Washington [187]
At sundown light rain began to fall. In advance of his men, Washington crossed the river and staked out a place on the Jersey shore, the dangerous side of the river, a vulnerable patch if news of the raid leaked out. With the future of the country riding on his shoulders, the Virginia planter displayed an indomitable tenacity. Quite simply, if the raid backfired, the war was likely over and he would be captured and killed. Washington, gathering up his courage, responded brilliantly to the challenge. Legend depicts him shrouded in a cloak against the biting wind, sitting perched on an empty beehive, barking orders at Henry Knox, who relayed his words to the boatmen. Knox’s resonant voice bellowed throughout the night, and Major James Wilkinson credited his “stentorian lungs” as essential to the operation.18
As always, Washington was the tutelary presence, never asking his men to take risks he didn’t share. As chunks of ice traveled swiftly down the Delaware, the question arose whether it was possible to negotiate tricky currents under such dreadful conditions. “Who will lead us?” Washington asked, and John Glover and his stout-hearted fishermen, aided by Philadelphia stevedores and local boatmen, promised to rise to the occasion. As was often the case, Washington attained his greatest nobility at times of crisis. “His Excellency George Washington never appeared to so much advantage as in the hour of distress,” wrote Greene.19
The night was darkened by a moon sheathed in clouds. As 2,400 men boarded the Durham boats to begin their 800-foot journey across the river, they were tightly wedged in: 40 standing men were sometimes squeezed into a single craft. The task of transporting skittish horses and eighteen field guns—nearly 400 tons of cumbersome artillery—on the Delaware ferries was a prodigious undertaking. The elements delivered a bone-chilling mixture of rain, sleet, and wind that soaked everything. Around eleven P.M., as a grim northeaster began to churn up the waters, snow and hail pelted men exposed in the boats—“a perfect hurricane,” in the words of fifer John Greenwood .20 Since most of the soldiers couldn’t swim, they must have experienced sheer terror at the thought of their boats capsizing. Along the shores, the river froze into such thick crusts that Washington said the “greatest fatigue” came from “breaking a passage” through them.21 The storm significantly retarded troop movements and heightened fears of arriving at Trenton after daybreak, jeopardizing the entire plan. But it also had the collateral advantage of muting sounds from the river and blinding the enemy to the army’s advance. Despite the delays, Washington made the momentous decision to proceed with the perilous mission, which had taken on its own irresistible logic. As he later wrote, “I well knew we could not reach it [Trenton] before day was fairly broke, but as I was certain there was no making a retreat without being discovered, and harassed on repassing the river, I determined to push on at all events.”22 It was brilliant daring, combined with a large measure of outright desperation.
Even though the army was supposed to scoot across by midnight, the last boat didn’t cross the river until three A.M. Not a single soldier died. On the Jersey shore, Washington remained a study in quiet resolve and concentrated force. Not until four A.M. was the assembled army ready to initiate its nine-mile march to Trenton. Washington didn’t know that the other two sections of his invading force, slated to traverse the river downstream at Trenton and Bristol, had been canceled due to an inability to pierce icy masses in the river. Colonel Cadwalader, who couldn’t get his artillery