Victory or Death

George Washington. McConkey's Ferry, in the Province of Pennsylvania. Wednesday, 25 December 1776.

On Christmas of 1776 Washington recrossed the Delaware and attacked the garrison at Trenton, following this with a further action at Princeton.

The Universal Register: The Four-Year War

The ice was coming down the river in plates, grey and white, some of them as big as a barn floor, turning slowly in the current and grinding against each other with a noise like a mill; and he stood on the Pennsylvania bank in the last of the light with his hands behind his back and watched it come, and did not let anybody see what he thought of it.

The boats were drawn up below him at the ferry. They were the Durham boats that carried pig iron and flour down the river to Philadelphia in the ordinary way of things: long black open hulls, forty and sixty feet, high in the side and pointed at both ends, built to be poled and rowed by men who knew the river. He had had every one of them gathered up and brought over to this side when the army came across, not three weeks ago, for sixty miles up and down, so that the King’s army in the Jerseys should have nothing to follow him in. Now they were going to carry him back.

Glover’s men were in them already. The Marblehead regiment, the fishermen who had taken the army off Long Island in the fog, sitting at their oars in their short jackets and their tarred hats with the sleet beginning in the air, waiting for the order and talking among themselves in their own speech, which he could not always follow, about the ice, which they did not like. He had asked Glover at noon whether it could be done. Glover had looked at the river for a long time and said, “Don’t you worry about that, General. My boys can manage it.” He had said it the way a man says a thing he has decided to make true.

On the night of the twenty-third, at his table at Keith’s, he had cut paper into slips and written the countersign on them himself, one after another, for the officers of the guard: Victory or Death. Dr Rush of the Congress had been sitting with him, and had watched him do it, and when one of the slips fell to the floor had picked it up and read it, and looked at him, and put it back on the table without a word. It was not a phrase he would have chosen in ordinary times. It had seemed to him, writing it, a plain statement of the alternatives.

He had written to his brother on the eighteenth that if every nerve was not strained to recruit the new army with all possible expedition, he thought the game was pretty near up. He had written to the Congress on the twentieth, more formally, that ten days more would put an end to the existence of the army. Both were true. He did not write things to the Congress, or to his brother, that were not true.

The enlistments ran out on the last day of December. On the first of January the greater part of the men standing on this bank would be free to go home, and would go, because they had been promised they could, and because they had walked here from Fort Lee through the Jerseys with the King’s army a day behind them and nothing in their bellies, and had had enough. He did not blame them. He had had enough himself, on the road. He had found, somewhere about Brunswick, that there was no bottom to it: that a man could be tired and beaten and ashamed and then find, the next morning, that he was more of all three.

He had let his generals persuade him to hold Fort Washington. From the Jersey shore he watched it fall with twenty-eight hundred men inside. Fort Lee went next, its tents left standing and its kettles on the fires. At every town on the retreat the militia left him. The people of the Jerseys signed Howe’s declaration and nailed protection papers to their doors. Nobody had told them that taking the pardon was a crime, because it was not. They were the King’s subjects. So, according to every paper the Congress had ever issued, was he.

Then General Lee, the second officer of the army, taken in his dressing gown at a tavern at Basking Ridge, where he had gone to sleep three miles from his own troops with a guard of a dozen men, by thirty dragoons who had come down the road in the morning and fired the house. And before Lee was taken, a letter.

He opened Lee’s letter to Reed believing it official. Lee thanked his adjutant for his obliging letter and lamented the fatal indecision of mind that was worse in war than stupidity. Washington sent it on, explaining his mistake. Reed answered at length. Washington replied civilly. They had not spoken of it again.

Tonight Reed was at Bristol with Cadwalader, twenty miles downstream, waiting to cross. Washington had written without reserve to him for a year and a half. He found that he did not want to think about Reed tonight, and did anyway.

There had been a pamphlet, too.

Mr Paine had brought it out at Philadelphia on the nineteenth, the first of a series, he said, and copies had come up to the camp, and somebody had left one on his table at Keith’s with a corner turned down. He had read it on the night of the twenty-third, after the slips, by one candle, because he read everything that might be read by the men.

