Section II

WITH HIS BROTHER Sir William’s campaign succeeding splendidly in New Jersey, and the war rapidly losing support among the people there, David McCullough Admiral Lord Howe decided to make yet another appeal for conciliation. Signed also by Sir William, the new proclamation was their boldest, most generous gesture thus far, they felt. It was issued in the spirit of their obligation, as commissioned by the King, to serve as peace negotiators as well as military commanders, but also because Lord Howe genuinely believed that a negotiated settlement with the Americans was yet possible and vastly preferable to a long-drawn-out conflict. He had no desire to lose any more British lives or to inflict any more destruction and suffering on the Americans than necessary.

The proclamation, dated November 30, was an immediate success. It offered all who, within sixty days, would come forth and take an oath of allegiance to the King—and pledge their “peaceable obedience”—a “free and general pardon,” and that they would

reap the benefit of his Majesty’s paternal goodness, in the preservation of their property, the restoration of their commerce, and the security of their most valuable rights, under the just and most moderate authority of the crown and Parliament of Britain.

Hundreds, eventually thousands, in New Jersey flocked to the British camps to declare their loyalty. Considering the way the war was going, the size and might of the British army, and the pathetic state of Washington’s meager band, it seemed the prudent thing to do. As a farmer near Brunswick named John Bray wrote to a kinsman:

You can come down and receive protection and return home without molestation on the part of the King’s troops and you best know the situation of the provincial army. Do advise Cousin Johnny and Thomas and Cousin Thomas Jones, for if they do stay out to the last, they will undoubtedly fare the worst.

***

HAVING CROSSED THE RARITAN and occupied Brunswick on December 1, Cornwallis called a halt, as he had been ordered by General Howe. For six days—six merciful days for Washington and his army—the British and Hessians made no move, a decision that puzzled, even infuriated many of the British and local Loyalists who saw no reason to let up on the chase.

Called on to explain later, Cornwallis would say his troops were exhausted, footsore, hungry, and in need of rest. More important, it had not seemed at the time that excessive haste was wise or necessary. There were dangers in too rapid a pursuit. He worried about General Lee, who was variously reported just ahead or coming up from behind. But had it looked like he could catch Washington, Cornwallis said, he would have kept going, whatever the risks, no matter the orders.

Some would see the pause as a horrendous blunder and blame William Howe. Captain Charles Stedman, one of Cornwallis’s own officers and the earliest British historian of the war, would speculate that had Cornwallis been allowed “to act at his own discretion…he would have pursued the weakened and alarmed enemy to the Delaware, over which, without falling into his hands, they never could have passed.” But this assumed that Washington and the army could not have escaped down the east side of the river, which seems unreasonable.

The Hessian officer Johann Ewald, an intelligent and experienced soldier, concluded that Cornwallis had no desire to put his valuable troops in needless jeopardy. On the night of the capture of Fort Lee, when Ewald and his jaegers had started after a column of rebels retreating in “a cloud of dust,” Cornwallis had ordered them back. “Let them go, my dear Ewald, and stay here,” Cornwallis had said. “We do not want to lose any men. One jaeger is worth more than ten rebels.” By the time of the halt at Brunswick, Ewald wrote, the hope of the whole British command was “of ending the war amicably, without shedding the blood of the King’s subjects in a needless way.”

Others would say it was for political reasons related to the latest peace move that Cornwallis intentionally let Washington get away. No one would ever prove this, and it seems unlikely, especially since General Howe, sensing that a final blow might now indeed be struck, arrived at Brunswick on December 6 with an additional brigade commanded by General Grant, and ordered the advance to continue at once.

The weather had turned unseasonably warm, ideal for campaigning. A Loyalist newspaper in New York had already set the scene in a report published the day before:

It is said by some persons who have lately seen the rebel forces that they are the most pitiable collection of ragged, dispirited mortals that ever pretended to the name of an army…and that if the weather continues fair but a little longer, there is no visible impediment to His Majesty’s troops in completing a march to the capitol of Pennsylvania.

Everything seemed to the advantage of the conquering army, all was going as wished except for one vexing problem that had been growing steadily worse for several weeks. Marauding and pillaging by redcoats and Hessians had gotten out of hand. “Scandalous behavior for British troops,” wrote Major Stephen Kemble, the Loyalist serving with the British army, “and the Hessians outrageously licentious, and cruel to such a degree as to threaten with death all such as dare obstruct them in their depredations.” Kemble had recorded this in his diary in early November, before the capture of Fort Washington. “[I] shudder for New Jersey,” he had written.

