The Crossing (7 page)

In his own words, a Hessian appears far more human and understandable than as a historical memory, and what follows is an entry in a Hessian diary, made by one of the Jägers on the day they arrived in Trenton:

We marched to Trenton and joined our two regiments of Rall
[sic]
and Knyphausen, in order to take up a sort of winter quarters here, which are wretched enough. This town consists of about one hundred houses, of which many are mean and little, and it is easy to conceive how ill it must accommodate three regiments. The inhabitants, like those at Princeton, are almost all fled, so that we occupy bare walls. The Delaware, which is here extremely rapid, and in general about two ells deep [90 inches], separates us and the rebels. We are obliged to be constantly on our guard, and to do very severe duty, though our people begin to grow ragged, and our baggage is left at New York. Notwithstanding, we have marched across this extremely fine province of New Jersey, which may justly be called the garden of America, yet it is by no means freed from the enemy, and we are insecure both in flank and rear. The Brigade has incontestably suffered the most of any, and we now lie at the advanced point, that as soon as the Delaware freezes we may march over and attack Philadelphia which is about thirty miles distant.

In Trenton, as elsewhere, the ability of the Quakers to maintain themselves as they did during the Revolution is a testimony, not only to the Quaker faith, but to that quality so rare in war, compassion, which never entirely disappeared during the Revolution. The entire community of Quakers suffered uniquely during the war. Uncomfortably situated, poignantly conflicted by religion, ideals and principles, they were in their great majority entirely sympathetic to the American cause. Among many of them this sympathy was so deep-felt and profoundly religious, that in spite of their faith they took up arms in the Continental cause. But the majority of them adhered to their faith, bore the insults and taunts of both sides patiently and without bad will, and when the opportunity offered, provided food, shelter and medical aid to both the rebels and the British.

When the war began, the immediate reaction of Americans from those areas of the country where there were few or no Quakers was to regard them with suspicion and often with hatred and contempt. But as the war went on, these feelings changed to respect and admiration. The militant Protestant ideologies provided much of the impetus for the Revolution, and to religious people, the sense of the Quakers as Christians was hard to reject.

Yet, a Quaker meetinghouse was fair game for men who would think twice before defiling a church. Twenty members of the 16th Regiment of the Queen's Light Dragoons quartered themselves in the Friends' meetinghouse on Third Street in Trenton, filthied and damaged the place, and, on occasion, stabled their horses there.

[20]

ON SATURDAY, which was the fourteenth of December, one week after Washington led his beaten army across the Delaware, the Hessians completed their occupation of the little village of Trenton with the arrival of Colonel von Lossberg's Fusilier Regiment. Their drums shattering the morning silence, their leggings chalked white, their coats bright red, they marched proudly into the village and quartered themselves in the Methodist and Episcopal churches. Later the same day, Colonel Rahl established his brigade hospital in the parsonage of the Presbyterian church. Dr. Elihu Spencer, the Presbyterian parson, was an avid book collector, and he complained afterward that the Hessians had used his books to light fires and to clean their boots.

With the arrival of the Fusilier Regiment of Hessians in Trenton, Sir William Howe completed his plans for the containment of Washington's shattered army until the Delaware River froze solid within a few weeks. He stationed his British troops in the rear, where they could easily join the Hessians when the time came for a general advance against the Continentals: a thousand Highlanders at Amboy, a thousand red-coats at New Brunswick and a thousand more at Princeton.

The Hessians—who were armed not only with their guns but with their reputations—were at the river bank itself, somewhat more than fifteen hundred men at Trenton and about the same number at Bordentown, some ten miles downstream and toward Philadelphia. Thus six thousand men were considered by the British as ample to deal with what remained of the American army. The rest of the troops were quartered in New York City for that interval—a short one they were certain—before the war ended.

