Band of Giants_The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence Read online

  “These are the times that try men’s souls,” Paine had written. “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it NOW, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

  He went on to give details of the retreat, to rail against Tories, and to whip up enthusiasm for what many had written off as a lost cause. “Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it.”

  Paine’s electric words crackled through the colonies. They gave voice to a popular spirit, which defeat had prodded awake rather than dampened. “We require adversity,” said Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, “and appear to possess most of the republican spirit when most depressed.”4

  “Read in the camp, to every corporal’s guard,” The Crisis had a dramatic effect. It became both a catalyst and a symbol of a fresh seriousness in the minds of the beleaguered patriots. “The great revival did not follow the battles of Trenton and Princeton,” writes modern historian David Hackett Fischer. “It preceded them, and made those events possible.”5

  * * *

  Something had to be done. Washington called a council of war to discuss a plan he had been mulling. Secret preparations followed. On Christmas Eve, another war council met over dinner at Nathanael Greene’s headquarters. The following day, officers issued their troops three days’ food and told them to be ready to march by evening. They did not say where.

  The cold and snowy weather had eased. Ice floes sped down the Delaware. On Christmas night, troops marched toward two ferry landings ten miles north of Trenton, where the river was barely three hundred yards across. Colonel John Glover’s Marblehead mariners had gathered as many boats as they could find, including high-sided cargo boats and flat-bottomed ferries. As evening descended and a full moon rose in the east, Henry Knox began barking orders. He was to manage the complicated task of moving 2,400 men and eighteen field guns, along with horses and equipment, across the tusked river.

  “Floating ice in the river made the labor almost incredible,” Knox later wrote to Lucy.6 The strong current, high winds, and speeding chunks of ice turned the crossing into a slow, Herculean task requiring “the stentorian lungs and extraordinary exertions of Colonel Knox.” Delaware colonel John Haslet fell into the icy water, but continued on in his sopping clothes.

  “Perseverance accomplished what first seemed impossible,” Knox wrote.7 By about two o’clock in the morning the troops were on the Jersey side and ready to march. During the crossing, the weather had turned dirty. A snarling nor’easter brought snow, rain, and hail. Sharp winds drove needles of sleet against exposed flesh.

  The delays during the crossing left Washington in a quandary. Intent on surprise, he had planned to reach the town just before daylight. But by the time the men marched and dragged their cannon ten miles to Trenton, it would be light. In addition, thick ice had blocked the landing of additional militia troops below the town. The main body would have to attack without support.

  It was all up to Washington. Call off the attack? Go back to safety? Or risk his whole army? He decided to plunge on. “The troops marched with the most profound silence,” Knox noted.8

  Slashed by hail and icy rain, in ruined shoes or no shoes at all, through a mauling wind, carrying heavy muskets and packs, the soldiers plodded into the darkness. Some reported an elation at odds with their surroundings. “I felt great pleasure,” one remembered later, “more than I now do in writing about it.”9

  As they approached the town from the north, Washington divided his force. General Sullivan would attack along the river. Greene’s men would sweep to the inland side and push down the two main streets of the village. Later, a myth gained traction that the Hessian troops had been celebrating Christmas and were too drunk to fight effectively. The truth was they had been on high alert for days, ready to turn out at any alarm. Rall had posted guards on all the roads and sent out frequent patrols. Warned of a possible attack, he had responded, “Let them come.”

  But in spite of these preparations, Washington was able to achieve almost complete surprise when his men reached the first guard post. The storm helped. Torrents of snow and sleet continued to claw the watery light, reducing visibility and encouraging the enemy to remain indoors. The rebels attacked with the bare-toothed savagery of creatures too long beaten down. “I never could conceive,” an American colonel recorded, “that one spirit should so universally animate both officers and men to rush forward into action.”10

  Sullivan began his charge just as Greene’s men came pounding into the village. Henry Knox unlimbered his artillery and pointed the barrels down the high street. When the Hessians came running out, his gunners blasted canister shot along the pavement, cutting men to pieces. Knox was “cool, cheerful and was present everywhere.” The fight, within the confined streets of the compact village, stunned the troops of both sides with its noise and hellish chaos. “There succeeded a scene of war of which I had often conceived,” Knox wrote to Lucy, “but never saw before.” He compared it to the end of the world.11

  “The sight was too much to bear,” a sergeant wrote. A musket ball tore into the shoulder of an eighteen-year-old American lieutenant. A surgeon saved his life by clamping a severed artery. The soldier, James Monroe, would live to be elected president in 1816.