The plenty of New Jersey, the “Garden of America,” its broad, fertile, well-tended farms, abundant supplies of livestock, grain, hay, food put up for winter, barrels of wine and beer for the taking, were all too much to resist. On the first night his Hessian troops set foot in New Jersey, Captain Ewald wrote, “All the plantations in the vicinity were plundered, and whatever the soldiers found in the houses was declared booty.” Ewald was appalled by what he saw.

On this march [through New Jersey] we looked upon a deplorable sight. The region is well-cultivated, with very attractive plantations, but all their occupants had fled and all the houses had been or were being plundered and destroyed.

The British blamed the Hessians. (“The Hessians are more infamous and cruel than any,” wrote Ambrose Serle, after hearing reports of British plundering.) The Hessians blamed the British. The Americans blamed both the British and the Hessians, as well as the New Jersey Loyalists, and the British and Hessian commanders seemed no more able to put a stop to such excesses than Washington had been. The stories, amplified as many may have been, were a searing part of a war that seemed only to grow more brutal and destructive.

Accounts of houses sacked, of families robbed of all they had, became commonplace. American reports of atrocities were often propaganda, but many were also quite accurate. The Pennsylvania Journal, the Pennsylvania Evening Post, and the Freeman’s Journal carried reports of the sick and elderly being abused, of rape and murder. No one was safe, according to the British officer Charles Stedman. “The friend and the foe from the hand of rapine shared alike.”

The New Jersey Loyalists were the most villainous of all, Nathanael Greene reported to his wife Caty.

They lead the relentless foreigners to the houses of their neighbors and strip poor women and children of everything they have to eat or wear; and after plundering them in this sort, the brutes often ravish the mothers and daughters and compel the fathers and sons to behold their brutality.

“The enemy’s ravages in New Jersey exceed all description,” Greene would report to Governor Nicholas Cooke of Rhode Island. “Many hundred women ravished.”

At Newark, according to the report of a congressional committee, three women, one of whom was in her seventies, another pregnant, were “most horribly ravished.”

Fear and outrage spread across New Jersey and beyond. “Their footsteps are marked with destruction wherever they go,” Greene said of the enemy.

What remained of Washington’s army, the “shadow army,” as Greene called it, was pitiful to behold. “But give me leave to tell you, Sir,” Greene would write to John Adams, “that our difficulties were inconceivable to those who were not eye witnesses to them.”

***

BRITISH AND HESSIAN FORCES got under way from Brunswick on December 7 and came on faster than ever, William Howe having decided that, “The possession of Trenton was extremely desirable.” With the continuing success of the Proclamation of November 30 and hardly any opposition from the rebels, Howe intended to secure another large part of New Jersey where Loyalists were plentiful, and where, as he also said, Philadelphia was in easy striking distance.

Washington was on his way from Trenton to look things over at Princeton when he received word of the enemy’s strength and rapid advance. Immediately he turned back.

“Our retreat should not be neglected for fear of consequences,” advised Nathanael Greene, who had also ridden to Princeton earlier in the day. In the trek across New Jersey, Washington had become increasingly dependent on Greene. But it was “beyond doubt” that the enemy was advancing, Greene reported. Lord Stirling expected them by noon. Lee was also said to be “at the heels of the enemy,” but Greene cautioned Washington that, whatever happened, Lee ought to be kept under control “within the lines of some general plan or else his operations will be independent of yours.”

Washington had already made his decision, and he calmly, deliberately, carried it out. A fleet of boats was standing ready at Trenton. By nightfall, the weary troops and their commander were crossing the Delaware to the Pennsylvania shore, where bonfires had been set ablaze to light the way.

One of those watching from the Pennsylvania side was the artist Charles Willson Peale, who had arrived with a Philadelphia militia unit in answer to Washington’s call for help. Peale wrote later of the firelight on the river and shore, of boats laden with soldiers, horses, cannon, and equipment, of men calling out orders. It was “a grand but dreadful” spectacle: “The hallooing of hundreds of men in their difficulties getting horses and artillery out of the boats, made it rather the appearance of Hell than any earthly scene.”

