(Sample Chapter) First in War: Crossing the Delaware

(Sample Chapter)
First in War: Crossing the Delaware
“We often have to act by the moon or twilight
and leave the World to judge it in the clear sunshine.”
--Gen. William Maxwell1
Wrapped in a large weatherproof cloak for protection against the bitter wind and holding
a rolled horse whip in his gloved hands, the general watched his troops pass before him in the
dark as he sat, sullen and grim, on a wooden crate locked in the frozen mud of the eastern bank
of the Delaware River.
It was early in the morning, a few minutes after 3 a.m., to be precise, and the officers
under his command had been ferrying men, horses, and equipment from camps across the river
for nearly twelve hours now. It was miserable work; large, unpredictable ice floes in the river
and driving sleet and snow beat against the high-walled, sixty-foot-long barges manned by
experienced whalers and fishermen. These rugged men of the sea, their faces lined and leathered
from years of working in open salt air, had been organized into the Fourteenth Continental
Regiment under the command of a skilled militia colonel named John Glover, a Marblehead ship
captain by trade.
Glover and his men had done this sort of thing before. Months earlier, the regiment had
helped this same army retreat in shame across the East River in New York one night after a
ruinous battle at Long Island. The covert operation then had, in all probability, saved the
general’s army from total destruction. But this hazardous river crossing now was an assault into
the enemy-controlled state of New Jersey.
The men pulled hard at the oars—this was to be their last official action. They would be
free to return to their settlements along the coast of Massachusetts a few days from now when
their enlistment contracts would be fulfilled at the end of the year. Glover had ordered the first of
the commandeered boats, designed to haul iron-ore from the Durham Iron Works downriver, to
push off from McKonkey’s Ferry, situated on the Pennsylvania shore where the river channel
grew shallow between low-slung wooded bluffs, around dusk the previous evening when the
weather was still calm. The polar winds had since continued to build out of the north-east all
evening, whipping the surface of the river into a slushy foam and glazing every surface with a
thick coat of rime until it became, in the words of one officer, “as severe a night as I ever saw.” 2
Despite the general’s best efforts at military homogeny, the men who now disembarked
from each boat and filled the ranks of his “Continental” army wore a colorful array of uniforms
and home-spun linens decorated with an assortment of fur, feathers or ribbons. Many openly
flaunted his restrictions on hair length, tying their flowing hair back into loose pony-tails as was
the fashion on the frontier along the untamed Appalachian mountains to the west. A faint peek-aboo moon glowing between low fleeing clouds silvered their footprints in the snow that were
“tinged here and there with blood from the feet of the men who wore broken shoes.”3 Those who
had no shoes at all, and there were many, wrapped rags or strips of rawhide around their feet;
others were forced to go barefoot without complaint, stamping their feet constantly to keep their
toes from freezing. A young Massachusetts musician among them by the name of John
Greenwood, sixteen years old and adopting a sentiment common to soldiering, later recollected
that there was no use in complaining anyways, “for it was all the same owing to the impossibility
of being in a worse situation than their present one, and therefore the men always liked to be kept
moving in expectation of bettering themselves.”4
These were the ragged survivors of one of the worst defeats in what would become
American history. They had lost more than five thousand of their friends and comrades to the
enemy during their last campaign, and most had worn out their clothing and equipment or had
lost their weapons during a long retreat across the muddy roads of New Jersey weeks earlier.
One local man noted that many of them fell “dead on the roads with their packs on their backs”
or had been found “perishing in haylofts.”5 Mostly young men between the ages of fifteen and
twenty-five from the lower classes of colonial society, the bulk of them were sons of yeomen
farmers or shopkeepers, indentured servants, convicts, former slaves or recent immigrants from
the backwaters of Ireland, Scotland, Germany or England—the jeweled centerpiece of King
George III’s far-flung empire.6 Haggard, unkempt, and stooping low in the face of the wind,
there was little romantic about them as they filed past the general towards the warmth of the
scrap-lumber bonfires scattered along the banks above the river. Even the general harbored no
illusions about the men under his command, asserting that “to expect, among such people, as
comprise the bulk of an army, that they are influenced by any other principles than those of
Interest, is to look for what never did, and I fear never will happen.”
