food and supplies that were now coming through to the army originated there or were transshipped through the city. Whatever small navy the Americans had was based there, and it was the largest and busiest port in America, the largest shipbuilding center.

Putnam repeated their demand. The Congress would not remain in Philadelphia; they were frightened. Better that he should suggest that Congress move to Baltimore than to have them scurry for safety, each to his own place, like hunted rabbits. That would be the end.

Very well, he told Putnam. Let them go to Baltimore.

So they did, without wasting an hour, and on the twelfth of December, 1776, they sent a message to Washington that said:

“… that until they should otherwise order, General Washington should be possessed of all power to order and direct all things relative to the department and the operation of the war.”

Well, he was now a military dictator of sorts. There appeared to be no end to the roles he would play.

[19]

THEN PART OF THE MYSTERY of what the British intended was solved. The British regulars left Trenton village; the Hessians marched in and occupied it, this time for the winter, settling down with the finality of men who had come to stay.

The first to arrive in Trenton were the grenadiers, some six hundred strong, led by Colonel Johann Gottlieb Rahl, who would be commandant of the entire occupying force. These men wore dark blue uniforms and sported great brass shakos, and they had the reputation of having killed more Americans than any other unit on American soil. They also were famous for their corps of trumpet, French horn and drums, often conducted by the colonel himself. He loved music, particularly military music.

The Knyphausen regiment followed Rahl's grenadiers, and they were in more or less the same strength, some six hundred strong. They wore black uniforms with silver facings, and almost every man in the regiment had a fierce black mustache, waxed and thrusting out horizontally, like two sharp sword points.

The two regiments took over the village methodically, in a practical and businesslike manner, but without any noticeable hostility toward those residents who had remained in their houses. About half of the village had fled; those who stayed, with some few exceptions, were Quakers, and their manner toward the Hessians was no different from the grave and courteous behavior they displayed toward anyone else.

Upon arrival, the Hessians posted notices around town:

S
MALL STRAGGLING PARTIES NOT DRESSED

LIKE SOLDIERS AND WITHOUT OFFICERS,

NOT BEING ADMISSIBLE IN WAR WHO PRESUMES

TO MOLEST OR FIRE UPON SOLDIERS OR

PEACEABLE INHABITANTS OF THE COUNTRY,

WILL BE IMMEDIATELY HANGED WITHOUT

TRIAL AS ASSASSINS.

In all fairness, it must be stated that the Hessians hanged no one during their occupation of Trenton, nor did they inflict any cruel punishment that we have record of.

The following morning-Friday, the thirteenth of December-a company of fifty Jägers marched into Trenton, to join the two regiments already in occupation. The Jägers wore bright green uniforms with red facings and cocked hats. The Jägers were the Hessians most feared by the Continentals, perhaps because the German regiments in the American army had a traditional terror of the Jäger regiments in Europe.