Free The Crossing by Howard Fast Page A

force at Princeton. Even if there had been some possibility of success in such a plan, the fact of his broadcasting it at the inn undercut and negated any element of surprise.
    It was ten o’clock before Lee had properly dressed himself. Lee, Wilkinson and Scammel sat down together for breakfast, during which Lee could not refrain from a steady flow of caustic comments on Washington. The two younger officers listened quietly, and insofar as we gather from Wilkinson’s memoirs, neither of them joined the attack on the commander in chief nor did they defend him.
    After breakfast, Lee pushed the dishes aside, shouted for paper and ink and began a letter to General Gates. He had already arranged for Wilkinson to abort his mission of finding Washington and instead carry back with him to Gates Lee’s own letter.
    â€œThe ingenious maneuver of Fort Washington,” Lee wrote, “has completely unhinged the goodly fabric we had been building. There never was so damned a stroke; entre nous, a certain great man is damnedly deficient. He has thrown me into a situation where I have my choice of difficulties: if I stay in this province, I risk myself and my army; and if I do not stay, the province is lost forever.”
    While Lee was writing this letter, Scammel had mounted and was well on the way to Sullivan at Vealtown. Major Wilkinson, however, waited for the letter to be completed, so that he could take it back to Gates. He stood at the window of the inn overlooking the road, while Lee wrote.
    We go back to the Tory Lee had thrown out of the inn the night before. Determined to revenge himself, this Tory rode eighteen miles through the night to the British encampment at Brunswick, where he gave them the information about Lee being at the inn. At first they were ill disposed to believe the man, but when he finally convinced them that a general officer of the Continental army was asleep and almost alone at the inn at Baskingridge, a Colonel Harcourt took a troop of dragoons and followed the Tory back to the inn.
    As the dragoons approached the inn, Lee’s guards, sitting behind the inn in the sunlight, saw them coming and guessed what they were after. They responded to the approach of the British by taking off across the fields as fast as they could run, their instinct for self-preservation larger than any desire to fight and die for Charles Lee.
    Wilkinson was standing at the window. When he saw the British cavalry troop approaching in the distance, he shouted to Lee that British dragoons were there.
    Lee, finishing the letter to Gates about Washington’s inabilities, leaped to his feet and cried out, “Where?”
    Wilkinson shouted that they were everywhere and in a moment would be all around the house. The letter was in Lee’s hand, and Wilkinson snatched it and bolted. Lee began to shout for the guards and fired his pistols at the British and missed. The British were now in the house, and Lee was their captive.
    Wilkinson claims in his memoirs that he drew his pistols and would have fought the British if there had been any hope of prevailing against a force of a dozen dragoons. But the fact of his escape makes it more likely that Wilkinson dived for the nearest hiding place and remained there until the British had departed.
    In any case, Wilkinson must have hidden himself well, for the British took Lee, searched the house and rode off without ever finding him. Wilkinson claimed that the British shouted that if Lee did not surrender they would burn the house down, but this is at odds with the British account of the incident, which stresses the fact that they wanted Lee alive. They sought the great easy victory of capturing a Continental general, and here they got one of the four top general officers.
    After the British had departed, Wilkinson saddled his horse and rode back to Vealtown to Sullivan’s encampment. It was late in the afternoon when he arrived there, and Sullivan had already begun