Delaware River Crossing

# The Delaware River Crossing

By late December 1776, the American Revolution stood on the brink of extinction. What had begun with soaring rhetoric and bold declarations in Philadelphia that summer had devolved, by winter, into a desperate retreat across New Jersey. General George Washington's Continental Army, once numbering nearly 20,000 men, had been reduced through battlefield defeats, desertion, disease, and the expiration of short-term enlistments to a ragged force that could barely hold itself together. The British army under General William Howe had driven the Americans out of New York in a series of humiliating engagements, and many colonists — along with members of the Continental Congress — were beginning to wonder whether independence had been a catastrophic miscalculation. Thomas Paine, traveling with the army during those bleak weeks, captured the mood when he wrote that these were "the times that try men's souls." It was precisely in this atmosphere of near-total despair that Washington conceived one of the most audacious operations of the entire war, and it was Colonel John Glover's regiment of Marblehead, Massachusetts fishermen who made it possible.

The plan was deceptively simple in concept and enormously difficult in execution. Washington would ferry his army across the ice-choked Delaware River on Christmas night, march nine miles south to Trenton, New Jersey, and launch a surprise attack on the Hessian garrison stationed there. The Hessians — German professional soldiers hired by the British Crown — were considered among the finest troops in the war, and their presence at Trenton represented a serious threat to Philadelphia. Washington understood that a bold stroke could alter the psychological trajectory of the entire conflict. But everything depended on getting an army across a freezing river in the dead of night, through a winter storm, without detection.

This is where Colonel John Glover and his Marblehead mariners proved indispensable. Glover, a militia colonel from the fishing port of Marblehead on the Massachusetts coast, commanded a regiment composed largely of commercial fishermen and sailors — men whose daily lives involved handling boats in the frigid, unpredictable waters of the North Atlantic. These were not gentlemen soldiers or farm boys pressed into service; they were hardened watermen with calloused hands and an intimate understanding of currents, wind, and ice. On Christmas night, 1776, they took command of the flat-bottomed Durham boats — heavy cargo vessels normally used to transport iron ore and grain on the Delaware — and began the painstaking work of ferrying approximately 2,400 soldiers, 18 artillery pieces, and horses across the river. The conditions were brutal. Sheets of ice floated in the current, temperatures plunged, and a driving storm of sleet and snow lashed the boats. The Marblehead men, accustomed to working in freezing conditions on open water, managed the oars and poles while soldiers huddled against the cold, trusting their lives to the seamanship of strangers from a coastal town most of them had never visited.

The crossing took far longer than Washington had planned. He had hoped to have all his forces across and in position to strike Trenton under cover of darkness, but the storm and the ice delayed the operation by several hours. The attack finally came at approximately eight o'clock in the morning on December 26, rather than in the predawn blackness Washington had envisioned. Yet despite the delay, the surprise was complete. The Hessian garrison, commanded by Colonel Johann Rall, was overwhelmed. Rall himself was mortally wounded, and nearly the entire garrison of roughly 1,000 soldiers was killed or captured. American casualties were astonishingly light.

The victory at Trenton resonated far beyond its modest tactical scale. After weeks of devastating defeats that had driven morale to its lowest point, the triumph electrified the American cause. Soldiers whose enlistments were expiring in mere days agreed to stay on. Recruits who had been wavering decided to join. The Continental Congress, which had fled Philadelphia in panic, took heart. Washington followed the Trenton victory with another engagement at Princeton just days later, further solidifying the turnaround. Historians have long recognized that the Delaware crossing and the Battle of Trenton likely saved the Revolution from collapse at its most vulnerable moment. And once again, as they had demonstrated months earlier during the evacuation of the Continental Army from Brooklyn after the disastrous Battle of Long Island, it was the seafaring men of Marblehead whose unique skills proved to be the critical variable — the difference between survival and annihilation for the cause of American independence.