His own interests, both economic and personal, had brought him here as well, shivering
in the shadows in the wee hours of the morning after Christmas Day, 1776. He was General
George Washington, tasked the year before by the Second Continental Congress to oust the
British army from North America, and until this moment he had failed in this singular duty.
Lately, especially, he had been hammered from all sides, and on many different fronts, so at this
moment, with his newest plan shredding in the teeth of a surprise Atlantic storm, he felt like the
rude descriptor his enemies had branded him with: “a little paltry colonel of a militia of
bandits.”7 The determined movement of the army now straddling this frozen river channel was
his largest gamble yet, and he was desperate for redemption.
The billowing wind sweeping the river valley was so intense—“a perfect hurricane”—
that while feeding their fires with split rails from fences pulled down along the river banks
Washington’s men noticed that “the wind and fire would cut them in two in a moment.”8 The
young fifer Greenwood, who had been issued a musket “as indeed every officer had” for the
attack, felt he could only keep himself alive by constantly rotating in front of a fire, warming one
side while the other was turned to the harassing elements.
Ever the micro-manager, Washington, still poised serenely within his flapping cloak,
called out to the men every now and then in a low voice, offering words of encouragement. He
had earlier given strict instructions to operate under “a profound silence,” but the fierceness of
the storm and “the crash of the ice which filled the river”9 had rendered such cautious discipline
unnecessary. He had since permitted the bonfires as it was unlikely that even enemy spies would
venture into such weather.
Disembarking from one of the first boats the evening before, Washington had diligently
watched every boat cross the eight hundred and fifty feet or so of choppy water behind him,
fretting as the early morning hours slipped away in the fury of the nor’easter. His original plans
had called for all of the boats to be well across by midnight so that the men would have time to
make Trenton by dawn. Any later, and he would almost certainly lose the element of surprise.
Down the shore, now stripped bare of its dry fall foliage, one of his hand-picked protégés,
a former bookseller and young officer named Colonel Henry Knox (who would later become the
nation’s first Secretary of War), was directing the crossing of the column’s eighteen heavy
artillery pieces with “a deep bass” voice that emanated from within his corpulent 280-pound
frame. His “stentorian lungs” somehow possessed enough force to relay messages across the
storm. Though he was only twenty-six, he had won Washington’s approval the previous winter
by stubbornly dragging a large arsenal of cannons nearly 300 miles on ox sleds, all the way from
Fort Ticonderoga to Massachusetts, to where the rookie commander-in-chief was then besieging
the British at Boston. Despite this experience, Knox was struck by how the Delaware’s fast
current, filled with flat cakes of ice, “made the labor almost incredible,” but he was now bringing
over the last of the pieces and skittish horses “with infinite difficulty.”10 He would later boast to
his wife that “perseverance accomplished what at first seemed impossible.”11 Washington’s own
fierce tenacity was the only thing keeping the expedition moving at this point. Unbeknownst to
him, the other moving pieces in his war plan had already failed further downstream.
Brigadier General James Ewing, with 600 militiamen, had been attempting to ford the
river directly across from the closest enemy outpost at Trenton, the object of Washington’s plan.
Ewing had called off his assault after struggling all evening against a wall of ice that quickly
built up in the river. Colonel John Cadwalader, who was ordered to use his 2,400 men to disable
support from a neighboring Hessian garrison at Bordentown, had only been able to row 600 men
across a tidal estuary section of the river but was currently pulling them back. He had “found it
was impossible” to get his own artillery across due to a thick sheet of ice spreading out a hundred
yards from the Jersey shore. Accepting defeat, he scribbled off a note to Washington from
Bristol, “I imagine the badness of the night must have prevented you from passing as you
intended.” The fourth element comprising Washington’s reserve unit, fresh militiamen from
Philadelphia recruited by General Israel Putnam who were to follow Cadwalader into New
Jersey, had never even left the city abandoned by Congress weeks earlier.