  The battle lasted two hours. The Americans pressed the Hessians back and surrounded them in an orchard beside the town. Colonel Rall, cantering on his horse to rally his men, was shot and mortally wounded. The remaining 886 enemy soldiers surrendered.

  Washington singled out his young artillery officer for praise in his report on the battle, an honor Knox was delighted to relay to his wife. “This I would blush to mention to any other than you, my dear Lucy.”12

  The troops gathered up the spoils, which included six field guns and 1,200 muskets. They hurried back to the west side of the river. They had accomplished something remarkable.

  * * *

  Washington immediately faced another critical decision. The next day, December 27, he learned that the Pennsylvania militiamen, who he had hoped would join him in the Trenton attack, had finally made it across the icy water. The inexperienced troops were determined to fight, and their leader, John Cadwalader, urged Washington to join him. Perhaps they could push the remaining invaders out of western New Jersey.

  The commander in chief knew that his men were tired. Many were sick. Should he risk another crossing? He called a council of war. His officers raised “some doubts.” Washington steered the meeting toward a consensus. Yes, they would go over the river again with the entire army.

  The thickening ice floes made the crossing on December 30 more treacherous than the first. With reinforcements, Washington now commanded five thousand men. As they took up positions in Trenton, he learned that they would have more of a fight than they had bargained for. General Cornwallis was rushing across New Jersey with eight thousand British and Hessian soldiers.

  Washington found himself in a precarious position. The enlistments of most of his men would run out at midnight on the 31st, freeing them to go home. Few had signed up for another stint. Like Richard Montgomery before Quebec, the commander in chief was about to see his army evaporate.

  A master of the theatrical gesture, Washington addressed his assembled troops from astride his horse. “My brave fellows,” he shouted. “You have done all that I have ever asked you to do, and more than could be expected; but your country is at stake, your wives, your houses, and all that you hold dear.” His speech, and a ten-dollar bonus, convinced 3,300 men to reenlist.13

  Washington aligned these troops on the south side of a creek that joined the Delaware at Trenton. He sent out a strong force to meet Co
rnwallis on his advance along the main road from Princeton, twelve miles away. Their core was a battalion of Pennsylvania riflemen led by Colonel Edward Hand, a tough, Irish-born frontier physician. His men slowed Cornwallis’s advance. When they finally arrived in Trenton, the British pushed the Americans toward a bridge that would bring them across the creek. The fighting became intensely violent. Benjamin Rush, who treated the wounded, wrote that “for the first time war appeared to me in its awful plenitude of horrors.”14

  As the mass of British troops kept pouring into the town, the enormity of the situation dawned on the patriots. They were outnumbered. They could no longer retreat across the Delaware. Their position along the creek, strong for the time being, could be outflanked by Cornwallis’s superior force.

  “If there ever was a crisis in the affairs of the Revolution,” an American officer affirmed, “this was the moment.”15

  Fortunately, the early darkness gave Cornwallis pause. He decided to wait until daylight to renew the fight. He was reported to have said, “We’ve got the Old Fox safe now. We’ll go over and bag him in the morning.”

  In a council of war that night, Henry Knox, who had just learned that Congress had promoted him to brigadier general, argued that the next day’s battle would be a disaster. The army, he noted, was “cooped up” like a flock of chickens. Why not break out and attack the enemy’s rear at Princeton?

