The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [66]
The two healers, the man of medicine and the man of the cloth, had survived their journey into and out of the hell of the Canadian disaster and made it back to their hometowns alive. While the doctor had fretted that he had lost so many lives, he had saved many, too. And while the minister lamented over and over again that he was unable to offer God’s help to enough men, he had to know that whether it was sitting next to the bed of a dying soldier or standing on top of his high drum platform surrounded by torches, he had brought the word of God to the soldiers of the Revolution and in doing so had eased their fears.
As Beebe was headed home by sleigh to Sheffield, Massachusetts, the week before Christmas, he and the others traveling with him learned all the details of the crushing defeats George Washington’s army had suffered in the New York area during the previous three months. Following the debacle on Long Island, the British followed the Americans to Harlem, forcing them to retreat. Washington withdrew his forces to White Plains, where he suffered another loss and had to withdraw still farther north.
General Howe turned his attention on another target, the garrison of three thousand Americans at Fort Washington in Manhattan. The British and Hessian force of thirteen thousand men overran the fort, forcing nearly all three thousand of its defenders to surrender. Howe and Lord Cornwallis then went after Washington’s main army, pursuing it across New Jersey. Washington had lost many of his cannon at Fort Washington. He had suffered more than five thousand men lost in casualties and desertions. The British chased him westward and now, as Beebe rode home in late December, Washington found himself on the western shore of the Delaware River in Pennsylvania, about to be crushed.
Chapter Thirteen
CHRISTMAS, 1776:
Private John Greenwood Crosses the Delaware
The War
Just before Christmas, 1776, George Washington and the soldiers of his main army of twenty-five hundred found themselves at the brink of extermination on the snow-covered western shore of the Delaware River in Pennsylvania. Washington correctly guessed that following the evacuation of Boston, General Howe would return to America and attempt to capture New York. He had met Howe head-to-head in four disastrous encounters there. The British then pursued Washington’s remaining force across New Jersey to the Delaware. The Americans crossed into Pennsylvania on December 7 and the British remained on the New Jersey side. Another two thousand American troops arrived a week later. The army possessed only eighteen cannon and was short on supplies. The substantial militia promised by Pennsylvania’s government never materialized.
Washington had to contend with the main British army of some nine thousand troops, and its fifteen-hundred-strong force of Hessians that were left to keep an eye on him in Trenton, New Jersey, just across the river. He feared they would cross the river and crush his army. He then concocted a daring plan to cross the Delaware at night, on Christmas Day, and take the Hessians in Trenton by surprise. Most of his generals disapproved of the idea and its chances of success were slim. Washington wrote himself a note, “Victory or death!” and then rolled it up into a ball and tossed it into a corner of the room in the building he was using as his headquarters. The attack would either be a stunning victory that would give the Revolution new life or it would be a disaster that would end it.
John Greenwood, the teenage fifer turned soldier, stood alongside the other men in his regiment, the Fifteenth Massachusetts, commanded by John Patterson, on a snow-covered parade ground near the Delaware River at 4 p.m. as the snowstorm that General Washington had predicted began to move toward the region. The snow would