Being George Washington by Glenn Beck Read Free Book Online

commanders.
    And moving cannon … well, that was the most impossible task of all. It was hard enough to transport Henry Knox’s guns on rutted roads and through rolling fields and hillsides. Shoving them on—and off—these boats, and over these rough waters was harder and slower still. “Put your shoulder to it, men!” Knox shouted. “Put your shoulder to it!”
    George Washington waited for the last of the cannon to complete the crossing. Only then could they begin the march to Trenton. He had loitered on this shore for so long that he had made a little seat for himself, a broken wooden box that had once contained a beehive.
    As he sat there, dressed in his great blue cloak, in the cold and dark, he pondered whether he had already lost his chance. Could he still reach Trenton before daybreak? Would General Ewing—and General Cadwalader, who was launching his own force from Dunk’s Ferry—be there to meet him?
    So much had to go right. So much had already gone wrong. The Continental Army had lost the great majority of its men since its first losses on Long Island. Its back was against the wall. There could be no more defeats, no more retreats. Today it was all or nothing—“Victory or Death,” as he had once written.
    Suddenly, Henry Knox, puffing mightily and clapping his pudgy gloved hands together for warmth, approached.
    “General,” he said, “we are all across.”
    Washington arose quickly, his little seat toppling over.
    “To Trenton, men! Before the sun rises.”
    Morning, December 26, 1776
    Western bank of the Delaware River
    Near Dunk’s Ferry
    General John Cadwalader was a cultivated Philadelphia merchant. He was not a ferryman.
    Yes, he had men from his city’s waterfront to assist him in making his crossing of the Delaware, but he was still getting absolutely nowhere. The same ice floes that stymied General Ewing to the north hamstrung Cadwalader. He had been assigned to cross at Dunk’s Ferry, across the river from Burlington, New Jersey, but his boats could barely be put in the water there, let alone be rowed or poled toward the opposite shore. Changing plans, he moved north along the river, but it was the same story there. Slabs of ice the size of mattresses and as hard and sharp as bayonets filled the river. An advance party had made it across earlier, but that was it. No one else could.
    The British might yet somehow be defeated, but this wretched river could not.
    Cadwalader just stood there, forlorn and staring, his hands jammed hard into his pockets, a scarf covering his face. He was too much the gentleman to swear as General Ewing did. All he could do was order his men—tired from lack of sleep and disheartened from failure—to march home to camp and pray for General Washington.
    Morning, December 26, 1776
    Bear Tavern Road, beyond Jacob’s Creek
    Western bank of the Delaware River
    Now it was sleeting.
    Not just squalls of heavy snow, but the worst and wettest sleet anyonein the Continental Army had ever seen. Freezing and stinging, it made moving forward even more difficult.
    Washington’s march to Trenton had commenced a full four hours late. Shoeless men, their feet swaddled in rags, deposited an ominous trail of blood along their path. Washington saw a drummer lad, a redheaded boy from nearby Delaware, so weary that he lay down in the snow to rest, perhaps even to sleep.
    “Rouse him! Shake that boy!” George Washington shouted from horseback, through gales of sleet. “To sleep this night is death!”
    The road had run upward from the river, a good two-hundred-foot change in elevation, with portions of that incline extremely pitched. That made the hard work of Henry Knox’s burly gunners into something that was more akin to impossible. Then came even more trouble, this time in the form of Jacob’s Creek—which, despite its name, was no ordinary stream, no bucolic brook in sunlit meadows. Lying in a steep ravine, it required Knox’s men to lash their longest drag ropes