  Washington, the Old Fox, weighed his options. He wanted to avoid “the appearance of a retreat.” He had to think of “popular opinion.” He wanted “to give reputation to our arms.” He decided to attack.

  Leaving behind a small force to make noise and keep campfires burning along the creek, he quietly led his army onto a country road and hurried them toward Princeton. A sudden invasion of bone-chilling air froze the mud and allowed the Americans to lug their cannon along the rutted lane.

  By morning, they were approaching the village of Princeton, home of one the colonies’ premier colleges. The limpid day was “bright, serene, and extremely cold, with a hoarfrost that bespangled every object.”16

  Washington led the main force along the back road, intent on surprising the British in the village. General Hugh Mercer, his physician friend, veered left with 350 men to secure a bridge on the main road. Before Mercer reached his objective, a flash of light alerted the Americans. It was the glint of the rising sun on the bayonets of British reinforcements hurrying down the turnpike toward Trenton.

  Rushing to secure the high ground, Mercer’s men smashed directly into two enemy regiments commanded by British colonel Charles Mawhood. Neither force had time to dig in or to array in formal battle lines. They mingled in a wild, hand-to-hand melee as the crystalline morning erupted in violence.

  During the fighting, a cannonball shattered the leg of Mercer’s horse. A British infantryman swung his musket butt and knocked the general to the ground. Mercer refused to yield and was fatally bayoneted by British soldiers. Delaware colonel John Haslet, who had earned a master of divinity degree in Glasgow, Scotland, stepped up to rally the American forces. A musket ball struck him in the head and killed him.

  “The ground was frozen,” one observer noted, “and all the blood which was shed remained on the surface.”17 The rising sun turned the battlefield into a sparkling crimson horror. British troops charged with bayonets. Mercer’s men retreated. But now American soldiers were turning back from the road to Princeton village and rushing onto the field of battle. Henry Knox’s gunners began to rake the enemy with cannon blasts. A thousand untrained Pennsylvania militiamen could not form a line until Washington himself cantered in among them on his white horse. “Parade with us!” he screamed in his reedy voice. “There is but a handful of the enemy, and we will have them directly!” His words trumped fear. He waved his hat. The men rushed forward. The tide of battle turned. Providence again preserved the general amid the flying bullets.

  Cornwallis, realizing that Washington had gulled him, rushed his men from Trenton back toward Princeton. By the time they arrived, the Americans had already left.

  Washington wanted to hurry on to Brunswick, sack the enemy’s main supply depot, and “put an end to the war.” But his men were entirely spent. He led them to the high ground around Morristown, where they could safely spend the winter.

  “Lord Cornwallis is, I believe, a brave man,” a British officer commented, “but he allowed himself to be fairly outgeneralled by Washington.”18

  The battles at Trenton and Princeton had deep consequences. They forced the British to pull back to a shrunken perimeter around Brunswick. Foraging parties that ventured farther into New Jersey were set upon by roaming patriot militia units.

  “Our affairs at present are in a prosperous way,” Washington wrote with a sigh of relief. “The country seems to entertain an idea of our Superiority—Recruiting goes on well.”

  He would never be a military genius, but when it mattered most, his Excellency had cast off indecision, taken a heart-stopping risk, and conquered. He had met his crisis. He had stood by his country and repulsed the enemy. In a bemused afterthought, Washington concluded, “a Belief prevails that the enemy are afraid of Us.”19

  Ten

  A Continual Clap of Thunder

  1777

  Far from being afraid of Washington’s feeble army, the British were now determined to crush the rebellion during the 1777 fighting season. Conciliation had not worked. The overwhelming British victories at Long Island and New York had not convinced the rebels to yield. Only unrelenting violence would decide the matter.

  General John Burgoyne had convinced the ministry in London to adopt a bold plan. He would haul men and guns down from Canada, overwhelm the fortress at Ticonderoga, continue on to Albany, secure the Hudson-Champlain corridor, divide the New England rebels from the rest of the colonies, and thus “do the business in one campaign.”

