The Winter Soldiers: The Battles for Trenton and Princeton
384
The Winter Soldiers: The Battles for Trenton and Princeton
384eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
The Winter Soldiers is the story of a small band of men held together by George Washington in the face of disaster and hopelessness, desperately needing at least one victory to salvage both cause and country.
In the fall of 1776 the British delivered a crushing blow to the Revolutionary War efforts. New York fell and the anguished retreat through New Jersey followed. Winter came with a vengeance, bringing what Thomas Paine called "the times that try men's souls."
Richard M. Ketchum tells the tale of unimaginable hardship and suffering that culminated in the battles of Trenton and Princeton. Without these triumphs, the American Revolution that had begun so bravely could not have gone on.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466879515 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Holt, Henry & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 08/26/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Sales rank: | 919,701 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Richard M. Ketchum (1922-2012) is the author of the Revolutionary War classics Decisive Day: The Battle of Bunker Hill; The Winter Soldiers: The Battles for Trenton and Princeton; the award-winning New York Times Notable Book Saratoga: Turning Point of America's Revolutionary War; and, most recently, Divided Loyalties: How the American Revolution Came to New York. He lived in Vermont.
Read an Excerpt
The Winter Soldiers
The Battles for Trenton and Princeton
By Richard M. Ketchum
Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 1973 Richard M. KetchumAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7951-5
CHAPTER 1
1. A Gentleman from England with Genius in His Eyes
In the raw, unsightly camps west of the Hudson the American army was in trouble. Early in October 1776 a New York militia colonel who suffered with the name of Ann Hawkes Hay poured out his problem to Peter Livingston, the president of the New York Convention in Fishkill. Almost half of his regiment at Haverstraw, Hay reported, lacked weapons and he wondered what in the world he should do or where he could look for reinforcements if the enemy attempted a landing there. He was short of money to pay his men and a few days earlier he had been unable to collect more than thirty-eight of them together, even after repeated summons to duty. Several British cutters had sailed upriver and fired at the shore, damaging Hay's own house and taking away a piece of the hat he was wearing, but despite this real and present danger his soldiers complained that if they left their farms their families would starve; there had been no opportunity to harvest corn or buckwheat and they had been so busy all summer with what Hay called the "publick troubles" that there had not been time to sow winter grain. Worse yet, some of them felt that the Congress in Philadelphia had done the country no favor by rejecting the British government's overtures for reconciliation; all his men cared about, Hay said, was "peace, liberty, and safety," and if they could only have that, they would be content.
When Hay took his griefs to Major General Nathanael Greene, who commanded Fort Lee on the crest of the New Jersey Palisades, Greene considered them worrisome enough to bring to the attention of the commander in chief, George Washington, even though he intended to settle the matter himself. Greene was an independence man through and through, and he made it clear to Hay that he had no patience with the men's grousing. If they didn't follow orders, Hay should send them down to Fort Lee, where Greene would see that they did.
Actually, Greene had a morale problem too. The number of men stationed near the fort varied anywhere from 200 to 2,000, and the presence of that many additional people in a farm community was bound to create friction. When Lieutenant Joseph Hodgkins of the Massachusetts Line wrote to his wife on September 30, he said that he had been in the area for ten days and would be glad to stay longer: "I have been at the trouble of building a log house with a stone chimney," he told her. "I got it fit to live in three days ago, before which I had not lodged on anything but the ground." The difficulty was that those logs, like many others that had gone into soldiers' huts, came from one of the nearby farms. In this neighborhood the fences were laid up French style, five rails high, one on top of another, and nothing could be handier for building. A farmer named Peter Bourdet, whose rocky, wooded land had been cleared for the construction of Fort Lee during the summer, complained that the fences around 125 acres of his pasture had been torn down by the troops and that he had lost three acres of corn and four of flax and oats as well. A lot of the soldiers were sick and so many more were deserting that Hugh Mercer, who was in charge of a mobile reserve known as the Flying Camp, near Perth Amboy, doubted if Washington could muster five thousand dependable troops. He feared the worst if the poorly armed, badly disciplined militiamen he had seen, who were "perpetually fluctuating between the camp and their farms," had to face General William Howe's British veterans.