The long retreat that had begun in New York and continued from the Hudson to the Delaware was over. Casualties had been few in New Jersey, and its pitiable appearance and miseries notwithstanding, the army, or the semblance of an army, had once again survived.

“With a handful of men we sustained an orderly retreat,” wrote Thomas Paine in The Crisis, which soon appeared in Philadelphia. No sign of fear was to be seen, he insisted. “Once more we are collected and collecting…. By perseverance and fortitude we have the prospect of a glorious issue.”

Henry Knox, writing on the morning of December 8, his first letter to his wife in weeks, said she might be surprised to find he was in Pennsylvania. Though physically exhausted, he, like Paine, refused to be downcast. It was “a combination of unlucky circumstances” that had brought things to such a pass, he told her. “We are now making a stand on the side of the Delaware toward Philadelphia.”

In truth, men were dreadfully dispirited. Many had given up, in addition to the 2,000 who had refused to sign on again after December 1. Hundreds had deserted. Many of those left were sick, hungry, altogether as miserable as they appeared.

To Charles Willson Peale, walking among them by the light of the next morning on the Pennsylvania shore, they looked as wretched as any men he had ever seen. One had almost no clothes. “He was in an old dirty blanket jacket, his beard long, and his face so full of sores that he could not clean it.” So “disfigured” was he that Peale failed at first to recognize that the man was his own brother, James Peale, who had been with a Maryland unit as part of the rear guard.

***

THAT THE ENEMY MIGHT CROSS the Delaware at one or several points and move quickly to seize Philadelphia, as they had New York, no one doubted. On Washington’s orders every boat not commanded to bring the army across had been destroyed for sixty miles along the east bank of the river, which was no small accomplishment. But broad and swift as it was, the river could remain a barrier to Howe only so long, as Washington warned the members of Congress repeatedly in a series of urgent dispatches.

“From several accounts, I am led to think that the enemy are bringing boats with them,” he wrote.

If so, it will be impossible for our small force to give them any considerable opposition in the passage of the river…. Under the circumstances, the security of Philadelphia should be our next object.

In another letter to John Hancock, he stated flatly that “Philadelphia beyond all question is the object of the enemy’s movements,” that “nothing less than our utmost exertions” could stop Howe, and that his own force was too thin and weak to count on.

Washington and his staff had taken up quarters in a brick house directly across the river from Trenton, where he hoped to keep watch on the enemy. His troops were scattered close by the river for nearly twenty-five miles, camped in the woods and brush out of sight from the river, the greater part of them about ten miles to the north of Washington’s headquarters.

While Joseph Reed had gotten nowhere with his recruiting efforts in New Jersey, Mifflin’s efforts had produced some results. The Philadelphia volunteer militia (or Philadelphia Associators as they were called) that Charles Willson Peale had arrived with numbered 1,000 and marched into camp “in a very spirited manner,” as Washington noted approvingly.

On December 10, word came at last that Lee and 4,000 troops commanded by General Sullivan had reached Morristown to the northeast.

“General Lee…is on his march to join me,” Washington wrote to the governor of Connecticut, Jonathan Trumbull. “If he can effect this junction, our army will again make a respectable appearance, and such as I hope will disappoint the enemy in their plan on Philadelphia.”

Everything depended on Lee.

The letter to Trumbull was written December 14, when Washington knew nothing of events of the day before, Friday the 13th—events wholly unexpected and of far-reaching consequences. As time would show, that Friday the 13th had been an exceedingly lucky day for Washington and for his country.

***

IN AN INEXPLICABLE LAPSE of judgment, General Lee had spent the previous night of the 12th separated from his troops, stopping at a tavern about three miles away at Basking Ridge, for what reason is not known.

With Lee was a personal guard of fifteen officers and men. The next morning, in low spirits and no apparent hurry, Lee sat at a table in his dressing gown attending to routine paperwork, then took time to write a letter to General Gates for no other purpose than to blame Washington for all his troubles and for the woeful state of affairs in general.

“Entre nous, a certain great man is damnable deficient,” Lee told Gates.

He has thrown me into a situation where I have my choice of difficulties: if I stay in this province, I risk myself and army; and if I do not stay, the province is lost forever…. In short, unless something which I do not expect turns up, we are lost.