And so, at this pivotal moment, it had all been left to Washington. “The fate of unborn
millions,” as he had once envisioned, now truly depended “under God, on the courage and
conduct” of him and the other future leaders of a nascent republic who were now huddling
together on this frozen riverbank in the middle of the night.12
Things had never looked bleaker for the American patriots. Washington had even
admitted as much in a recent letter to his brother John Augustine Washington, whom he called
Jack, writing “I think the game is pretty near up.”13
The loss of New York and Fort Washington to the British and Washington’s forced
retreat across New Jersey had rocked the American cause to its core. On December 12, with
British outposts less than twelve miles away from Philadelphia, Congress had swiftly evacuated
its seat in the city where they had gathered in headier days only six months earlier to sign the
Declaration of Independence. The representatives had been unhelpful enough to grant
Washington almost dictatorial “full powers” to continue the war before fleeing the city with
many of the terrified residents.
The British commander, Major General William Howe, now safely ensconced for the
winter in the parlors of high society Manhattan loyalists—and, not so discreetly, the arms of a
married blonde mistress—had informed his superior in London, Lord George Germain, on
December 20 that the entire countryside of New Jersey was in “almost general submission.”
Characteristically, he had cautiously failed to follow up on his easy routing of the American
army, which he assumed must have “inevitably been cut to pieces” during the retreat, and so he
had placed his forces in comfortable winter quarters on several islands around his Manhattan
base. Howe assured Germain that his troops and even the outposts were “in perfect security,”
though he admitted the outposts were “too extensive” along a 30-mile front near Washington’s
Bucks County, Pennsylvania, encampment where the season’s first major snowfall was,
incidentally, building up that very morning.14 But with winter on the doorstep, Howe believed
the American cause would die on its own over the coming months.
A dark air of suspicion settled over the surrounding countryside as neighbors began to
eye each other. Supported by Howe’s field commander, Earl Charles Cornwallis, the loyalist
residents of New Jersey seemed to have the upper hand and superior numbers on their side as the
British freely handed out offers of amnesty. Washington despised them, noting that “the conduct
of the Jerseys has been most infamous. Instead of turning out to defend their country and
affording aid to our army, they are making submission as fast as they can.” 15 The secret signers
of the Declaration of Independence, still unknown to the public, were being hunted down like
wild game by British intelligence units who knew each of them to a man. One patriot from
Pennsylvania aptly summed up the American mood, “Vigor and spirit alone can save us…There
is no time for words. Exert yourselves now like freemen.”16
But it was the very dearth of patriotic fervor that had become the main problem for the
Americans. Even the usually enthusiastic Sam Adams had written to his wife earlier in the month
that, “I do not regret the part I have taken in a cause so just and interesting to mankind…[but] I
must confess it chagrins me greatly to find it so illy supported by the people of Pennsylvania and
the Jerseys. They seem to me to be determined to give it up….”17
Washington’s own army was quickly evaporating. His 20,000-man force of three months
earlier had melted into a rough collection of less than 3,000 troops. Worse still, only half of these
were actually healthy enough to fight; the rest suffered from jaundice, dysentery, or some other
sickness. He had been given no money from Congress to pay even these faithful few. Equipment
and arms were in short supply; panicked Americans had left behind 146 cannon (nearly all of
their arsenal), 2,800 muskets, and 400,000 cartridges during the harried evacuation of Fort Lee
on the Hudson River the month before. Compounding these problems was the looming New
Year deadline, now only days away, when the enlistment contracts of his Continental regulars
would expire. With his army’s morale as low as it had ever been, Washington knew what would
then happen: “You may as well attempt to stop the winds from blowing or the sun in its diurnals
as stop the regiments from going when their term is expired.”18 Inevitably, his troops would
quietly retire to the warmth of their own hearths and firesides and the now smoldering ember of
American independence would die cold as winter snow blanketed the battlefields of the previous
year.
