The First American Army (21 page)
Read The First American Army Online
Authors: Bruce Chadwick
Private John Greenwood Crosses the Delaware
The War
J
ust 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.
J
ohn 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 not arrive until later, but the men searched the darkening skies for the first falling flakes this frigid Christmas Day of 1776. The air was bitterly cold and the wind had started to move sharply through the trees along the river near Samuel McKonkey’s ferry slip. The slip complex consisted of a two-story, grey stone house on the Delaware with a wide wooden dock for the ferry that traveled some two hundred yards back and forth across the river at that point.
The late afternoon chill made Greenwood even more uncomfortable than he had been for days. Like many others who had marched south from Fort Ticonderoga to Albany, and then to the Delaware, the sixteenyear-old soldier was suffering from scabies, or “the itch,” the chronic soldiers’ affliction that caused itching, scabs, and irritation. The teenager obtained some ointment from a doctor which he rubbed over the irritated areas of his thighs. The salve had helped, but he still ground his legs against each other as he walked, trying to make the itch go away. He had no idea where the army was headed this day as he looked out on the bleak, white countryside with its forests of barren trees broken by a few clusters of evergreens.
“None but the first officers knew where we were going or what we were going about,” he wrote in his diary. “For it was a secret expedition and we, the bulk of the men coming from Canada, knew not the disposition of the army we were then in, nor anything about the country. This was not unusual, however, as I never heard soldiers say anything, nor ever saw them trouble themselves, as to where they were or where they were led. It was enough for them to know that wherever the officers commanded they must go, be it through fire and water, for it was all the same owing to the impossibility of being in a worse condition than their present one and, therefore, the men always liked to be kept moving in expectation of bettering themselves.”
Greenwood had truly become a soldier by the winter of 1776 and no longer only played the fife for his regiment, except to amuse himself and his friends in camp. Today he bore his heavy musket, sixty rounds of ammunition stuffed into his pockets, and three days of cooked rations. Like the others, he was ready for battle, wherever and whenever it came.
From where many of the men stood they could see large, thick, flat sheets of ice float down the river in the distance, just as they had for the past week in sub-freezing temperatures. Tree branches full of ice hung over in wide arcs, some touching the ground. The land was still covered with one or two inches of snow that had fallen in small storms during the previous weeks. Freezing temperatures had prevented it from melting.
1
He and the other men in the regiment, standing amid their brigades, rubbed their hands together and stomped their feet on the frozen ground in a feeble attempt to stay warm.
The soldiers had reached the site after varying journeys. Some, such as Sgt. Joseph White of Massachusetts, who had become famous with the men for his comical encounter with the commander in chief in Boston, and Lieutenant James McMichael from Pennsylvania, had crossed the Delaware earlier in the month with Washington following the disheartening losses in New York and Long Island; others had arrived later with General Sullivan. Sgt. Thomas McCarty had marched all the way from Virginia.
Some Pennsylvanians, such as John Smith, had marched into camp with General Thomas Mifflin just a few days before. Smith told others that they had been repeatedly refused food and cider by Pennsylvania men and women whose farms they passed on their way to camp and had been forced to steal some to feed themselves.
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Sgt. White told soldiers he met that he had the same experience. General Israel Putnam ordered him to buy food for the men at a tavern at nearby Newton, but the proprietor refused to take Continental scrip (paper money), claiming that it was “rebel money” and worthless. White told him that he had orders. “I placed two men at the cellar door, as sentries; let nobody whatever go down,” he said to those listening. “I called for a light and two men to go down the cellar with me. We found it full of good things; a large pile of cheeses, hams, bacon, a large tub of honey, barrels of cider and cider royal, which was very strong. Also, all kinds of spirits.” The proprietor would not let them take any food, so White went back to Putnam, who accompanied him to the tavern. “I do not like your rebel money,” the tavern keeper told Putnam. “The General flew round like [a] top,” laughed White, nineteen, who had enlisted just before Bunker Hill. “He called for a file of men, a corporal, and four men came and [said] ‘take this Tory rascal to the main guard house.’”
Sgt. Thomas McCarty had his own woes. He told men he met that on December 13, the hut he had been sleeping in burned to the ground and he had lost all of his clothing in the fire. Then a week later, the men in his regiment had been forced to sleep on the ground and awoke buried in two inches of snow that had fallen during the night.
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There were mortifying tales, too, that enlisted men had heard. Sgt. Elisha Bostwick, who had survived the New York battles, told the men that his friend had been shot in the thigh and was too badly hurt to retreat with them; he was left to be taken as a prisoner. While leaving the field, they saw a British soldier grab his friend’s musket. He used the butt of it and “broke and pounded his skull to pieces” and then looted him. Another British soldier murdered a second wounded American left for, Bostwick sneered, “British clemency.”
