George Washington Was Almost Kidnapped by the British. A Surprising Twist Saved Him

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Here's what you'll learn when you read this story:
When the Continental Army formed 250 years ago at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, George Washington was appointed its commander-in-chief and major general.
During the winter of 1779–1780, British forces plotted to kidnap Washington from his headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey.
The kidnapping plot failed, partially due to one unlikely factor.
In the 250 years since the Continental Army was formed, on June 14, 1775, many episodes that early American fighting force faced have been etched into the collective consciousness. The victories at Saratoga and Yorktown, the brutal conditions of Valley Forge, they're stories of military resilience every generation of Americans has been brought up to know.
Still, more than two centuries on, there are stories about Continental Army soldiers and their leaders that are far less universally known but no less fraught than their famous fights and misfortunes.
In the winter of 1779–1780, less than a year before the decisive victory at Yorktown that secured American independence from the British empire, the cause of the Continental Army seemed near-doomed from forces both outside and within its encampment at Morristown, New Jersey. The army faced the harshest winter on record to ever hit the colonies. On top of that, British forces plotted to kidnap Continental Army Commander-in-Chief George Washington to bring the revolution, and perhaps Washington himself, to a swift and permanent end.
During the American Revolution, wars weren't fought year-round like they are today. Instead, combat was seasonal: When conditions permitted, men met on the battlefield, but during the winter months, they encamped on their respective sides, to meet once more when more favorable weather returned. During these harsher months, a commander's job was to strategize, ensure the men didn't slip in discipline (both in the sense of their physical fitness and their moral behavior towards the citizenry), and hope that the harshness of nature claimed more casualties from your opponent's army than your own.
Although the British held control of New York City throughout the war, Washington had twice made his winter headquarters right across the Hudson River in New Jersey. Far from the easy bridge-and-tunnel commute between the Big Apple and the Garden State that exists now, the Hudson River provided a veritable moat between the Loyalist forces and the Revolutionaries, making the position advantageous both for proximity and protection.
Washington's first winter stay in Morristown began in January 1777 and had been favorable and unremarkable. After this came the agony of the Valley Forge encampment of 1777–1778, and a subsequent spreading out of troops to smaller areas surrounding New York City from 1778–1779. For the winter encampment of 1779–1780, Washington was determined to return to Morristown once more.
So, at the beginning of December 1779, Washington made his headquarters within the Morristown mansion of Theodosia Ford, widow of iron magnate Jacob Ford Jr. The bulk of the Continental Army made camp in the woods of Jockey Hollow, roughly 5 miles away (but within eyeshot of Henry Wick's bountiful 1,400 acre farm, whose produce the eventually starving men weren't permitted to partake of). This left the enlisted men at the mercy of the elements, while the officers held parties at the Ford mansion. It also left Washington remarkably vulnerable, save for a small unit of roughly 100 men known as his Life Guards stationed near the mansion.
'The oldest people now living in this Country do not remember so hard a Winter as the one we are now emerging from. In a word, the severity of the frost exceeded anything of the kind that had ever been experienced in this climate before.' That is how General Washington described the second winter he and his men had endured at Morristown, in a letter he wrote to Marquis de Lafayette on March 18, 1780.
The winter along America's east coast from 1779–1780 would prove to be the worst on record. As described in David Ludlum's Early American Winters, 1604 – 1820, the lowest temperature recorded in nearby New York City that season was minus-16 degrees, and the 27 days of snowfall that occurred across November through March brought a total of 95 inches of snow to the coastal area.
Washington had taken steps to mitigate illness and death by demanding that soldiers' huts at the encampment be built to specific dimensional standards (14 feet wide by 16 feet long). The task consumed some 600 acres of trees from the area of Henry Wick's farm alone.
But the commander-in-chief couldn't have anticipated the terrible conditions that particular winter would bring. 'The winter of 1779 and '80 was very severe,' recalled J. P. Martin of the Connecticut Brigade, according to a transcript provided to Biography.com by Morristown National Historical Park, '…it has been denominated 'the hard winter,' and hard it was to the army in particular, in more respects than one. The period of the Revolution has repeatedly been styled 'the times that tried men's souls,' I often found that those times not only tried men's souls, but their bodies too; I know they did mine, and that effectually.'
Morale was at a low for the soldiers at Morristown. Not only had the war stretched on for years with no foreseeable end, but now their arrangements were a physical manifestation of the disparity between the classes. The enlisted men were in a frozen wood, eating shoe leather to survive as their colonist currency was unable to secure them goods from locals who would rather accept British money. Meanwhile, literal miles away the officers were warm inside mansions, having comparatively decadent celebrations. (Fans of the musical Hamilton will recollect the 'Winter's Ball' where Alexander Hamilton meets his future wife, Eliza. The meeting depicted occurred in Morristown in the winter of 1780.)
The bonds of the cause were therefore fragile. The rallying cries of George Washington were seemingly all that was holding soldiers back from mutiny (indeed, a year later in January 1781, the Pennsylvania Line of the Continental Army did mutiny at Morristown to secure better wages). This was, at least, the thinking of British Lieutenant Colonel John Graves Simcoe, who felt that the successful kidnapping of General Washington would all but collapse the cause of rebellion and end the war. And the unique conditions of the hard winter offered Simcoe just such an opportunity.$25.69 at amazon.com
William Hazelgrove, author of the book Morristown: The Darkest Winter of the Revolutionary War and the Plot to Kidnap George Washington, posits that Simcoe's designs toward Washington were more than just strategic. The Continental Army had previously taken Simcoe prisoner, and he felt disrespected when he was imprisoned alongside 'common men' as opposed to being held with men he felt were of his equal class and station.
