The Crossing by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page A

years old, his father, James Alexander, a fine lawyer, was retained in the Peter Zenger case and played an important part in freeing Zenger. All his life, William Alexander had been a civil libertarian, and it was a natural turn of events that made him into a rebel.
    Adam Stephen, on the other hand, was a man described as having only two admirable qualities, his courage and the fact that he was a Virginian. He was quarrelsome, short-tempered and he drank too much. But he commanded a brigade of Virginia volunteers, 479 men, 70 officers, consisting of the 4th, 5th and 6th Regiments of Virginia Infantry, Washington’s own people and those the commander felt were the most dependable soldiers he had.
    General Hugh Mercer, at fifty-one, was much like a father to Washington, and the big, Scottish physician led five regiments of Connecticut, Massachusetts and Maryland Militia. Fermoy was a French soldier of fortune, whose brigade consisted of only two regiments, but both of them dependable, the Ist Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania German Regiment, the Germans being as reliable as any soldiers in the army. As for Lord Stirling, his was a catch-all brigade of Virginia, Delaware and Pennsylvania volunteers.
    But these were only a handful of soldiers, and they could accomplish little that could turn the tide. He needed a new army, and he told his secretary, Joseph Reed, to go to Philadelphia and find him five thousand men if he had to pick them up off the street.
    Tall, charming, persuasive, Reed was a lawyer and a gentleman. He had been born in the little village of Trenton, across the river, and he knew every foot of this ground; and like Knox and Hamilton, he adored Washington. The pain of the dying army and its leader was his own. What should he tell them in Philadelphia, Reed asked, that the cause was dying?
    Inform them that the need is very great—in effect Washington’s summation of their condition. He became very soft of voice and very gentle when it was all stretched on a tight thread that the slightest shock might part. “Only find me men.” The plea became a refrain. Old Israel Putnam, fifty-eight years old, the plainest of Yankees, a good farmer and a brusque and narrow man, old before his years, cruel and heartless, as some said, his whole body twisted with the pain of arthritis—even he had learned to respect this tall, slender aristocrat, George Washington of Virginia. Washington sent him to defend Philadelphia.
    How?
    Somehow, he told Putnam. Yet he needed men for himself. Reed would find the men; he might leave Putnam none at all. Yet he must defend a city that was indefensible. Mifflin would go with him to search for supplies.
    Billy Smallwood, general of the Maryland Rifles, came to him. “Bullet stopper,” they called him, so shot up that he could barely drag himself on crutches, with lead in his legs and his belly. It was his men who made up the smartest brigade in the army, one thousand Maryland Rifles, in long, fringed hunting shirts and white three-cornered hats. When they came marching through Philadelphia the year before, with fifty fifes playing and fifty drums beating, they were the proudest sight that city ever saw, as several citizens put it. Then they were caught in Brooklyn Heights by the Hessians, and 261 of them died there, pinned by bayonets when they could not reload their long rifles; and 200 more bore the wounds of that day. Now only 211 remained out of the original 1,000, and Brigadier William Smallwood came pleading to his commander in chief that he might be permitted to ride to Maryland and raise a new command, that surely there were a thousand more riflemen in Maryland who would rally to the cause and avenge all the fine lads who had died and whose corpses were rotting unburied in the woods in Brooklyn.
    It must have been a moving scene, Washington telling him that he could not ride anywhere in his condition.
    But he could. His good men lifted him onto his horse.