As dusk approached on Christmas night during the Revolutionary War 1776 a storm emerged on the Bucks County, Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River. General George Washington, Commander in Chief of the Continental Army and his officers planned with great precision an attack on the British mercenary troops, the Hessians, who were in Trenton NJ.
The Durham rowboats and flat ferries moved into position after dark as the snow and winds increased from the nor’easter storm. The men who sailed them were experienced Watermen from the New England Patriot enlisted. The guns and horses and as many men who could stand in the rowboats were loaded and miraculously survived the treacherous icy river that night.
After exiting the boats safely in New Jersey on the opposite shore George Washington then had to march his troops nine more miles in the storm on a path known these days as Continental Lane. There is a small sign Continental Lane in New Jersey and my group walked that path, in silence, except for our footsteps of the brush crunching under walking shoes. George Washington’s men did it in freezing winds and sleet many without shoes 250 years ago.
A few interesting accounts, the first from General Washington’s inexperience twenty years earlier. George learned from his prior military lack of experience earlier in the French and Indian War, that a good leader knows when to fight and when to bug out! General Washington used his twenty years of learning from those mistakes, and now in his forties, during a fight with the British months earlier in the Revolutionary War August, 1776 during the Battle of Long Island from Patriot Fort Defiance he did exactly that, he retreated.
The British were so powerful in the early skirmish that day General Washington used the tactic of leaving the campfires burning to fool the British, and under the darkness of night and huge fog cover his men and artillery moved toward the East River this time to leave Long Island, New York. It was the strategy he would repeat on the Christmas Day Crossing of the Delaware months later only this time to attack in Trenton and win the first major battle of the Revolutionary War.
Of the three army columns he instructed to flank him during the Delaware Crossing only the one under the direct command of General Washington made it to the Battle of Trenton. Perhaps his men were inspired by their officers reading the words of Thomas Paine in those tiny rowboats. “These are the times that try men’s souls.” We know George was inspired by his wife Martha as his notes indicate he viewed her portrait while crossing the Delaware River with his men in the small rowboats. Washington also left journals indicating that Martha joined him at as many as sixty percent of the colonial war zone encampments, for lengthy stays and in support of her husband and America.
Nora D'Ecclesis.com 
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