I hope this is the dark part of the night, which is generally just before day.
—General Nathanael Greene
THE RETREAT OFGEORGE WASHINGTON and his battered little army, southward across New Jersey, began the morning of November 21. They were headed for a crossing point called Acquackanonk on the Passaic River, five miles away, retreat being their only choice and rivers offering the one possible defense against the oncoming foe in “dead flat” country, as Washington described it, with no stone walls. Once over the Passaic, they pushed on another twenty miles down the west bank of the river to the little port town of Newark.
Heavy rains had left the narrow road sloppy with mud, and the men were in tatters, many without shoes, their feet wrapped in rags. Washington rode at the rear of the column, a point long remembered by a newly arrived eighteen-year-old Virginia lieutenant named James Monroe. “I saw him…at the head of a small band, or rather in its rear, for he was always near the enemy, and his countenance and manner made an impression on me which I can never efface.”
By young Monroe’s estimate, Washington had at most 3,000 men, yet his expression gave no sign of worry. “A deportment so firm, so dignified, but yet so modest and composed, I have never seen in any other person.”
Washington had set the army on the road in the early morning but not before getting off an urgent request to General Lee at North Castle, New York, in which he had made his worries and troubles abundantly clear. The men were “broken and dispirited.” They had no tents, no baggage, no entrenching tools. (Every pick and shovel had been left behind at Fort Lee.) As things were, he dared not risk contact with the enemy, Washington wrote, and “so must leave a very fine country open to their ravages.”
He urged Lee to cross the Hudson with his brigades and join forces before it was too late. New Jersey was too rich a prize to give up without even the “appearance” of a fight. Were New Jersey to fall, it could have devastating effect on Pennsylvania.
To be certain Lee understood what he wanted, Washington said it again. “I would have you move over by the easiest and best [swiftest] passage.”
Yet it was a request only, not an order.
The letter had been dictated to Joseph Reed and sent off by express rider in a dispatch case into which Reed put a letter of his own to Lee. But of this Washington was told nothing.
Reed’s letter was a stunning indictment of Washington. At best, it could be taken as a desperate indiscretion; at worst, an underhanded act of betrayal.
His commander’s indecision over whether to abandon New York and again at Fort Washington had left Reed badly shaken. His confidence in Washington was shattered. But instead of confiding his feelings to Washington, he secretly poured them out to Lee, leaving no doubt as to who he thought should be leading the army in its hour of need.
He wished “most earnestly” to have Lee “where the principle scene of action is laid,” Reed wrote, seconding what Washington had said. Then, claiming he had no wish to flatter Lee, he went on to do just that and to make his main point.
I do not mean to flatter or praise you at the expense of any other, but I confess I do think it is entirely owing to you that this army, and the liberties of America, so far as they are dependent on it, are not totally cut off…. You have decision, a quality often wanted in minds otherwise valuable…. Oh! General, an indecisive mind is one of the greatest misfortunes that can befall an army. How often have I lamented it this campaign. All circumstances considered, we are in a very awful and alarming situation—one that requires the utmost wisdom and firmness of mind. As soon as the season will admit, I think yourself and some others should go to Congress and form the plan of the new army.
Washington worried about the health of his men. He worried about rumors of a British invasion to the south of Newark at Perth Amboy, at the mouth of the Raritan River, where New Jersey and Staten Island were separated by only a narrow channel.
In less than two weeks, on December 1, the enlistments of 2,000 of his troops would be up, the men free to go. It was the same nightmare prospect he had faced at Boston exactly a year before, and with the misery of the men greater now than ever, and morale suffering, there seemed every chance that his army would evaporate before his eyes.
Privately, Washington talked with Reed about the possibility of retreating to western Pennsylvania if necessary. Reed thought that if eastern Pennsylvania were to give up, the rest of the state would follow. Washington is said to have passed his hand over his throat and remarked, “My neck does not feel as though it was made for a halter.” He talked of retreating to the mountains of Augusta County, in western Virginia. From there they could carry on a “predatory war,” Washington said. “And if over-powered, we must cross the Allegheny Mountains.” He knew, as the enemy had little idea, just how big a country it was.
The problem was not that there were too few American soldiers in the thirteen states. There were plenty, but the states were reluctant to send the troops they had to help fight the war, preferring to keep them close to home, and especially as the war was not going well. In August, Washington had had an army of 20,000. In the three months since, he had lost four battles—at Brooklyn, Kips Bay, White Plains, and Fort Washington—then gave up Fort Lee without a fight. His army now was divided as it had not been in August and, just as young Lieutenant Monroe had speculated, he had only about 3,500 troops under his personal command—that was all.
