The Crossing Read Online Free PDF Page A

between the two of them, there in that tent:
    â€œI intend to cross the Delaware and hold the shore. I intend to run no more.”
    â€œOh?” And then John Glover must have asked just how the general proposed to cross a river swollen like the very devil under this constant rain, and where would they find the boats? And even if there were a few rotten little scows, you don’t put an army across a river in rowboats, and did he know how long it would take to put this army across in the few boats they might find?
    â€œHow long?”
    â€œA week.”
    â€œThe British are ten miles away. We must cross the river in a matter of hours after we reach the bank.”
    John Glover’s temper hung on a thin thread. He would remind the Virginian that everyone else deserted. Even this general had desertions in his own precious lifeguards, but the fishermen stayed. But because they stayed you didn’t expect miracles from them.
    Then it would have taken the same path of all the other meetings with Glover. Washington would have flattered and cozened him, and finally, the Virginian would have spoken about the Durham boats.
    Glover might not have known about the Durham boats or ever seen one of them, because he was a New England man, and the Durham boats were used to freight iron down from Riegelsville, where it was smelted and cast at the Durham furnace. There was a whole fleet of the great Durham boats making the run between Riegelsville and Philadelphia, and Washington could not have spent the time he did in Philadelphia without seeing the big ore boats tied up at the wharves.
    He would have described the boats to Glover, and Glover’s eyes would have lit up at talk of—according to Knox—the only thing he loved or cared for, a ship or a gig or a boat. And he might have said:
    â€œIf these Durham boats are what you say they are, and if you can gather together twenty of them, and if we can put thirty men or a pair of nags or a load of cannon into one of them, then I’ll take your army across the damn river, I will.”

[10]
    HE HAD STATED ONCE—in his own curious manner—that his honor forbade him to have secrets from the Congress, and on December I, from his camp at New Brunswick, listening to the pouring rain, he wrote to Congress as follows:
    â€œI have sent forward Colonel Hampton to collect proper boats and craft at the ferry for transporting our troops, and it will be of infinite importance to have every other craft, besides what he takes for the above purpose, secured on the west side of the Delaware, otherwise they may fall into the enemy’s hands and facilitate their views.”
    His language to Congress was always formal, polite, and very often separated by an enormous barrier of manners from the reality of his situation. To “facilitate” the “views” of the enemy meant to permit the enemy to destroy him. His writing reflected nothing of the enormous change that had come about inside of him. He called into his tent two very hard-minded and dependable Virginia gentlemen whom he had known in the old times, Wade Hampton and General William Maxwell. Maxwell was a tough Irishman who had left the poverty and servitude of Ireland behind him to find meaning and purpose in America and his own soul in the Revolution. He was one of Washington’s close circle of personal friends, whom he leaned on and depended on. He asked them whether they knew what the Durham boats were.
    They had seen them.
    He then told him that he wanted those Durham boats.
    â€œDo we pay for them?”
    With what, he might have asked them. For months now, he and his friends had been paying out of their own pockets—when they had the money—for everything from food to information. Congress had no money. No, they were not to pay for the Durham boats. They were to take them.
    And the iron works?
    To hell with the iron works! he might have said, but even more richly, for there was