Washington [186]
Washington and his generals decided to cross the Delaware on the night of Christmas Day and pounce upon the Hessian garrison in Trenton an hour before daylight as they slept off their holiday revels, gambling everything on one final roll of the dice. “For heaven’s sake, keep this to yourself,” Washington told Joseph Reed on December 23, “as the discovery of it may prove fatal to us . . . dire necessity will—nay must—justify any [attempt].”13 His men had braved hunger, fatigue, sickness, and defeat from personal loyalty to him. On December 24 Colonel William Tudor explained to his fiancée in Boston why he stayed with the motley crew gathered on the Delaware: “I cannot desert a man . . . who has deserted everything to defend his country, and whose chief misfortune . . . is that a large part of it wants [i.e., lacks] spirit to defend itself.”14 Crossing the Delaware, Washington knew, would produce either storied success or utter calamity, and he seemed ready to pay the price. Dr. Benjamin Rush encountered Washington during the tense evening before the operation. “While I was talking to him,” Rush recalled, “I observed him to play with his pen and ink upon several small pieces of paper. One of them by accident fell upon the floor near my feet. I was struck with the inscription upon it. It was ‘Victory or Death.’ ” 15 Rush had glimpsed the password of the secret operation, which summed up its desperate all-or-nothing quality.
ON THE FRIGID CHRISTMAS EVE OF 1776 Washington convened a dinner meeting of officers at the home of Samuel Merrick to plot their moves for the following night. In a group of inspired talkers, Washington was the peerless listener and had developed excellent working relations with his generals. After the five-day ordeal of crossing the Delaware into Pennsylvania, skeptics questioned whether the entire army could be rowed across in a single night. The tightly structured plans left little margin for error or slippage in the schedule. Reassurance came from Colonel John Glover, the maritime wizard behind the East River retreat, who reassured the gathering “not to be troubled about that, as his boys could manage it.”16 The grand strategy, orchestrated in minute detail, envisioned the main force of 2,400 men, along with Henry Knox and his artillery, crossing the Delaware at McConkey’s Ferry, nine miles above Trenton. Once across the river, this force would split into two columns: one marching under General Sullivan along a road hugging the river, and the second farther inland, along the higher Pennington Road, to be guided by Washington and Greene. These two columns would, in theory, rendezvous outside Trenton. Meanwhile, farther downstream, 700 militia led by General James Ewing would cross the river directly at Trenton, while 1,500 troops would cross at Bristol under Colonel John Cadwalader. Some historians have faulted Washington for the baffling intricacy of this nocturnal operation, but as it turned out, it gave him four separate chances to reach the Hessians at Trenton. Washington enjoyed the unified support of his generals, except for Horatio Gates, who showed his true colors by feigning sickness. While pleading that he was too sick to participate, he rode off to Congress to try to undermine Washington’s plan, a transparent betrayal that Washington regarded with contempt.
CHRISTMAS DAY 1776 dawned cold but sunny, then grew overcast by late afternoon as the soldiers, ignorant of their destination, began to file toward the river. They paced more slowly than Washington had reckoned, their bare feet tracing bloody streaks in the snow. Delays threatened the demanding timetable for the