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Dear Reader:

I wanted to call your attention to a recently completed report by Matthew White, entitled Calling Forth the Legacy of Jacob Francis: The Revolutionary Road to the Civil Rights Movement, which was prepared for the Friends of Washington Crossing Park (for whom I work part-time as a historical interpreter) with support from the National Park Service African American Civil Rights Grant Program. Depending on your point of view, I suppose White’s research about who ferried Washington’s army across the Delaware River on Christmas night 1776 has yielded a long-overdue exercise in myth-busting or (historiographically speaking) a sacrilegious tampering with what had been largely regarded as accepted fact for a couple of centuries. I’m speaking of the traditional historical interpretation that emphasizes the role of Colonel John Glover’s 14th Massachusetts Regiment (popularly known as the Marbleheaders) in transporting the Patriot troops across the river to attack the Hessian brigade occupying Trenton.

White points to the fact that Washington’s 1776 Christmas Day orders governing the Delaware crossing detailed various army units to perform specific tasks, especially those that had to travel to the crossing site at McConkey’s Ferry, and that neither Glover nor his Marblehead regiment were detailed to go to that site to oversee and undertake the ferrying operation. Implicit in the orders, White notes, is that the people who were actually going to manage the operation were already there. He contrasts this with the East River crossing from Brooklyn Heights to Manhattan Island on August 29-30, 1776, when Glover’s regiment was detailed to do boat duty, for which there is a substantial documentary record supporting the involvement of these soldiers. “For the evacuation of Long Island,” he writes, “there are orders, dozens of descriptions in journals and letters, and multiple pension accounts,” but “there is not one piece of evidence in any form that even implicitly suggests they were detailed to ferry” the troops on Christmas night. Despite the plethora of primary source references to Glover and the accomplishments of his regiment overall, there is no reference to such activity by those Massachusetts Continentals on December 25-26, 1776 in army orders, letters, journals, petitions, memoirs, family reminiscences, or pension depositions. Also noteworthy is that, according to White, evidence supplied by tax lists, wills, probate records, runaway ads, reminiscences, and letters strongly suggests that at least some of those who did convey Washington’s troops across the Delaware were enslaved people of color.

If this is unsettling to anyone, please don’t shoot the messenger—am just passing this along for your consideration. To be sure, I’ve always believed that, regardless of the role played or not played by Glover’s men, the others who helped get the Durham boats and “flats” (ferry boats) across the river that night have been given short shrift in our collective understanding of how this enterprise succeeded under very challenging conditions. Those would have included the Philadelphia dockhands recruited by Captain Joseph Moulder and local residents who had experience operating the ferries and so were familiar with navigating the river, especially in the dark.

Even if one accepts this new interpretation, it doesn’t detract from the heroic efforts of Glover’s soldiers on prior occasions in 1776, i.e., the evacuation of some 9,000 troops across the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan on the night of August 29, which in all probability saved half of Washington’s army from capture or annihilation, and the determined stand Glover’s 750-man brigade made against a landing by 4,000 Anglo-German troops at Pell’s Point on October 18, which helped give Washington the time he needed to withdraw his forces from Manhattan, where they could have otherwise been trapped by the enemy, and march them to White Plains, the site of their next encounter with General William Howe’s army on October 28.

The logic of Washington using Glover’s soldiers on August 29 but not December 25, according to this report, would appear to center, at least in part, on what they were expected to do after the army crossed the river. On the latter occasion, unlike the former, those Massachusetts soldiers were expected join the rest of the army (as they did) in a lengthy and difficult maneuver and attack, i.e., march almost 10 miles from McConkey’s Ferry to Trenton, confront the Hessians, and then march back to the crossing site with their prisoners to return to the Pennsylvania side of the river. Asking them to row the troops across the river both ways and do everything else the other troops did would have required a superhuman effort on their part. The traditional accounts of this affair seem to have taken for granted that Glover’s soldiers were, indeed, “supermen” in that respect—but is that based on a realistic assessment of human capabilities?

So, to sum up, does White’s report categorically disprove that any of the Marbleheaders helped to row boats across the Delaware on this legendary night? No, but at the very least, it calls into question the notion that they were detailed by the Continentals’ commander in chief to manage this operation.

Anyway, if you’d like to check out this report, just click on the link below.

Best regards,

dp