The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [162]
It was a short meeting. Fully realizing the plight of the men, the freeholders assured the general that they would quickly find food and direct the residents to somehow open up the roads. Over the next two days, in a miracle of engineering, hundreds of local militiamen and farmers worked tirelessly to break open more than eight miles of roadway. Those same farmers, and others, then sent Washington hundreds of head of cattle, straw, wheat, corn, anything they had, on just credit, to save the army. A week later, a correspondent wrote in the Jersey Journal, “The army is now exuberantly supplied with provision and every other necessary to make a soldier’s life comfortable.”23
The soldiers were stunned by the generosity of the people that day. Wrote one, “The inhabitants of this part of the country discovered a noble spirit in feeding the soldiers; and to the honor of the soldiery, they received what they got with thankfulness.”24
Another Winter Surprise Attack
The weather, food, and clothing catastrophes did not stop the Americans from planning yet another surprise winter attack. Washington had startled the enemy at Trenton three years before with his crossing of the Delaware in a snowstorm; why not do it again? The target was the British garrison on Staten Island, across the harbor from New York City, with its one thousand men.
Washington placed twenty-six hundred men under one of his veteran generals, Lord Stirling. Washington had to get the army to Staten Island quickly, so he decided to use hundreds of horse-drawn sleds to transport the army in what would be one of the most unusual attacks in military history.
Still, Washington worried. What if the caravan of sleds was seen? What if a thaw hit in the morning and the ice bridge to Staten Island from New Jersey melted, stranding the soldiers? What if the British forts were impregnable? Eager to stage the attack, and assured by Lord Stirling that it would succeed, Washington finally relented.25
Jeremiah Greenman arrived at the staging area for the raid, on the south side of the Morristown green, at 8 a.m. sharp on the morning of January 14 and waited with the twenty-six hundred other troops selected for the attack for the sleds promised by local farmers. Many of the soldiers wore hats and mittens that they had to borrow from the clothing warehouses. They had to return them when the attack ended. The sleds, each drawn by two horses, were delayed, but by 10 a.m. over four hundred had arrived and Lieutenant Greenman and seven others boarded one. Their sled followed the others in creating a lengthy train of sleighs that left Morristown in the early afternoon and traveled silently across the snow-covered roads thirty miles to Elizabethtown, where the soldiers slept overnight.
The attack on Staten Island commenced early the next morning. Greenman wrote brusquely in his journal, “Crossed the river on the ice. Came to Staten Island and proceeded on toward the enemy’s forts . . . five miles.”
The element of surprise that the Americans had enjoyed when they crossed the Delaware had been lost; the army had been seen. The British had time to dig in behind ten-foot-high snow and ice walls and barricade themselves in houses and barns. They were ready for the assault and easily turned back the American forces after a series of thunderous musket and cannon volleys.
To Lieutenant Greenman’s surprise, Lord Stirling did not order a retreat back to Morristown. He kept the army on Staten Island overnight on what turned out to be one of the coldest evenings of the year. “We took a post on a hill half a mile from one of the forts where the snow was about two feet deep. Here we dug the snow off the ground and built up fires and tarried all night. Very cold with a number of our men’s feet froze.” Doctors later reported nearly five hundred men suffered frozen feet.
An angry Greenman wrote the following day, after the retreat finally began, that one-third of the men