It began well. It began better than anything he had read in the war. These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. He read that twice and sat back in his chair. It was exactly true. It was the army he had: the summer soldiers gone home at every town in the Jerseys and the few who had stood it still on the bank of the Delaware, and he would have given a good deal to have said it himself, in those words, and had never in his life been able to say anything in words like those.

Then he read on, and a page or two further he came to the King.

Mr Paine said that he could not see on what grounds the King of Britain could look up to heaven for help against them: a common murderer, a highwayman, or a house-breaker, has as good a pretence as he.

He folded the pamphlet and put it in the drawer. An aide suggested reading it to the regiments. Washington refused. Under the Congress’s flag he could not authorise calling the King a highwayman. Whatever the men thought privately, their orders still named them subjects in arms for their rights. He would not put his name to an order saying otherwise.

He had kept the first page in his head, though. He found that he had it there tonight on the bank.

They began to embark at dusk, and it was eleven o’clock before the last of the first brigades was across, and it was three in the morning before the guns were.

He had meant to be over by midnight and in Trenton before dawn. He had known since about nine that he would not be. The storm came down out of the north-east a little before eleven, snow first and then sleet and then a hard driving rain that froze where it fell, so that the men’s coats were stiff with it and the boats were glazed, and the ice in the river came thicker and faster the colder it got. The Marblehead men poled and rowed and shoved the floes off with their oars and their boathooks and their feet, and swore, and went back and came again, over and over, all night, without stopping. He crossed early himself, in one of the first boats, and stood on the Jersey shore in the dark by the landing and watched the rest come out of the storm one at a time; and across the water, all night, above the wind and the ice and the oars, he could hear Knox.

Knox had the crossing. He had a voice that could be heard across a parade ground in a gale, and he stood on the Pennsylvania bank with it and directed the whole affair by shouting, boat by boat, horse by horse, gun by gun, eighteen guns and their teams and their limbers coming over in the ferry flats with the horses plunging, in the dark, in the ice, without losing one of them. It was the Ticonderoga guns over again. Washington stood on the far side of the river and listened to that voice coming across the water, enormous and cheerful and never once out of temper, and thought that if the thing failed it would not be Knox’s fault, and that if it succeeded it would be very largely Knox’s doing.

The last gun crossed at three. At four the columns were moving, three hours late. They could no longer reach Trenton in darkness. He considered retreat for a minute, then ordered the march. Twenty-four hundred men could not recross that river before daylight. He would not leave them half over it when the enemy came.

They marched nine miles, in two columns, in the storm.

The road was frozen mud, and then it was ice, and the sleet came at them sideways out of the dark. Some of the men had no shoes. Some had shoes that were nothing but the uppers tied on with rags, and in the first grey of the light he saw that the snow along the edge of the road was marked here and there with blood where they had walked. Men fell asleep standing when the column halted, and had to be shaken, and some lay down by the road to rest and had to be pulled up again, and two did not get up at all and were found afterwards, frozen, where they had sat down. He rode up and down the column all night. He did not make speeches. He said, as he passed the companies, the only thing there was to say: “For God’s sake, keep by your officers. Keep by your officers.”

Somewhere about Birmingham, where the columns divided, a rider came up from General Sullivan on the river road with word that the men’s muskets were wet and would not fire, and what did the General wish to do?

He looked at the rider for a moment through the sleet.

“Tell General Sullivan,” he said, “to use the bayonet. I am resolved to take Trenton.”

They came on the town a little before eight, out of the storm, with the light behind them, and the Hessians were asleep.

Not all of them. There was a picket in a cooper’s shop on the Pennington road, and it fired and fell back shouting, and he heard the cry go into the town ahead of him, in German, Der Feind! Heraus! Heraus!, and the drums begin. But they were too late. Greene’s column came in from the north and Sullivan’s along the river at the same moment, which was the one thing in the whole plan that went exactly as it was meant to; and Knox’s guns were up at the head of the two main streets before the Hessians could form in them.

