Eighteen guns across the ice

The story, from several sources

This account blends Rothbard’s chapter with the other sources listed below and has not yet been separated into Rothbard’s own account and the fuller story. Read Rothbard’s chapter 36 for his account.

By Christmas of 1776 Washington’s army had been chased out of New Jersey and was camped on the Pennsylvania bank of the Delaware, ill, barely clothed and about as low as an army can get. Then Thomas Paine’s pamphlet The Crisis went through the camp, and Washington decided on a swift strike across the river. Late on Christmas night, in a driving snow, he ferried 2,400 men over the ice-laden Delaware. Most of them crossed in dark Durham boats worked by Colonel John Glover’s Marblehead fishermen, the same men who had rowed the army out of Brooklyn in August. A nor’easter turned to sleet, and one soldier wrote that it blew a perfect hurricane. Rothbard singles out Colonel Henry Knox, a Boston bookseller turned artilleryman, who put eighteen field cannon across the river, about three times the usual proportion of guns to men. The cannon mattered on a snowy night, since the muskets of the day would not fire unless they were dry. A man who watched thought the crossing might have failed but for Knox’s stentorian lungs. The last men were over around three in the morning, hours behind schedule, and had nine miles to march. In an hour at Trenton the Hessian commander Rall was dead and more than 900 of his men were prisoners, for three American casualties. Rothbard calls Trenton the true turning point of the war.