First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [153]
Unimpeded by Clinton, Washington’s forces, a day after leaving camp at Philipsburg, reached the ferry crossings.
Down the cobblestone slopes leading to the docks the procession of the Allied army came; provision wagons were hauled aboard the ferries, followed by the rank and file of foot soldiers as they crowded over the gangways, while reconnaissance officers kept a tense watch for approaching redcoats. No shots or sudden charge of cavalry with flashing sabers broke“ into their orderly progress. The ferries filled with men, ropes were uncoiled and flung over the side to waiting dockhands, sails were hoisted and the boats slid into the water.
From an observation platform erected for him by the French on a plateau overlooking Haverstraw Bay, a bulge in the river five miles wide, Washington watched the ferries bearing his soldiers over the water on the journey to the last, best hope of victory in the long fight for independence. The Americans started crossing on August 20, and all were across by the next morning. Claude Blanchard, the French Commissary or Quartermaster General, standing next to the Commander-in-Chief on August 25 (the date given in his diary), as he watched the crossing, could feel the emotion stirring behind the impassive exterior. He sensed that as Washington surveyed the pageant moving across the broad stream “glittering in the sunlight,” he seemed “to see a better destiny arise, when at this period of the war, exhausted, destitute of resources, he needed a great success which might revive courage and hope. He pressed my hand with much affection when he left us at two oclock and crossed the river himself to rejoin his troops.” “I have the pleasure to inform Your Excellency,” Washington wrote to Rochambeau in a letter dated August 21 from King’s Ferry, on the far side, “that my troops arrived at the ferry yesterday and began to pass the River at 10 oclock in the morn and by sunrise of this day, they were all compleatly on this side of the river.” His date does not fit with Blanchard’s because Washington apparently came back after his first crossing and went over a second time with the French. The last of his troops landed after dinner in the darkness of the western shore at the foot of the Catskills, where the wail of the wildcat drifts through the undomesticated hills, and the rumble of thunder means that the ghosts of Henry Hudson’s crew are playing at bowls.
The French, slowed by their longer march to their ferry and a heavier train of equipment, embarked several days later, and they too crossed safely without incident. The calm of the Hudson crossing had remained untroubled except for Rochambeau’s order to unload surplus burdens for storage in Peekskill, which “made the rank and file complain loudly,” as reported by Rochambeau’s aide, Ludwig von Closen. Closen had a happier piece of news for his journal when a message of crucial importance to the campaign was delivered on the day of the American crossing by an officer returning from Newport to say that de Barras, the French naval commander, was now agreeable to bringing down the transports with the troops, meat and siege guns, which “greatly eased” Rochambeau’s mind. All the French were across the river by August 25. The absence of British interference puzzled the Allies. “An enemy of any boldness or any skill,” wrote the Comte de Deux-Ponts in his diary, “would have seized an opportunity so favorable for him and so embarrassing for us as that of our crossing the North