It was just after ten when a swarm of British cavalry appeared suddenly at the end of the lane. They were a scouting party of twenty-five horsemen commanded by Colonel William Harcourt, who had once served under Lee in Portugal. They had been sent out from Trenton by Cornwallis to gather intelligence on Lee’s “motions and situation.” At Basking Ridge, a local Loyalist had given them the answer.

From the end of the lane to the tavern was a distance of about a hundred yards. Six of the horsemen, led by Lieutenant Banister Tarleton, came at a gallop. In minutes they had the building surrounded, killed two of the guards, and scattered the rest.

“I ordered my men to fire into the house through every window and door, and cut up as many of the guard as they could,” Tarleton later wrote.

Some of those inside fired back. Then the owner of the tavern, a woman named White, appeared at the door. Screaming that Lee was inside, she begged for mercy.

Tarleton shouted that he would burn the building unless Lee gave himself up. In a few minutes Lee appeared and surrendered, saying he trusted he would be treated as a gentleman.

A young American lieutenant who had been inside and managed to escape, James Wilkinson, would later describe how a cheer went up among Lee’s captors and a trumpet sounded. Then off they dashed with their prize, the “unfortunate” Lee, hatless, still in his dressing gown and slippers, mounted on Wilkinson’s horse, which happened to have been tethered at the door. The astonishing raid had taken no more than fifteen minutes.

News of Lee’s capture spread in all directions as fast as the fastest horses could move. The British were jubilant. At Brunswick, where the prisoner was put under lock and key, Harcourt’s cavalrymen celebrated by getting Lee’s horse (Wilkinson’s horse) drunk, along with themselves, as a band played into the night.

A Hessian captain wrote in his journal, “We have captured General Lee, the only rebel general whom we had cause to fear.” The hero of the hour, Lieutenant Tarleton, wrote triumphantly to his mother, “This coup de main has put an end to the campaign.”

When the news reached England it was thought at first to be too improbable, then set off bell-ringing and joyful demonstrations as if a great battle had been won.

Among the British, it was thought that because Lee was a British soldier and gentleman, he was therefore, of course, superior to any raw American provincial who had assumed high rank, but then for the same reason, he was also that much more of a traitor to his King.

To the American officers and troops deployed along the west bank of the Delaware, and all whose hopes were riding on them, the loss of Lee seemed the worst possible news at the worst possible moment.

To Nathanael Greene it was one of a “combination of evils…pressing in upon us on all sides.” Washington, on first hearing what had happened, called it a “severe blow,” then said he would comment no further on “this unhappy accident.” Privately he was furious with Lee for having been such a fool. “Unhappy man! Taken by his own imprudence,” he told Lund Washington. And privately he must also have breathed a sigh of relief. After the continuing frustrations and anxieties Lee had subjected him to, there must have been a feeling of deliverance for Washington.

The popular, egotistical general who considered the members of Congress no better than cattle and longed for the “necessary power” to set everything straight was no longer a factor. In little time, fearing he might be hanged as a traitor and hoping to ingratiate himself with his old military friend William Howe, Lee would resort to offering his thoughts to Howe on ways the British could win the war.

The same day as Lee’s capture, Washington learned that Congress had adjourned in order to move to a safer location at Baltimore. It was abandoning Philadelphia for the first time since convening there for the First Continental Congress in 1774.

***

EVERYTHING SEEMED TO BE HAPPENING at once. On December 13, at his Trenton headquarters across the river from Washington, William Howe made one of the fateful decisions of the war. He was suspending further military operations until spring. Beginning immediately, he and his army would retire to winter quarters in northern New Jersey and New York. To secure the ground gained in the campaign, he would establish a string of outposts in New Jersey.

There had been a change in the weather. The days had turned much colder. The nights were the coldest yet with a “hard frost” and snow flurries, and this was all Howe had needed to make up his mind, “the weather,” as he wrote, “having become too severe to keep the field.”

It was commonly understood that eighteenth-century professional armies and their gentlemen commanders did not subject themselves to the miseries of winter campaigns, unless there were overriding reasons to the contrary. Considering all he had accomplished in the year’s campaign and knowing the helpless state of the rebel army, Howe saw no cause to continue the fight or to remain a day longer than necessary in a punishing American winter in a place like Trenton.

And there were, besides, compelling reasons to retire to New York City, for quarters for the army, and for the comforts and pleasures that so appealed to the general himself.

