Far differently was the night passed by the American
army. The troops under the immediate command
of Washington, at his camp on the Pennsylvania side
of the Delaware, above Trenton, numbered only
twenty-four hundred men in condition to undertake an
arduous expedition.[1] These started at three o'clock
on the afternoon of Christmas Day, every man carrying
three days' rations and forty rounds. They had
with them eighteen field-pieces. This force reached
MacKonkey's Ferry at twilight. Here the boats were
manned by Glover's sailors, from Marblehead, and
between the cakes of floating ice the little army was
rowed across the river. So pitiful was their condition
that a messenger who had followed them had easily
traced their route “by the blood on the snow, from the
feet of the men who wore broken shoes.”
Meanwhile, Cadwalader was to have crossed the river at Dunk's Ferry, below Trenton, but the ice was packed against the Jersey shore, and, though men on foot could get over, there was no hope for artillery. The eighteen hundred men destined for this part of the expedition waited in vain through the December night. At four in the morning, Cadwalader, sure that Washington, like himself, had been turned back by the difficulties of the expedition, ordered his half-frozen men back to their freezing camp.[2] “The night,” writes
- ↑ Bancroft, vol. ix. p. 230. “About twenty-five hundred men.”—Diary of Captain Moses Brown of Glover's regiment, kindly communicated by Edward I. Browne, Esq.
- ↑ Cadwalader to Washington, Sparks's “Correspondence,” vol. i. p. 309. This was John Cadwalader, brother to Lambert Cadwalader of the Continental service.—Washington, vol. iv. p. 241, n.