brother “that if every nerve was not strained to recruit this new army the game was pretty nearly up;” and added, “You can form no idea of the perplexity of my situation.  No man, I believe, ever had a greater choice of difficulties, and less means to extricate himself from them.  However, under a full persuasion of the justice of our cause, I cannot entertain an idea that it will finally sink, though it may remain for some time under a cloud.”  There is no complaint, no boasting, no despair in this letter.  We can detect a bitterness in the references to Congress and to Lee, but the tone of the letter is as calm as a May morning, and it concludes with sending love and good wishes to the writer’s sister and her family.

Thus in the dreary winter Washington was planning and devising and sending hither and thither for men, and never ceased through it all to write urgent and ever sharper letters and keep a wary eye upon the future.  He not only wrote strongly, but he pledged his own estate and exceeded his powers in desperate efforts to raise money and men.  On the 20th he wrote to Congress:  “It may be thought that I am going a good deal out of the line of my duty to adopt these measures, or to advise thus freely.  A character to lose, an estate to forfeit, the inestimable blessings of liberty at stake, and a life devoted, must be my excuse.”  Even now across the century these words come with a grave solemnity to our ears, and we can feel as he felt when he alone saw that he stood on the brink of a great crisis.  It is an awful thing to know that the life of a nation is at stake, and this thought throbs in his words, measured and quiet as usual, but deeply fraught with much meaning to him and to the world.

By Christmas all was ready, and when the Christian world was rejoicing and feasting, and the British officers in New York and in the New Jersey towns were reveling and laughing, Washington prepared to strike.  His whole force, broken into various detachments, was less than six thousand men.  To each division was assigned, with provident forethought, its exact part.  Nothing was overlooked, nothing omitted; and then every division commander failed, for good reason or bad, to do his duty.  Gates was to march from Bristol with two thousand men, Ewing was to cross at Trenton, Putnam was to come up from Philadelphia, Griffin was to make a diversion against Donop.  When the moment came, Gates, disapproving the scheme, was on his way to Congress, and Wilkinson, with his message, found his way to headquarters by following the bloody tracks of the barefooted soldiers.  Griffin abandoned New Jersey and fled before Donop.  Putnam would not even attempt to leave Philadelphia, and Ewing made no effort to cross at Trenton.  Cadwalader, indeed, came down from Bristol, but after looking at the river and the floating ice, gave it up as desperate.