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No one had a more vivid memory of English brutality than Bostwick. The twenty-seven-year-old Connecticut soldier stayed with the army despite a severe fever that had rendered him helpless for nearly two months during the spring. Still sick, he fought the best he could but had been badly shaken by the battles in New York. His regiment was hit with cannon fire early in the battle of White Plains. He wrote that “[cannon] ball first took the head of Smith, a very stout man, and dashed it open. Then it took off Chilson’s arm which was amputated. It then took Taylor across the bowels. It then struck Sergeant Garrete of our company on the hip and took off the point of the hip bone. Smith and Taylor were left on the spot. Sergeant Garrete was carried off but died the same day. What a sight that was to see within a [short] distance, those men with their legs and arms and guns and pack all in a heap.”
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The breath of the men froze in the air that afternoon as the soldiers talked among themselves. One of their officers moved in front of them and opened a pamphlet that he had carried in his hand. It was one of the dozens of copies of Thomas Paine’s
The American Crisis
that General Washington had suggested be read to the men by their leaders before they boarded the boats to cross the turbulent Delaware.
The general knew from John Honeyman, a friendly local farmer who had been selling food to the Hessians—and spying for the Americans while doing so—that the Hessians planned a holiday feast on Christmas Day. They would eat too much. He knew, too, that their commander, Colonel Johann Rall, liked to drink and play cards in the evening and enjoyed sleeping late in the morning, often not rising before 9 a.m. and then not bathing and dressing until 10 a.m.
The Continental Army soldiers stood in formation as the boats were lined up in the water for the departure. To preserve secrecy, they had not been told about the Christmas Day strike until they arrived at the parade ground. They did not fear the weather or the Hessians. Many deserters had given up all hope in the Revolution and gone home, but those who remained trusted George Washington. He had driven the British out of Boston and managed to get those soldiers that survived the Redcoat onslaught at Long Island out of Brooklyn Heights via a daring, secretive, late-night escape in boats across the East River to Manhattan. The men still with him, those who had not fled after the New York debacle, would follow him where he would lead them. “We loved him,” said one after the war had ended, “We’d sell our lives for him.”
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The freezing officer opened his copy of
The American Crisis
pamphlet, which had been distributed throughout the colonies and had met with much praise from military personnel and civilians. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” the officer began and Greenwood listened intently. “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in times of crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands
now
deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”
Following the reading, and some encouraging words from their superiors, the men began to board the small flotilla of the sixty-six-foot-long, eight-foot-wide, three-foot-deep flat-bottomed Durham boats, named after a nearby iron furnace that used the craft to transport iron ore and freight to Philadelphia, northern New Jersey, and Pennsylvania river towns. Washington believed that the Durhams could carry men just as easily.
Greenwood’s regiment was one of the first to cross. The young soldier carefully walked across the wide wooden slats of McKonkey’s ferry dock, making certain that he did not slip on the already icy structure. He moved into his assigned boat with the others, unsmiling, shivering, and sat down. When all of the men were in the Durham, the boatman poled the boat away from the dock and headed out into the darkness of the river. As their boat cut silently into the water and the ice, Greenwood looked back and watched the twenty-four hundred or so remaining men awaiting their turn to cross. All heard the booming voice of Henry Knox shouting at the men loading the cannon into their separate boats to hurry along and secure the field pieces carefully.
The journey across the river was perilous. Wide, flat sheets of ice slammed into the sides of the Durhams and the boatman struggled. “The force of the current, the sharpness of the frost, the darkness of the night, the ice, and a high wind tendered the passage of the river extremely difficult,” said Major James Wilkinson of the crossing later. A light wind slashed into the faces of Greenwood and the others as the boat made the agonizingly slow trip across the water. Then, just after 11 p.m., the predicted snow began to fall. It soon began to accumulate—one, two, three, four inches—and kept falling. On the other side of the Delaware, Washington, with his dark blue cloak wrapped tightly around his chest and neck, watched Greenwood and the others complete the treacherous passage. Greenwood and the soldiers in his regiment were freezing. “The storm was increasing rapidly,” wrote Greenwood. “It rained, hailed, snowed, and froze and at the same time blew a perfect hurricane.”
“It was as severe a night as I ever saw,” agreed Captain Thomas Rodney, of Delaware, whose men shivered along with Greenwood and his Massachusetts comrades. “The frost was sharp, the current difficult to stem, the ice increasing, and the wind high. It was only with the greatest care and labor that the horses and the artillery could be ferried over.”
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To ward off the snow and cold, Washington ordered the Fifteenth Massachusetts, Greenwood’s regiment, to scour the surrounding area for downed trees and fence posts in order to make a series of bonfires. Greenwood said that the wind was at full force and that “in a moment” it cut in half the wood he tossed onto the fire. The fierce wind made it impossible for him to turn in any direction for warmth. “When I turned my face toward the fire, my back would be freezing. However, as my usual acuteness had not forsaken me, by turning round and round I kept myself from perishing before a large bonfire.” The men were in good spirits, despite the deplorable weather conditions. “The cheerfulness of my fellow comrades encouraged me beyond expectation and, big coward as I acknowledge myself to be, I felt great pleasure,” Greenwood said.