[21]

THIS DESCRIPTION of the Hessian soldier is taken from Dunlap's
History of the American Theater:

“A towering brass fronted cap; mustaches colored with the same material that colored his shoes, his hair plastered with tallow and flour, and tightly drawn into a long appendage reaching from the back of his head to his waist; his blue uniform almost covered by broad belts sustaining his cartouche box, his brass hilted sword, and his bayonet; a yellow waistcoat with flaps, and yellow breeches, met at the knee by black gaiters; and thus heavily equipped he stood as an automaton, and received the command or cane of the officer who inspected him.”

The flamboyant, colorful, peacock dress of the Hessian soldier was by no means unusual in Continental Europe. There the uniform of the soldier had social as well as sexual—and often homosexual—significance. Its popinjay qualities were not without reason but served a very necessary purpose during the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Recruited most frequently from among the peasants, and often enough from the serfs, the Continental European soldier experienced a very significant change of character and position upon entering the army. From the very lowest rung of society he was elevated to a position of great subjective and even considerable objective importance; he was dressed in a colorful and striking uniform, and he was given the right to strut and parade his peacock feathers for the edification of the urban woman, whom he had always desired, even though she were maidservant or prostitute.

Criminal or peasant, he had once belonged to the least powerful element of society; now a musket was put in his hand and he was given the right, under certain conditions, to kill. This enlargement from subjugation to what was the ultimate power gave him a very distinctive and particular place in society.

The American soldier, on the other hand, was a world apart from this uniformed robot. Except for a few city companies of prosperous volunteers, the Continental had no other uniform during the year of 1776 than the clothes he wore when he had enlisted in the army either as a regular soldier or as a part of the militia. The whole symbolic significance of the uniform was lost upon him. Instead of the polished, bemedaled and brightly colored garments upon his own back, he saw them only upon the enemy and as a quality of the enemy. The popinjays were the others, not himself. He was recruited neither from the criminal classes nor from the serfs, but most frequently from the most advanced and educated elements of American society. What romance of warfare he might have gathered from storybooks had long since been dissipated by the bitter reality, and now soldiering in the army was to him and his fellows a common curse that had to be endured but never enjoyed. The only loyalty he had was to his cause, and this too was the only reason for existing as a soldier. He looked forward not to any rewards of cash, sex or plunder, but to that day when the unspeakable torment of the war would be over. Peace was paradise lost, the beloved condition in which he had once existed.

As for the Hessians, the American soldier despised them doubly. For one thing, they were the enemy; for another, they were foreigners who had been bought and paid for to fight in a war that the American felt was as unjustly directed against him as ever an armed movement was unjustly directed against defenders of their native soil. The Englishmen were strangers from overseas who had come to take his lands, burn his home, spoil his crop and put him into what he considered profoundly–if emotionally-a condition of virtual slavery; yet he could comprehend the motives of the English, since he could remember them historically as owners of the country when they first took it for the Crown.

He had no such comprehension of the motives of the Hessians; and along with lack of comprehension went the ugly memory of what the Hessians had done to the raw, unsoldierly, American boys on Brooklyn Heights and on Manhattan Island.

[22]

GENERAL CHARLES LEE was a strange and misunderstood man, who put himself outside of our history and outside of some balanced comprehension of the situation in which he found himself at the time. For that reason he was damned beyond reason and perhaps beyond his deserving. Mrs. Mercy Warren, a charming and perceptive woman of the period, writing to Samuel Adams, said the following of Lee, who was an acquaintance of hers: “… Plain in his person to a degree of ugliness; careless even to unpoliteness; his garb ordinary; his voice rough; his manners rather morose; yet sensible, learned, judicious, penetrating.”

He was not a man whom women found attractive. Another woman of the time called him: “A crabbed man.” He was given to introversion, silences and too much alcohol, and he always resented the aristocratic airs of Washington and Washington's circle—unself-conscious though these airs might be—and felt that Washington's friends regarded him, an Englishman, as more renegade than recruit.

On December 12, he led his two thousand soldiers out of Morristown, New Jersey, and marched them eight miles to Vealtown, for what reason we do not know. It was in response to no commands or orders from Washington; nor was Lee such a person as to take others into his confidence. At Vealtown, he instructed General Sullivan, who was his second in command, to supervise the making of a temporary camp for the men.