Desperate for help, he sent Reed off to Burlington, New Jersey, on the eastern bank of the Delaware River, upstream from Philadelphia, to impress upon the governor of New Jersey, William Livingston, the urgent need for reinforcements. As it was, New Jersey militia were not turning out in any numbers that could make a difference.
General Mifflin was dispatched on a similar mission to Philadelphia, to alert Congress to the “critical state of our affairs,” and do everything possible to round up Pennsylvania troops and send them on with all speed.
These were two critical undertakings, and in the choice of Reed, his closest confidant, and the very able Mifflin, the Philadelphian who had shown such valor in command of the rear guard at Brooklyn, Washington felt confident he was sending two of the best men he had, and that this would not be lost on any who listened to what they had to say.
The first report from Mifflin was bitterly disappointing. His fellow Pennsylvanians were “divided and lethargic,” Mifflin wrote, “slumbering under the shade of peace and in the full enjoyment of the sweets of commerce.” From Reed, Washington heard nothing.
***
IT RAINED HEAVILY on November 22, the day the army reached Newark, and rain fell through that night and again the next day. “The sufferings we endured are beyond description—no tent to cover us at night—exposed to cold and rains day and night,” one soldier would remember. Colonel Samuel Webb, writing at the time, said it was impossible to describe conditions as they were. “I can only say that no lads ever showed greater activity in retreating than we have…. Our soldiers are the best fellows in the world at this business.” Webb, who had only just recovered from wounds received at White Plains, served still on Washington’s staff.
But of greatest importance, as time would tell, was the impression made on Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense, who had recently volunteered to serve as a civilian aide on Greene’s staff. Greene, with his love of literature and political philosophy, had taken a great liking to the brilliant Paine, an impoverished English immigrant, who, like Greene, had been raised a Quaker, and whose pamphlet, Common Sense, since its appearance early in the year, had become more widely read than anything yet published in America. Greene called him Common Sense. (“Common Sense and Col. Snarl, or Cornell, are perpetually wrangling about mathematical problems,” Greene had reported to his wife during less troubled times before the fall of Fort Washington.)
Sick at heart over the suffering and despair he saw, but inspired by the undaunted resolution of many around him, Paine is said to have committed his thoughts to paper during the retreat, writing at night on a drumhead by the light of a campfire. He himself, however, said it was not until later, at Philadelphia, that in a “passion of patriotism,” he began what he called The Crisis, with its immortal opening lines:
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.
On November 24, Washington sent off another message to General Lee saying he must come by a “safe and secure route,” and asking that he bring a particular 24-pound cannon, “provided it can be done without great inconvenience.”
With Loyalists more prevalent in New Jersey than in any other of the thirteen states, and American deserters continuing to go over to the enemy, Washington’s plight was well known to the British command.
“The fact is,” wrote Lord Rawdon, “their army is broken all to pieces, and the spirit of their leaders and their abettors is all broken…. I think one may venture to pronounce that it is well nigh over with them.”
***
SINCE THE FALL of Fort Washington there had been a major shift in British plans. General Clinton was reassigned. He was to sail with an expedition of 6,000 troops to take Rhode Island, or more specifically Newport. For in the time when the fortunes of the rebel army were going steadily from bad to worse, rebel privateers off the New England coast had been attacking British supply ships with increasing success, and Admiral Lord Howe was in need of a secure, ice-free winter roadstead in the vicinity for some of his fleet.
Clinton thought ill of the Rhode Island expedition. He had argued that it be postponed and that instead he and his forces land at Perth Amboy and thus outflank and destroy the crippled rebels in one sweeping, concentrated effort before the onset of winter snow. Or, Clinton proposed, he could carry his attack directly to Philadelphia, by sailing up the Delaware. “This, in all probability,” he later wrote, “would have dispersed the Congress, and…deranged all their affairs.”
It was a critical moment in the management of the war, with Clinton and William Howe once more opposed on how best to proceed. Clinton continued to see Washington’s army as the heart of the rebellion, and the envelopment of the army, therefore, as the most expeditious strategy. Howe wanted to keep the Americans on the run, and continue to clear the board, so to speak—to clear New Jersey and Rhode Island of the rebel forces just as he had cleared New York, and by such conquests of vital territory bring the deluded American people and their political leaders to their senses and end their demonstrably futile rebellion.
Clinton was overruled, and though unconvinced, he departed dutifully for Rhode Island, where his expedition seized Newport without opposition and the predominantly Quaker inhabitants seemed quite happy to live in peace under his protection. But it was a conquest of little importance. As would be said, its effect on the course of the war was about what it would have been had Clinton’s forces occupied the town of Newport on the Isle of Wight.