Howe departed for New York on Saturday, December 14, joined by Cornwallis, whom he had granted leave to return to England to visit his ailing wife.

General Howe cozily accommodated in New York, as pictured in the minds of many, would rekindle old gossip and give rise to some popular doggerel:

Sir William, he, snug as a flea,

Lay all this time a-snoring;

Nor dreamed of harm, as he lay warm

In bed with Mrs. Loring.

***

NO BOATS WERE TO BE BUILT or hauled overland by the British to cross the Delaware. And for now there was to be no march on Philadelphia. The members of Congress could as well have stayed where they were.

But of this Washington seems to have known little or nothing. Close as he was to the enemy he had almost no idea of what they were doing, no knowledge that Howe and Cornwallis had departed, and that neither he nor Congress were any longer under immediate threat.

“The Delaware now divides what remains of our little force from that of General Howe whose object, beyond all question, is to possess Philadelphia,” Washington wrote on December 18, four days after Howe’s departure, to James Bowdoin, a member of the Massachusetts Council. Were the river to freeze, Washington feared, the enemy might attack over the ice. “Strain every nerve for carrying out the necessary works,” he told Israel Putnam, who was charged with the defense of Philadelphia. “There seems to be the strongest reason to believe the enemy will attempt to pass the river as soon as the ice is sufficiently formed.”

Desperate for reliable intelligence—for information of almost any kind—Washington let it be known he was willing to pay for it, at almost any price. In a dispatch to his general officers, he implored them to find a spy who would cross the river and determine whether any boats were being built or coming overland. “Expense must not be spared in procuring such intelligence, and will readily be paid by me.” To Lord Stirling, he wrote, “Use every possible means without regard to expense to come with certainty at the enemy’s strength, situation, and movements—without this we wander in a wilderness of uncertainties.”

As early as December 15, he had received a report from a commander of Pennsylvania militia posted below Trenton, John Cadwalader, saying, “General Howe is certainly gone to New York, unless the whole is a scheme to amuse and surprise.” Perhaps Washington found it impossible to believe, or suspected that it was indeed a ruse. Whatever the reason, he seems to have ignored it.

The foe gathered on the other side of the river was the British army no longer, but a holding force of 1,500 Hessians settled in for the winter under the command of Colonel Johann Rall, the veteran officer who had led the fierce Hessian assaults at White Plains and Fort Washington.

Concerned about “the apparent designs” of the enemy—the “wilderness of uncertainties”—Washington moved his headquarters ten miles upstream to Buckingham Township, closer to the main body of the army, where Greene, Stirling, and Knox had their headquarters.

In two weeks, on New Year’s Day, all enlistments would expire. And what then? “Our only dependence now is upon the speedy enlistment of a new army,” he wrote to Lund Washington. “If this fails, I think the game is pretty near up.”

On December 20, in the midst of a snowstorm, General Sullivan rode into Buckingham at the head of Lee’s troops, having marched at a pace four times what Lee had set in order to join Washington as soon as possible. But instead of the 4,000 that Washington had been expecting, there were only half that number, and the men were in more wretched condition even than Washington’s own ranks. When Lee had complained of his troops having no shoes, it had been no exaggeration for effect. General Heath would later write of seeing Lee’s troops pass through Peekskill, many “so destitute of shoes that the blood left on the frozen ground, in many places, marked the route they had taken.”

One of those who had made the trek from Peekskill was Lieutenant Joseph Hodgkins. In a letter headed “Buckingham in Pennsylvania, December 20, 1776,” Hodgkins reported to his wife Sarah:

We have been on the march since the 29th of last month and we are now within 10 or 12 miles of General Washington’s army. We expect to be there tonight. But how long we shall stay there I can’t tell. Neither can I tell you much about the enemy, only that they are on one side of the Delaware River and our army on the other.

They had marched about two hundred miles, Hodgkins thought, and the greatest part of the way was dangerous—“the enemy being near,” but also because so much of the country was “full of them cursed creatures called Tories.”

General Gates, too, arrived, but to Washington’s disappointment, he had with him only six hundred men.

Before departing for Baltimore, Congress had named Robert Morris to head the committee to look after affairs in Philadelphia, by now an all-but-abandoned city. Writing to Morris three days before Christmas, Washington said he thought the enemy was waiting for two events only before marching on Philadelphia—“Ice for a passage, and the dissolution of the poor remains of our debilitated army.”