Another blow to the Americans was the loss of Washington’s second-in-command, the
able but eccentric Major General Charles Lee, captured by the British under suspicious
circumstances during the retreat across New Jersey. Slovenly, vain and insubordinate, the former
Englishman was nonetheless a brilliant professional soldier. He had earlier been a real contender
for the post of commander-in-chief. His pack of beloved dogs trailing him wherever he went, he
had served as one of Washington’s most capable officers during the New York campaigns but
had then disobeyed Washington’s order to retreat with him across the Delaware. Washington,
who had known Lee since the French and Indian War decades earlier when they had served
together during a disastrous battle that had claimed the life of the British general Edward
Braddock, laid bare his feelings about Lee in a letter to his brother Jack, “He is zealously
attached to the cause, honest and well-meaning but rather fickle and violent I fear in his
temper.”19
It was worse than that: Lee’s intentions had been to displace Washington by standing his
ground in New Jersey and winning a lion’s share of the glory for himself. Only his own
obstinacy became his undoing. On Friday the 13th of December, while inexplicably separating
himself from his troops to spend the night at an isolated tavern owned by a pretty widow, he had
been at a desk writing to a fellow officer that he thought “a certain great man is most damnably
deficient” when he was captured by a detachment of seventy British cavalry. The dragoon of
light horsemen, among them a young Banastre Tarleton who would gain infamy later in the war,
immediately spirited him off to New York City “with every mark of indignity, not even suffering
him to get his hat or surtout coat,” as Washington later lamented. Gloating that they had
“captured General Lee, the only rebel general whom we had cause to fear,” many British officers
had wanted to close the pincers on Washington and take Philadelphia by Christmas before the
overly-cautious Howe had shut down aggressive actions for the winter.20
Lee was not the only one under Washington’s command who was then second-guessing
Washington’s ability to lead. The morning of his capture, Lee had written his contemptuous note
to General Horatio Gates, another former British commander who had served with Washington
during the Braddock campaign. Gates also was worried about Washington’s generalship after the
New Jersey retreat. He was a friend of Washington, and his technical third-in-command, but he
sensed everything slipping out from under Washington’s control. As Washington seemed to
dither from his headquarters just beyond the long reach of Howe, the conservative Gates
confided to his aide, Major James Wilkinson, that he thought Washington should retreat deeper
into the American interior and wait to reform his scattered army. Gates, who had spent the
summer at Fort Ticonderoga in New York rebuilding the Continental Army’s northern forces
after its failed invasion of British-occupied Canada in 1775, began to voice his concerns with
some members of Congress who were sympathetic to his own view of Washington. Many of
these thought that perhaps the time had come to let Gates, a career soldier, take the reins from the
besieged squire of Mount Vernon.
Though still unaware of just how deeply his authority was then being questioned,
Washington had recently stumbled into at least one of the intrigues against him. Weeks earlier,
he had accidentally opened a private letter carried by express rider from General Lee to Joseph
Reed, Washington’s former secretary and aide-de-camp, who was then away on a recruiting
mission. In it, Lee had floridly poured out his contempt for Washington as a leader.
I received your most obliging, flattering letter—lament with you that fatal
indecision of mind which in war is a much greater disqualification than stupidity or even
want of personal courage. Accident may put a decisive blunder in the right, but eternal
defeat and miscarriage must attend the men of the best parts if cursed with indecision.