Sullivan, an intelligent man and a lawyer, then thirty-six years old, followed Lee's orders only because he had a deep, ingrained respect for the military acumen of his commander. He knew all the unpleasant personal characteristics of General Lee, but at the same time he recognized Lee's incisiveness and his brilliance. In the year of war Sullivan had seen, he had experienced enough American blunders to make him slow to judgment and criticism, even though he knew Lee as an opportunistic soldier of fortune. In any case, they were not Lee's blunders. A profound supporter of the Continental cause, Sullivan had been a delegate to the First Continental Congress. He was at the siege of Boston, and he fought gallantly at the battle of Brooklyn Heights, where he had been captured by the Hessians. He was then exchanged for a British officer and was able to rejoin General Lee's command.

As far as we can gather, Lee looked at the few houses available around Vealtown and rejected all of them as “pious holes.” The plain fact of the matter is that they were houses of Methodist and Lutheran families, and thus without liquor; and Lee wanted desperately to get drunk. He wanted to be away from righteous Americans.

Therefore he left his troops, taking with him only a guard of six mounted men, and rode to Baskingridge, three miles away, where he took up his quarters at the local inn. The amiable innkeeper at Baskingridge agreed that while General Lee could have a room upstairs, his six troopers must make their beds on the floor in the main room by the fireplace, a practice not unusual in those days and infinitely preferable to the open field.

Only minutes after Lee and his escort had left the encampment of the two thousand Continental soldiers at Vealtown, Major Wilkinson arrived with messages from General Horatio Gates to General Washington. Major Wilkinson was then nineteen or twenty years old—like other facets of Wilkinson, his age was hard to pin down—and from what others had to say about him, which was never laudatory, he was not an extremely trustworthy person. So far as one can put the pieces of his character together, he was a young man of opportunist tendencies and quick intelligence. As so often with men of that type, his ambition outran his store of common sense, and he all too frequently mounted the wrong horse at the wrong time.

On the other hand, he did subsequently write a journal of experiences in the Revolution, and the journal does provide a good deal of information that cannot be found elsewhere. Unfortunately the information, like the man, is not wholly to be trusted, and the central hero of whatever event described is always Major Wilkinson.

Wilkinson had been dispatched by General Horatio Gates who, with an army of between eight and nine hundred men, had been detained from joining Washington by an unseasonable snowstorm near the Wallpack River in New Jersey. His orders were to find Washington. It would appear that he had also been instructed by Gates to interview General Charles Lee and have an off-the-record discussion with him before he, Wilkinson, found the commander in chief.

Wilkinson rode from Gates's camp to Morristown, where he certainly had little expectation of finding General Washington but every expectation of finding Charles Lee. There he learned that Lee had gone on to Vealtown. Wilkinson rode there and spoke to General Sullivan and was now informed that Lee was spending the night at the inn at Baskingridge.

When Wilkinson got to Baskingridge, the inn was asleep. But he felt that his mission was important enough to awaken everyone in the house, and he hammered at the door. A sleepy innkeeper guided Wilkinson to Lee's bedroom. The night before Lee had had too much to drink, and now his response to being awakened was a furious outpouring, well-spiced with four-letter Anglo-Saxon words. It was the second time Lee had been disturbed that night. Earlier, a Tory had come to the inn to complain to Lee that a horse of his had been stolen from him by Continental army deserters. When Lee had cursed out the Tory roundly and thrown him out of the inn, the Tory swore he would get even.

Wilkinson, knowing nothing of the Tory incident, bore the abuse and delivered to Lee General Gates's letter, which had been intended for Washington. Apparently Lee was pleased to have a letter addressed to the commander in chief, and he read it immediately, without ever questioning the propriety of either Wilkinson's action or his own. Lee refused to comment on the letter or to say anything about his own circumstances at the inn. Instead he told Wilkinson that he would see him in the morning light and that he should get the devil out of his room.