Although targeted assassinations of high-ranking figures weren't common in the era, kidnappings and imprisonments like that of Simcoe were considered acceptable strategy. Some kidnappings, like the case of Reverend Charles McKnight, could be severe enough to kill their captives, effectively assassinating without technically committing the faux pas.
The Hudson River had typically provided an effective defense against any attempt to capture a figure as prominent as Washington. Crossing it with anything more than a small skiff of soldiers would have been impossible without detection. Being able to transport hundreds of men, cannons, and horses across the Hudson and into Morristown would take a miracle, and General Simcoe couldn't walk on water.
Until the winter of 1779–1780, when the Hudson River froze over.
Some on the side of the Continental Army suspected that the river's solid state could provide an opportunity for a British incursion. In a January 31, 1780, letter, Silas Condict of the New Jersey Executive Council wrote to Washington: 'I do not pretend to know what precautions are taken to prevent a Surprise at Head Quarters, or to Secure the Commander in Chief, in case of a bold attempt to take him […] but the Importance of the Object, May induce [the British] to hozard[sic] an attempt, and will fully justify every Means to be ready to receive them.' Condict added, 'the possibility of a party of Horse coming here undiscovered I cannot doubt, the probability of the undertaking and the Success of Such an enterprize[sic] I cannot determine.'
Washington responded to Condict's letter, stating that 'precautions, which I think will be effectual, have been used to guard against it.' But Condict was right to worry.
Lieutenant General Wilhelm von Knyphausen, then-temporary commander of British troops in the New York City area, approved a plan for Simcoe's Queen's Rangers to march across the Hudson to capture Washington. While some British forces were to attack Morristown directly, others were to be sent from Staten Island to strike other key points in New Jersey to distract from the kidnapping attempt and to spread the Continental Army thin.
Records of the kidnapping attempt exist from both sides of the conflict. In a letter to a Colonel Read on February 13, 1780, Continental Army Colonel James Abeel reports he had received intelligence from Elizabethtown 'That a Party of between 4 & 500 Horse and three thousand foot under the Command of Genl Gray crossed Powle's Hook on thursday last [10 Feb.] and marched as far as the West end of Colo. Schuylers Swamp and intended to march on to Morris Town by Way of the Notch, the light Horse were to endeavour to bring off his Excellency.' Abeel flatteringly was referring to Washington as his Excellency.
From the Loyalist perspective, we have the account of Stephen Jarvis, a Loyalist Queens Rangers, who recounts:
'…a plan was formed to take General Washington, who lay some distance from New York, and rather attacked from his Army so as to make the attempt practicable. The 17th Light Horse and the Cavalry of the Queen's Rangers were designed for this service, and we marched from Staten Island to New York upon the ice, and took up our quarters at the Bull's Head, which at that time was quite out of the City.'
But then, Jarvis continues:
'The time arrived and we crossed over to Elizabethtown Point, and after marching some distance in the country, returned back without making any attempt, and thus the affair ended, much to my disappointment, for I had set my heart on this expedition, as I was to have taken charge of the General after he had fallen into our hands.'
So what foiled the Loyalists' kidnapping plot and saved the revolutionary cause? It was not, ultimately, the intelligence Colonel Abeel had received, nor the precautions Washington wrote about. Some of the planned distraction attacks, like a raid on Elizabethtown, were foiled by militia horse patrols under the leadership of Major General Arthur St. Clair. But perhaps Washington's most unexpected aid during the assault was the very same brutal winter that was ravaging his army at Jockey Hollow.
British Lieutenant General Knyphausen would later report that the roads the Loyalist forces faced as they moved from Hackensack, New Jersey, toward Morristown were 'impassable,' but one might be inclined to believe they were almost supernaturally boobytrapped in the colonists' favor. While prepared to trudge their horses through snowy roads, the Loyalists weren't prepared for what had been forming beneath the fluffy winter weather: sheets of sleet, which beneath the hoof-fall of British horses shattered into jagged spears of ice and slashed their fetlocks (a crucial joint between the hoof and what in layman's terms might be viewed as the horse's ankle area).
The hard winter at Morristown ultimately saved the cause of American liberty and possibly even the life of George Washington himself. But not all of the Continental Army survived through the entirety of that brutal season. It's estimated that around 100 men died at Morristown during the winter of 1799–1780. And while we know much about the Continental Army in the 250 years since its inception, the final resting place of those 100 men remains a mystery to this day.
Jockey Hollow is now part of the Morristown National Historical Park. Not far from the site where the Pennsylvania Line had their encampments, a small rock with a plaque sits declaring the area Jockey Hollow Cemetery. The memorial plaque was placed on May 30, 1932, its location based on stories from the 19th century that suggested this as the burial site for the men who didn't survive the hard winter.
However, as the National Parks Service notes, 'archeological studies since the late 1930s have found no trace of human remains.' To this day, the place in Jockey Hollow where the Continental Army pierced the frozen ground to inter their fallen brethren, while miles away Washington warmed himself in Ford Mansion and Lieutenant Colonel Simcoe plotted his kidnapping scheme, remains entirely unknown.
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