In the famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware, all eyes go to the general, but the men rowing the boat came from John Glover’s Marblehead regiment. This deep dive follows Glover from a fatherless childhood in Salem to work as a cordwainer and then a ship-owning merchant in the rum and fish trade. It also covers the 1773 smallpox hospital he built on Cat Island despite a town vote, which a mob later burned.

When war came, Glover chartered his schooner Hannah, considered the first armed vessel of the Continental Navy, and led an amphibious regiment in which about a third of the men were dark complexioned, one of the first integrated units in American history. His mariners evacuated 9,000 troops across the East River after the Battle of Long Island, held off 4,000 British and Hessian troops at Pell’s Point with 750 men, and ferried the army across the icy Delaware in Durham boats before Trenton.

• From shoemaker to merchant and the controversial smallpox hospital
• The schooner Hannah and the roots of the U.S. Navy
• Why Grand Banks fishermen formed an integrated regiment
• The silent East River evacuation and the stone walls of Pell’s Point
• Saratoga, his later life, and the effort to save Glover’s farmhouse