Yet, as George Washington assured his old friend Mercer, it was not entirely the men's fault; after all, "Men who have been free, and subject to no control, cannot be reduced to order in an instant." All this confusion was the natural result of inexperience, and inexperience was what the Continental Army seemed to have most of in the fall of 1776. It had been in existence for little more than a year and as yet few soldiers had any real training or knowledge of military matters, and their officers were not much better off. Mercer, who was now a brigadier general, had been a physician in Fredericksburg, Virginia, until a year before. Nathanael Greene, who had served in a Providence, Rhode Island, militia company, had seen no active service until May of 1775. And eighteen months later, as he tried to cope with the never-ending series of problems involving the troops, Greene began to wonder if there would ever be any leisure time in which to reflect upon matters of great importance when he had to devote so many hours to paper work. It was this that "confines my thoughts as well as engrosses my time," he grumbled. "It is like a merchandise of small wares." Fortunately, within the past month Greene had found someone to help him with letters and reports, and a highly unusual aide-de-camp he was. The Rhode Island officer's reputation for impulsiveness didn't fully explain his choice of an Englishman who had been in the colonies for less than two years, who was also a civilian with no military experience. But Greene was desperate for help and he was undoubtedly pleased to acquire a staff member who was one of the most celebrated figures in America.
The new arrival had spent some time in Philadelphia, where he had impressed a number of people, including one of the Massachusetts delegates to the Continental Congress, John Adams. "His name is Paine," Adams wrote to a friend, "a gentleman about two years from England — a man who, General Lee says, has genius in his eyes." Genius might be there, but what was more quickly apparent behind the dark, penetrating eyes, beaked nose, and a sensuous mouth that threatened to break into a grin at any moment was an impression that the fellow was looking through you, probing to see what was there. It was not easy to be comfortable in the presence of this Paine.
If ever there was a case of an individual and an idea that came together at the right moment, Thomas Paine was it. He had been driven to the New World by a succession of personal failures and a festering hatred for the society which had brought them about. The son of a poor Thetford corset maker, he had picked up a rudimentary education before going to work for his father as an apprentice staymaker — an occupation he disliked so intensely that he ran away from home at sixteen, went to sea, and served aboard a privateer in the Seven Years' War. Sick of that, he jumped ship and turned up in London, to work at various jobs — staymaker, cobbler, cabinetmaker, tax collector, along with brief sallies into other fields, always skating on the thin edge of defeat, barely avoiding debtors' prison. His first marriage, to a servant girl, ended with his wife's death a year later; a second ended in separation. Like so many other Englishmen, Paine was a victim of enclosure laws enacted two centuries earlier which had remorselessly forced thousands of small farmers off the land and into the cities. There the luckier, more adaptable ones formed the nucleus of a working class for the industries beginning to spring up in English towns. The less fortunate turned to begging or thieving or worse: in the streets of London Tom Paine witnessed every form of human degradation — murder, drunkenness, brutality, starvation. Not a day passed, he said, but that he saw "ragged and hungry children, and persons of seventy and eighty years of age, begging in the streets." Workers were reduced to serfs, a rigid, inequitable class system marked men for life, and the lower classes were brutalized by a savage criminal code that would hang a ten-year-old boy for stealing a penknife or permit women to be stoned to death in the pillory. Epidemics of disease were a commonplace in the vile, stinking slums; infant mortality was unbelievably high; and with death its handmaiden, life was cheap. Somehow or other, Paine managed to stay afloat in the murky cesspool of lower-class London; somehow he wangled an introduction to the famous Benjamin Franklin and obtained a letter of recommendation from the American ambassador extraordinary; and somehow he left England in October 1774, bound for a new land and a new tomorrow.
Writing to his son-in-law, Richard Bache, Franklin described the Englishman as "an ingenious worthy young man" who might make "a clerk, or assistant tutor in a school, or assistant surveyor." Through Bache's efforts Paine found employment with Robert Aitken, a Philadelphia printer and bookseller who had started a publication called The Pennsylvania Magazine. By the time Paine got around to writing his thanks to Franklin three months after his arrival in America, he was able to inform his benefactor that he was the editor of the publication and that circulation had risen from 600 to 1,500 under his stewardship. Paine, it was clear, had a keen ear for what was going on around him; the Philadelphians he met treated him as a sounding board, for he was a recently arrived Englishman to whom they could pour out their grievances over government policy, a man eager to discuss ideas and to sop up the best of them like a sponge.
The London years had left an abiding mark on Paine, a nagging conscience that would make him speak out again and again for the oppressed, and one of the first articles he wrote for the magazine was an attack on the institution that was already beginning to trouble thoughtful Americans. Called "African Slavery in America," it brought him to the attention of Dr. Benjamin Rush, the prominent young physician and reformer. Soon Rush was urging Paine to turn his mind to the matter of independence from Britain (even in 1775 the doctor's profession and connections prevented him from coming forward personally as a spokesman in that controversy), but Paine hesitated to use the pages of the magazine in this way; for one thing, Aitken was too timid to risk offending his conservative subscribers; for another, Paine himself — like most native Americans — believed that the differences between the colonies and the mother country could still be reconciled. Or so he thought until events outside Boston on April 19, 1775, persuaded him that "all plans, proposals, etc." to patch up the quarrel were "like the almanacks of the last year; which though proper then, are superceded and useless now." In the months following the battles at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill, when George Washington of Virginia was appointed commander in chief of the colonial army and the British forces sat sullenly in Boston besieged by a ragtag mob of New England farmers and tradesmen, Paine found it increasingly difficult to understand how a war could be going on in Massachusetts while Pennsylvania and the other colonies were so little affected.