Difficulties between Clinton and William Howe, the friction of the two contrasting personalities, had grown steadily worse. At White Plains, in an outburst of frustration and anger, Clinton had told General Cornwallis he could not bear to serve under Howe, and this Cornwallis had chosen to tell Howe. Thus it was with considerable relief that Howe saw Clinton sail off from New York, just as when Clinton had departed Boston for South Carolina.
In Clinton’s place, Howe put Cornwallis, knowing he had a far more reasonable man to deal with and a highly energetic and effective field commander.
Like Howe—indeed, like Clinton—Charles Cornwallis was a true eighteenth-century English aristocrat, a shining representative of Britain’s ruling class, born to wealth, position, and influence. Schooled at Eton, he had decided in his youth on a military career, in which he had distinguished himself ever since. At age thirty-seven, he was at his professional prime but, unlike Howe, a man with no bad habits or inclinations to self-indulgence, and if not as intellectually gifted as Clinton, he had no peevish or contrary side.
Tall and somewhat overweight, as was the fashion, he carried himself well and was considered handsome, except for a cast in one eye. (In fact, he had lost sight in one eye as a result of a boyhood accident.) He was devoted to his ailing wife, whom he missed dreadfully, and devoted to his men—“I love that army,” he had once declared—and their devotion to him was notable. He was the most popular British general serving in America, known to be strict but fair, and genuinely concerned for the well-being of his troops. Repeatedly in the year’s campaign—at Brooklyn, Kips Bay, Fort Washington, and in his stunning surprise capture of Fort Lee—he had shown himself to be enterprising and aggressive. Thus far, he had done everything right.
On November 23, two days after the capture of Fort Lee, Cornwallis had met there with General Howe (who, having been made a Knight of the Bath by the King, was now Sir William Howe). The two conferred for several hours, going over the map of New Jersey and reviewing plans.
Howe gave orders to Cornwallis to pursue the rebels as far as New Brunswick, or Brunswick as it was then known, another fifty miles south of Newark, on the Raritan River, and stop there until further orders.
On November 25, after the rains subsided, Cornwallis and an army now numbering 10,000 set off, determined to catch Washington, Cornwallis said, as a hunter bags a fox. But on the rain-drenched roads, in muck ankle-deep or worse, the long columns of redcoats and Hessians with their heavy baggage trains and artillery moved slower even than the Americans had. They were three days reaching Newark.
At nine o’clock on the morning of November 28, the British engineering officer, Captain Archibald Robertson, recorded, “All the army marched in two columns towards Newark, where it was said the rebels would stand.” About one o’clock, the British advanced on the town in force, only to find it empty.
Washington had pressed on toward Brunswick and the Raritan. “The enemy gave us not the least interruption upon our march,” he wrote to General Heath.
There was word at last from Charles Lee, but only to report his own tribulations with foul weather and men without shoes. He was still at North Castle and made no mention of plans to leave.
Washington replied at once. “My former letters were so full and explicit as to the necessity of your marching as early as possible…that I confess I expected you would have been sooner in motion,” he said sharply. Yet he was still reluctant to issue a clear order to Lee.
By the time he reached Brunswick the morning of November 29, Washington had been joined by the dauntless Lord Stirling and more than 1,000 reinforcements. They were a first glimmer of hope, though hardly enough. Numbers of Stirling’s men, too, were shoeless and without coats or even shirts, and the December 1 expiration of enlistments, when twice that number would be free to leave, was only two days away.
***
ON NOVEMBER 30 AT BRUNSWICK, a sealed letter from General Lee to Joseph Reed arrived by express rider. With Reed still absent, Washington tore it open thinking it might be news that Lee and his men were at last on the way. The letter was dated November 24. “My dear Reed,” it began.
I received your most obliging, flattering letter—lament with you that fatal indecision of mind which in war is a much greater disqualification than stupidity or even want of personal courage. Accident may put a decisive blunder in the right, but eternal defeat and miscarriage must attend the men of the best parts if cursed with indecision.
Lee went on to explain why he had not started for New Jersey as Washington wished, and apparently he did not intend to do so.
What Washington thought or felt as he read the letter, or how many times he may have reread its first paragraph, no one knows. Clearly Reed, his trusted confidant and supposed friend, and Lee, his second-in-command, had both lost faith in him.
Washington resealed the letter and sent it off to Reed with a note of explanation.
The enclosed was put into my hands by an express [rider]…. Having no idea of its being a private letter…I opened it…. This, as it is the truth, must be my excuse for seeing the contents of a letter which neither inclinationor intention would have prompted me to.
He thanked Reed for the “trouble and fatigue” of his journey to Burlington and wished him success in his mission. And that was all.
