Ice, Wind, and the Delaware

The river was a nightmare. I had seen heavy seas off the Grand Banks and ice in Marblehead Harbor in the worst winters, but the Delaware on Christmas night 1776 was something else entirely. The current ran fast, swollen by days of rain and snowmelt, and the surface was choked with slabs of ice — some the size of tabletops, others as big as a fishing dory — grinding against each other with a sound like breaking timbers.

My men knew boats. That was why we were there. The Marblehead regiment was not a typical infantry unit. We were fishermen, sailors, and watermen from the Massachusetts coast, men who had handled oars and sails since childhood. General Washington needed us for this one thing: to move his army across a river that no ordinary soldiers could have crossed.

The boats were Durham boats, mostly — flat-bottomed freight vessels built for carrying iron ore and grain down the Delaware. They were forty to sixty feet long, pointed at both ends, and drew only a few inches of water when loaded. In calm conditions, they were easy enough to handle. In the ice and wind of that Christmas night, they required every ounce of skill my men possessed.

We began the crossing at about six in the evening. The plan called for the entire army — some 2,400 men, plus artillery, horses, and ammunition — to be across by midnight, leaving time for a night march to Trenton and a pre-dawn attack. The plan was already behind schedule before we started, and conditions made every trip across the river slower than the last.

The ice was the worst of it. Slabs jammed against the boats as we pushed into the current, threatening to crush the hulls or spin the vessels broadside. My men used poles and oars to fend off the larger pieces, sometimes standing in the bow and shoving ice aside with their hands. The wind drove sleet into our faces. The soldiers we were ferrying sat in the bottoms of the boats, wet and freezing, clutching their muskets and trying not to move.

Colonel Knox stood on the Pennsylvania bank, his great bulk visible even in the darkness, bellowing orders and encouragement as each boat loaded and pushed off. He was responsible for getting the artillery across — eighteen cannons, each weighing a thousand pounds or more, loaded onto boats that were already riding low in the water. It was Knox's guns that would win the battle, but first they had to survive the river.

Trip after trip, boat after boat, my men rowed and poled their way across and back. The crossing took far longer than planned — it was nearly three in the morning before the last units were on the New Jersey shore. We had lost our chance at a pre-dawn attack. Washington consulted briefly with his officers and made the decision to press on regardless.

Not a single soldier was lost to the river. Not one boat was swamped, not one cannon was dropped. In conditions that would have been dangerous for experienced watermen in daylight, my fishermen moved an army in darkness. When I think about what the men from Marblehead did that night, I think about all the mornings they had rowed out to the fishing grounds in winter storms, all the times they had hauled nets in freezing spray. The skills that saved the Revolution on December 25, 1776, were the same skills that put cod on Boston tables. The war was won by working men.