The streets were called King Street and Queen Street. He noticed that, afterwards, and wished he had not.

The guns fired down them, the length of the town, and the Hessian regiments that came tumbling out of the houses to form in the streets were knocked down where they stood. They tried to bring up their own guns in King Street and a captain of Virginians named Washington, a distant cousin, and a young lieutenant from the same colony named Monroe, went at them with a few men and took them, and were both shot down doing it, and both lived. The Hessian colonel, Rall, who had been up late, got his men out of the town into an orchard on the east side and tried to come back at the guns, on his horse, shouting, and was shot out of the saddle twice; and his men stood in the orchard in the sleet without their colonel, with the American regiments closing round them on three sides and the guns on the fourth, and after a little while they began, one company at a time, to ground their arms.

It had taken less than an hour. Some of them got across the bridge over the creek to the south before Sullivan closed it, and ran for Bordentown. The rest were taken. He sat on his horse at the head of King Street and watched them come in, in their blue coats and their tall brass caps, and their great moustaches, most of them, and their faces, which were young, a great many of them, and frightened, and very far from home.

They were the foreign mercenaries of the Grievances. He had read the charge in July and had thought it fair. Looking at them now, he thought that they were the only enemy in this war that he had never once had to call ministerial.

He went to see Rall in the afternoon, with Greene.

They had carried the colonel into the house he had used for his headquarters, a Quaker’s house on King Street, and laid him on a bed in the front room, and he was dying, and knew it. He was a heavy man of fifty or so with a soldier’s face, grey now. He spoke no English. Through an officer who interpreted, he asked the General’s word that his men would be treated with kindness, as prisoners of war, and not as what the Americans had been told they were.

Washington gave it. He gave it in plain words, standing by the bed with his hat in his hand, and the interpreter put it into German, and the dying man looked at him for a moment as though he were reading it on his face rather than hearing it, and then nodded, and shut his eyes. He died in the night, they said afterwards, in the same bed. Washington had already gone back over the river by then, with his prisoners.

Neither Cadwalader nor Ewing had crossed. Washington had only the twenty-four hundred from McConkey’s, wet and exhausted, with Howe’s troops at Princeton. By afternoon some were drunk on rum found in a Hessian cellar. He ordered them back across the river with the prisoners. Glover’s men rowed through the ice again, and on the Pennsylvania bank the soldiers lay down where they landed.

He was at Newtown on the morning of the twenty-seventh, at the house he was using there, and Tilghman brought him the returns.

Tench Tilghman was a Philadelphian of thirty-two, quiet and exact, who had come to him in the summer as a volunteer and asked no pay, and who wrote a better hand than any man on the staff and never wasted a word. He laid the papers on the table and stood by while the General read them.

Twenty-three officers taken, and eight hundred and eighty-six men. Something over twenty of the enemy killed, as near as could be known, and some eighty wounded. Six brass field pieces. A thousand stand of arms, with their cartouche boxes and their swords. And of the army that had made the attack: no man killed by the enemy. Two frozen on the march. Captain Washington and Lieutenant Monroe wounded, and two or three privates.

It was the best return he had read in the war, and by the end of the week every newspaper from Portsmouth to Savannah would have it. And it was nine hundred Hessians. Howe had thirty thousand men. In four days the greater part of the army that had taken them would walk away with its enlistment papers in its pocket, and he must ask it, regiment by regiment, to stay, and find something to pay it with, and he did not know if it would.

He put the returns down.

“A victory that saves an army, Tilghman,” he said quietly, “is not the same thing as one that wins a war.”

Tilghman looked at him for a moment, and then at the papers, and said, “No, sir.”

That was all either of them said about it. Then Washington pulled the inkstand towards him and took a sheet of paper and began his letter to the Congress, in his own hand, as he always did with a letter that mattered, in the plain words he always used.

I have the pleasure of Congratulating you upon the Success of an Enterprize, which I had formed against a Detatchment of the Enemy lying in Trenton, and which was executed yesterday Morning.

It was true, every word, and it was what the Congress needed to read, and outside the window the men who had done it lay asleep in the snow.