Lee was responding to a letter from Reed, who had made his own assessment of Washington’s
conduct. “Oh! General, an indecisive mind is one of the greatest misfortunes that can befall an
army.” Though Washington had not seen Reed’s letter of betrayal, which Reed had slipped into
an official outgoing dispatch, Washington was now keen to both of his aides’ true feelings of
him. For one who staked so much of his worth on his honor and reputation, the new knowledge
must of stung deep. To his credit, Washington simply forwarded the letter to Reed and,
employing his neatest penmanship, wrote a polite note of apology for opening his mail and
thanked him for his efforts on his mission.21
Washington, whose practiced self-honesty had made him a life-long realist, was only too
aware of the precariousness of his predicament. “In short, your imagination can scarce extend to
a situation more distressing than mine,” he wrote to Lund Washington, a distant cousin who
managed his Mount Vernon, Virginia, estate.22 He knew he had to do something to garner
continued confidence from his supporters. They sympathized for him; one Congressman had
recently written about him to a friend, “I feel for Washington, that best of men.”23 Even his
enemies had seen that he would be unable to feed his men much longer. One English spy report
noted the Americans were “scarce of provisions—particularly flour—not above six thousand
bushels of wheat—about three days salt provisions—ill-clothed—in want of shoes and stockings
and blankets.”24 Prodded by his aides, Washington knew that he needed to “strike some stroke”
out of sheer necessity.25 For weeks his nimble mind had searched for ways to stem the red tide of
ruin lapping at his heels, and a dim plan of escape had slowly come to him.
The day after Lee’s capture, on December 14, Washington had written to Connecticut
governor Jonathan Trumbull, Sr., that he hoped to “attempt a stroke upon the forces of the
enemy, who lay a good deal scattered, and to all appearance, in a state of security. A lucky blow
in this quarter would be fatal to them, and would most certainly raise the spirits of the people,
which are quite sunk by our late misfortunes.”26 So much of this plan would depend on luck, but,
unknown to Washington, luck had then turned to favor the weary general. The very day of
Washington’s letter to Trumball, Cornwallis had retired with his troops back to New York,
leaving behind a small force of 1,500 marauding Hessians in Trenton under the command of
Colonel Johann Gottlieb Rall. Crowded into snug winter quarters, they were all that were holding
the region directly across the river from Washington’s camp.
Then, on December 20, the same date of Howe’s letter to Germain outlining the
countryside’s “general submission,” Washington’s reinforcements had arrived. Major General
John Sullivan, the son of Irish immigrants and the future governor of New Hampshire who had
recently been paroled by the British after his capture at the Battle of Long Island, had appeared
in camp during the swirling snowstorm with the surviving half of Lee’s lost forces—2,000 men
in even more distress than those in Washington’s camp. Disgusted at their condition, Washington
had been slightly encouraged two days later by the addition of a New Hampshire brigade of 600
relatively fresher Continentals herded in from Ticonderoga by Gates. These additions had meant
that now, with 1,000 militiamen from Philadelphia and a regiment of German settlers from
Maryland and Pennsylvania who had also mustered to his banner, Washington would control a
useful, if temporary, military force of 6,000 men in the few days left to him before the year was
out.
On December 22, Washington had called his top aides together for a secret council of war
at his headquarters in the private home of Presbyterian sympathizers, minorities among their
pacifistic Quaker neighbors on the Pennsylvania side of the river. There, he shared with his aides
that he had made up his mind to act in some manner against the British garrisons in New Jersey
before the river froze over enough to allow a strong enemy assault on the American position, an
attack that would almost certainly create an open path for the British all the way to Philadelphia.
He knew from his experiences observing native Indian groups battle during the French and
Indian War that a flashy attack followed by a swift retreat could be extremely effective. He felt
the time had come to make an aggressive stand, even if it was to be the Americans last stab in the
dark.
He had not been alone in this line of desperate thinking. That same day Reed, growing
bold on his recruiting mission down the river at Bristol, Pennsylvania, had written an unsolicited
letter to him prodding him to action.
