A Man to Remember

(5 of 9)

The siege of Boston introduced Washington to his awful responsibilities. Sixteen thousand Americans were camped in a great semicircle around Boston. They had, somehow, to be fed, disciplined, taught some rudiments of military maneuvering—and used against the enemy. Few had uniforms. Few had enough powder—in fact, Washington discovered there was hardly enough powder in the whole country to fight one battle.

The soldiers got noisily drunk, tore up farmers' fences for wood, quarreled with their officers, and carried on lewdly with female camp followers. New Englanders, thei commander noted privately, "are an exceedingly dirty and nasty people." Washington personally had to issue the most elementary sort of orders: that drunkenness be prohibited, that soldiers keep themselves and their camps clean. He had to do so throughout the war. He also had to put up for years with an even more horrifying phenomenon, which presented itself at Boston: his army began melting away, for militiamen, enlisted for short terms of only a few months, went home when their time was up, and always tried to take their muskets with them.

He was saved from committing his unwieldly, untrained and dwindling force to an assault on Boston by long-suffering gangs of soldiers, who dragged heavy cannon over the snow all the way from old Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain to Boston. When the cannon were mounted on Dorchester Heights, the British sailed away to Halifax.

Washington's travail promptly began again the next summer. His army, beaten on Long Island, escaped across the East River to Manhattan, thanks to a fog, regiments of Salem and Marblehead boatmen, Providence, and Washington's daring. It fought and retreated to White Plains, fought and retreated across the Hudson—and across New Jersey—and across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania. As winter deepened, only 2,400 ragged, ill-fed Continental regulars were left. On Dec. 20, 1776, Washington wrote to Congress: "Ten more days will put an end to the existence of our Army . . ."

Lightning at Christmas. Then he gambled. Five nights later, in numbing cold on Christmas night, he took his little force across the ice-clogged Delaware. Wet, half-frozen, lashed by driving sleet, it marched nine miles to Trenton and surprised the town and its Hessian defenders. The Americans triumphed in less than two hours of fighting and without the loss of a man. They killed or wounded more than 100 of the enemy, captured 1,000 more, and with them, 1,000 muskets and six brass fieldpieces. Only three days later they audaciously invaded New Jersey again, and stayed to bleed the British at Princeton (where Washington, rallying his troops, rode unscathed within 30 paces of blazing enemy muskets).

The country was electrified, the revolution was saved. That was the pattern of the war—months of defeat, discouragement and disaster broken, when all seemed lost, by a daring stroke and a taste of triumph.