When Tom Paine had landed in America on November 30, 1774, the long-simmering dispute between England and her possessions in North America was coming to a head — a situation made to order for a passionate, articulate man who was also an uncompromising zealot. Sensing that the country was already "set on fire about my ears," he decided "it was time to stir." Even if Americans did not realize that the moment for action was nigh, the expatriate Englishman did, for as he perceived the situation, "Those who had been long settled had something to defend; those who had just come had something to pursue." Here he found few of the class distinctions that so divided England; here the abundance of land had produced a class of independent farmers; here merchants and planters — men of some wealth — who had felt themselves exploited and excluded by Britain's colonial policies, were aligning themselves politically with the farmers and tradesmen. And, as it happened, Paine's arrival coincided with a period of almost unbearable tension: five months after he began work in Philadelphia fighting broke out between the colonists and the king's troops. Into this tinderbox Tom Paine tossed a spark that turned a disorganized rebellion into the overthrow of an entire social and political system. Through the summer and early fall of 1775, Paine turned his mind increasingly to the idea of independence, and on October 18 he published an article called "A Serious Thought," in which he spoke out boldly for separation from England. In December he asked Benjamin Rush to read a draft of a pamphlet he had written, and Rush urged him to show it to Franklin, Samuel Adams, and David Rittenhouse, three staunch "friends to American independence." Paine's employer, Robert Aitken, refused to publish the manuscript, which was too incendiary for his taste, but a small printer named Robert Bell was persuaded to do so, and on January 10, 1776, the fifty-page pamphlet appeared. Rush had suggested that Paine call it "Common Sense."
The argument between government and the governed had gone on for so long and with such increasing vehemence that it is hard to realize how few Americans had reached the stage of advocating separation from England. Yet in March 1775 Benjamin Franklin — who probably knew as much about the attitudes of his countrymen as anyone — could assure William Pitt, now Earl of Chatham, that "he had never heard in any conversation from any person drunk or sober the least expression of a wish for separation or hint that such a thing would be advantageous to America." With the exception of a few radicals in the colonies (who knew better than to risk losing moderate support by advocating independence), no one took the idea very seriously. Even after blood was shed at Lexington and Concord; even after the grisly business at Bunker Hill, which made it virtually certain that a war of some kind would be fought; even after the Continental Congress had created an army and appointed a commanding general, there was still no real ground swell for separation. In August 1775 Thomas Jefferson stated that he was "looking with fondness towards a reconciliation with Great Britain," adding that he "would rather be in dependence on Great Britain, properly limited, than on any nation on earth, or on no nation." And the following January the Maryland Convention took a firm stand against independence, citing the "experience we and our ancestors have had of the mildness and equity of the English Constitution, under which we have grown up to and enjoyed a state of felicity not exceeded by any people we know of." Americans on the whole were not thinking seriously of independence; they were also loyal to their king, whom they considered a benevolent man who would do right by America if it were not for his advisers. Colonial wrath took the form of animosity to George III's ministers, those "enemies to the freedom of the human race, like so many Master devils in the infernal regions."
What altered the situation so drastically was the sudden, widespread acceptance of the ideas put forward in Common Sense. Paine was not the first man to call for independence, but he did so at the critical moment, in words that precisely suited the passions of the hour. Common Sense gave tongue to the innermost thoughts of men in every colony — merchant and farmer, lawyer, soldier, delegate to the Continental Congress. Shockingly and with unheard-of daring, Paine attacked King George as a "hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh" and "the Royal Brute of Great Britain." He assailed the very principle of hereditary monarchy, proclaimed the need for separation of mother country and colonies, denounced the British ruling group for exploiting the lower classes in America and England alike, and urged the colonists to declare their independence and make their land a refuge for Europe's downtrodden. Not only did Paine appeal to the American liberal; realizing that he must attract conservatives to the cause, he argued that independence would make it possible for the colonies to remain aloof from Europe's wars, take advantage of its beckoning markets, and obtain foreign aid. Since the founding of Jamestown there had been fifteen conflicts in which — with few exceptions — the great powers had participated, an average of one war every generation, and the American colonists had been drawn willy-nilly into these European struggles for trade and empire. "Europe is too thickly planted with kingdoms to be long at peace," Paine warned his readers, "and whenever a war breaks out between England and any foreign power, the trade of America goes to ruin, because of her connection with Britain ... Everything that is right or reasonable pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, 'Tis time to party."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Winter Soldiers by Richard M. Ketchum. Copyright © 1973 Richard M. Ketchum. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.