  Fort Ticonderoga, the mighty “Gibraltar of the north,” had been left vulnerable when the British destroyed Arnold’s fleet the previous autumn. Burgoyne’s engineers hauled several cannon up a nearby mountain, forcing American general Arthur St. Clair to abandon the poorly located fort without firing a shot. Early in July, the Americans snuck out of the bastion in the middle of the night and headed south. The loss, a rattled George Washington wrote to Schuyler, was “an event of chagrin and surprise not apprehended nor within the compass of my reasoning.”1

  As the Americans fled Ticonderoga, the Green Mountain Boys, now incorporated into the Continental Army, took up a rearguard position at the Vermont crossroads of Hubbardton. Ethan Allen, their former leader, had earlier been captured by the British. Vermont farmer Seth Warner, almost as large as Allen but of quieter demeanor, now led the Boys. He and his men fought a sharp battle that slowed the British pursuit.

  Slowed but did not stop. Burgoyne marched on. When King George heard of the capture of Ticonderoga, he blustered, “I have beat them! I have beat all the Americans!”2

  Having expected a long siege at Ticonderoga, Burgoyne was as confident as his king. In Skenesborough, at the southern tip of Lake Champlain, the invaders paused to regroup. Burgoyne decided to continue overland rather than backtrack to Ticonderoga, where he could have portaged his artillery and supplies to Lake George. A few days’ march would bring him to Fort Edward. He would follow the Hudson River south and, in a few days more, arrive in Albany. The war would be as good as won.

  Celebrating his impending victory, Burgoyne ordered choice bottles drawn from his traveling wine cellar. The man whom Horace Walpole called “General Swagger,” who saw war as a grand drama, cavorted with his mistress, his mind fizzing with champagne.3 He had already decided that he would not accept a mere knighthood, like the ones awarded to generals Howe and Clinton. Only a hereditary title, a baronetcy, would suffice. He wanted to be a lord.

  * * *

  It hardly seemed that the death of one young w
oman could play a major role in derailing his dream. Yet two days before Burgoyne reached the Hudson at Fort Edward, Indians allied with the British killed twenty-five-year-old Jane McCrea, known as Jenny.

  The young woman had lived with her older brother outside Fort Edward. He was a patriot; Jenny and some of her other siblings were loyalists. Such divided families were not unusual in northern New York, where sentiment was sharply split between Whigs and Tories.

  The lovely Jenny—her beauty purportedly enhanced by long reddish hair—had fallen in love with and become engaged to a local man named David Jones, also a loyalist. Jones had traveled to Canada and signed on to fight with Burgoyne. Now a lieutenant in a provincial battalion, he was marching south with the invasion.

  As Burgoyne approached, Jenny’s brother fled with other patriot refugees. Jenny stayed behind at the home of an older woman. When the British came close enough, she planned to join her fiancé and be married.

  McCrea’s brother had good reason to depart. A month earlier, in Burgoyne’s camp at Skenesborough, soldiers had fired a salute to welcome five hundred Indian warriors. Some were Mohawks, the fiercest fighters among the Iroquois. Others were strapping Ottawa warriors, who had come from as far away as the upper Great Lakes, drawn a thousand miles by the promise of scalps, prisoners, and booty. The Canadian Indians who had come south with Burgoyne averted their eyes when they encountered these large, ruthless men from distant forests. To settlers, they were demons from Hell.

  The details of what happened to Jenny McCrea would never emerge entirely from the fog of legend. On July 27, Indians abducted her and her hostess. The women became separated. Two chiefs may have argued about whose prisoner Jenny was, each coveting the expected ransom. One of them shot or tomahawked the young woman. One of them slit her scalp with a knife and ripped off her hair with his teeth. One of them stripped her, mutilated her body, and tossed her into a ditch. One of them headed back to camp with her scalp. As her killer, oblivious to sentimentality, danced around the fire with his prize, her horrified lover recognized the distinctive hair.