As near as could be determined, Washington now had an army of about 7,500, but that was a paper figure only. Possibly 6,000 were fit for duty. Hundreds were sick and suffering from the cold. Robert Morris and others in and around Philadelphia were doing everything possible to find winter clothes and blankets, while more and more of the local citizenry were signing the British proclamation. Congress had fled. Two former members of Congress, Joseph Galloway and Andrew Allen, had gone over to the enemy. By all reasonable signs, the war was over and the Americans had lost.

Yet for all the troubles that beset him, all the high expectations and illusions that he had seen shattered since the triumph at Boston, Washington had more strength to draw upon than met the eye—in his own inner resources and in the abilities of those still with him and resolved to carry on.

In Greene, Stirling, and Sullivan he had field commanders as good as or better than any. Though Greene, his best, and the very able Joseph Reed had let him down, both had learned from the experience, just as Washington had, and were more determined than ever to prove themselves worthy in his eyes. Greene, as he would confide to his wife, was extremely happy to have again “the full confidence of his Excellency,” confidence that seemed to increase “the more difficult and distressing our affairs grow.”

Henry Knox, a novice artilleryman no longer, and the steadfast John Glover, could be counted on no matter how tough the going. (In recognition of the part played thus far by the twenty-six-year-old Knox, Washington had already recommended him for promotion to the rank of brigadier general.) Junior officers and soldiers in the ranks, men like Joseph Hodgkins, were battered, weary, ragged as beggars, but not beaten.

Washington himself was by no means beaten. If William Howe and others of like mind thought the war was over and the British had won, Washington did not. Washington refused to see it that way.

With Lee gone and Congress entrusting him with more power, Washington was fully the commander now and it suited him. Out of adversity he seemed to draw greater energy and determination. “His Excellency George Washington,” wrote Greene later, “never appeared to so much advantage as in the hour of distress.”

His health was excellent. The loyalty of those he counted on was stronger than ever.

On December 24, the day before Christmas, Washington’s judge advocate, Colonel William Tudor, who had been with him from the beginning, wrote again, as he often had during the campaign, to tell his fiancée in Boston of his continuing love for her, and to explain why his hopes of returning soon to Boston had vanished. “I cannot desert a man (and it would certainly be desertion in a court of honor) who has deserted everything to defend his country, and whose chief misfortune, among ten thousand others, is that a large part of it wants spirit to defend itself.”

***

BRISTOL, PENNSYLVANIA, was a small town on the western side of the Delaware, downstream from Trenton, across the river from Burlington, New Jersey. It was from Bristol, where he was helping to organize Pennsylvania militia, that Joseph Reed had written a remarkable letter to Washington dated December 22.

It was time something was done, something aggressive and surprising, Reed wrote. Even failure would be preferable to doing nothing.

Will it not be possible, my dear General, for our troops or such part of them as can act with advantage to make a diversion or something more at or about Trenton? The greater the alarm, the more likely success will attend the attacks….

I will not disguise my own sentiments that our cause is desperate and hopeless if we do not take the opp[ortunit]y of the collection of troops at present to strike some stroke. Our affairs are hastening fast to ruin if we do not retrieve them by some happy event. Delay with us is now equal to total defeat.

Apparently the letter was unsolicited. What was remarkable was the degree to which it corresponded with Washington’s own mind and plans.

In the bleak days after the Battle of Brooklyn, Washington had told Congress, “We should on all occasions avoid a general action or put anything to the risk unless compelled by a necessity.” But he had also written of the possibility of some “brilliant stroke” on his part that might save the cause.

On December 14, he had written to Governor Trumbull that a “lucky blow” against the enemy would “most certainly rouse the spirits of the people, which are quite sunk by our misfortunes.”

Now, compelled by necessity, his “brilliant stroke” worked out in his mind, he was ready to put almost everything at risk.

With Greene and a few others at the Buckingham headquarters, he had been going over the plan for days, insisting on the strictest secrecy.

But on December 21, Robert Morris had written to say he had heard an attack across the Delaware was being prepared and that he hoped this was true.

Responding now to Reed, Washington confirmed that an attack on Trenton was to begin Christmas night. “For Heaven’s sake keep this to yourself, as discovery of it may prove fatal to us…but necessity, dire necessity, will, nay must, justify an attempt.”