Possibly, Washington was more hurt than angry. Later he would tell Reed, “I was hurt not because I thought my judgment wronged by the expressions contained in it [the letter], but because the same sentiments were not communicated immediately to myself.” Possibly the charge of “fatal indecision of mind” also hurt deeply, because Washington knew it to be true.
Above all, he must have felt profoundly alone, as alone as he had ever been. First Greene had let him down, now Reed. And who was to say what Lee had in mind, or might do?
At Philadelphia many of the Congress were ill or exhausted or absent. All three of the principle contributors to the Declaration of Independence were no longer present. Thomas Jefferson had gone home to Virginia in September. John Adams was at Braintree. Benjamin Franklin had departed on a mission to France. At times there were not enough delegates for a quorum, and as the news from New Jersey became more bleak, and the British army drew nearer, Philadelphia was beset by an extreme outbreak of the jitters.
The Pennsylvania Journal announced “very good intelligence that the British intend to make a push for Philadelphia,” and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, among others, reported “much alarm” in the city and in Congress. Delegate William Hooper of North Carolina, another signer of the Declaration of Independence, described a prevailing “torpor” in Congress. Hooper, however, had no patience with those blaming Washington for every misfortune.
Oh how I feel for Washington, that best of men [he wrote]. The difficulties which he has now to encounter are beyond the power of language to describe, but to be unfortunate is to be wrong and there are men…who are villains enough to brand him. There are some long faces here.
Once, during the Siege of Boston, when almost nothing was going right and General Schuyler had written from Albany to bemoan his troubles, Washington had replied that he understood but that “we must bear up against them, and make the best of mankind as they are, since we cannot have them as we wish.” It was such resolve and an acceptance of mankind and circumstances as they were, not as he wished them to be, that continued to carry Washington through. “I will not however despair,” he now wrote to Governor William Livingston.
***
ON SUNDAY MORNING, December 1, with British and Hessian columns advancing on Brunswick, 2,000 of Washington’s troops, New Jersey and Maryland militia, their enlistments up, walked away from the war, and without apology. “Two brigades left us at Brunswick,” wrote Nathanael Greene, “notwithstanding the enemy are within two hours march and coming on.”
Washington sent off still another urgent summons to Lee to come with all speed, “or your arrival may be too late to answer any valuable purpose.”
“The enemy are fast advancing,” he reported in a hurried dispatch to John Hancock, noting that the time was half past one. “Some of them are in sight.”
He ordered the only bridge over the Raritan at Brunswick destroyed, and this had been largely accomplished. But the river was fordable—in some places only knee-deep—and as he also told Hancock, mincing no words, his present force was “totally inadequate” to stop the enemy.
The first of the British artillery arrived at the river, and by late afternoon British and American cannon were exchanging fire, the American guns commanded by young Captain Alexander Hamilton. But again, as at Newark, when the British troops pressed on to the town the next morning, they found that the Americans had taken off.
Washington had decided what must be done. He was heading for Trenton. “It being impossible to oppose them with our present force with the least possible prospect of success,” he informed Congress, “we shall retreat to the west bank of the Delaware.”
“When we left Brunswick,” wrote Nathanael Greene, “we had not 3,000 men—a very pitiful army to trust the liberties of America on.” The hour had never looked darker.
The post road, or King’s Highway, from Brunswick to Trenton, the main thoroughfare between New York and Philadelphia, was as straight and flat and fine a thirty-mile stretch of road as any in the country, and the retreating army made good time. The retreat was not at a run. It was a forced march, not a rout, as sometimes portrayed. Washington and the main body of the army, marching through the night, reached Trenton on the Delaware the morning of December 2, having left Lord Stirling and two brigades as a rear guard at the little college town of Princeton.
Orders were issued to round up all boats along the east bank of the Delaware and to destroy any that could not be used, to keep them out of enemy hands.
Among the delegates to Congress, the distances from Brunswick to Trenton and Trenton to Philadelphia were well known, and so if Cornwallis was at Brunswick, then he and his army were a mere sixty miles from Philadelphia. “The inhabitants of Princeton and Trenton…are evacuated,” wrote Massachusetts delegate Robert Treat Paine. “The people left them on Sunday night with panic and precipitation.” People in Philadelphia were getting out, too, many taking all the possessions they could carry. “Numbers of families loading wagons,” a citizen recorded. “All shops ordered shut…people in confusion, of all ranks.”
The great question on everyone’s mind was where were Lee and his men. It was said they were not far, “close in the rear of the enemy.” But no one knew. “I have not heard a word from General Lee since the 26th of last month,” John Hancock read in a letter from Washington dated December 3.