We are all of opinion my dear General that something must be attempted to revive
our expiring credit [and] give our cause some degree of reputation… that even a
failure cannot be more fatal than to remain in our present situation…in short some
enterprise must be undertaken in our present circumstances or we must give up
the cause…Will it not be possible my dear [General] for your troops or such part
of them as can act with advantage to make a diversion or something more at or
about Trenton?… I will not disguise my own sentiments that our cause is
desperate and hopeless if we do not take the [opportunity] of the collection of
troops at present to strike some stroke. Our affairs are hastening fast to ruin if we
do not retrieve them by some happy event. Delay with us is now equal to a total
defeat.27
After finalizing plans with his generals at a second meeting later that evening,
Washington, still wounded from the Lee letter incident, replied to Reed the next day in placating
terms. “The bearer is sent down…to inform you that Christmas day at night, one hour before day
is the time fixed upon for our attempt on Trenton. For Heaven’s sake, keep this to yourself, as
the discovery of it may prove fatal to us; our numbers, sorry I am to say, being less than I had
any conception of; but necessity, dire necessity will, nay must, justify my attack.”28 He had
ordered that the men “be provided with three days provisions ready cook’d”29 and had set in
motion plans for the elaborate four-pronged attack on Trenton. He was to lead the main column
of 2,400 troops himself, crossing the river at McConkey’s Ferry eight miles to the north of the
100-house hamlet sheltering Rall’s mercenaries. With his other columns closing in on Trenton
from the south and west, and with more than a little luck, the desperate action would mean that
he could quite possibly turn the teeth of his trap back around on the British.
Others had seen how the mantle of potential disaster had weighed on him for days.
Benjamin Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, had visited him on a
gloomy Christmas Eve and seen how “he appeared much distressed and lamented the ragged and
dissolving state of his army in affecting terms.” The doctor watched Washington doodle on
several scraps of paper during the course of their conversation. One of them falling to the floor
near his feet, Rush realized that Washington had been scrawling the secret passphrase to be
distributed among his sentinels for the upcoming assault. The chosen phrase revealed how dark
Washington’s mood really was—“Victory or Death.” Everything was at stake during the
looming gamble.
He had also been further isolated by Gates. After Gates arrival in camp, Washington had
asked the experienced commander to lead the assault on Trenton. Gates, moody and “much
depressed in mind,”30 had backed off, claiming he was too ill after the march from Ticonderoga.
He had asked to be relieved so he could go to Philadelphia to improve his health. Reluctantly,
Washington had acquiesced, but had begged Gates to make a stop at Bristol on his way to sort
out the problem of a vague command structure between the militia and continental units there.
But Gates had grown bold to the point of insubordination. Skipping Bristol, he did go on to
Philadelphia, but had no intention of staying; he had made up his mind to make his way on to
Baltimore, where John Hancock and a few others were still conducting over affairs of Congress.
He would then lay out his own plan, and force Washington’s hand.
For reasons unknown (the letter is lost), Gates had sent a letter back to Washington
before setting out from Philadelphia, where the “silence and stillness” of the abandoned streets
created an eerie “wilderness of houses.” He asked his aide Wilkinson to be his courier. Riding all
the next day over frozen roads, the nineteen-year-old Wilkinson arrived at McConkey’s Ferry
just before sunset and sought out the commander-in-chief in the last calm moments before the
storm broke. “I found him alone,” he recalled later, “with his whip in his hand, prepared to
mount his horse…. When I presented the letter of General Gates to him, before receiving it, he
exclaimed with solemnity, ‘What a time is this to hand me letters!’” Wilkinson explained that
Gates had charged him with the delivery. “By General Gates! Where is he?” The aide again
explained that he had left him that morning in Philadelphia. Washington reeled. What was Gates
doing there? “I understood him that he was on his way to Congress,” Wilkinson replied.
Thunderstruck by the machination against his authority, Washington repeated the phrase aloud.
“On his way to Congress!” He ripped open the seal, and the young Wilkinson, keen to the
probable tone of the letter, escaped Washington’s legendary fury by quickly making his bow and
joining the troops mustering in the fading twilight.31
And so, all at once—political, martial, logistical, financial—even the natural elements
seemed to be conspiring against Washington as he sat brooding on the rotting, overturned crate
that had once been some local farmer’s beehive. With almost nine miles still between him and
Trenton, any attack now would be hours after sunrise. Despairing, he contemplated calling off
the attack, but even here he was stuck. He would later explain to Hancock that he was “certain
there was no making a retreat without being discovered, and harassed on repassing the river.”
His kairos moment appeared before him here, now, as he sat on a beehive in the middle of the
night. He must make a decision.
And so he did. Now that all of the men had crossed the river he set his face like flint. The
passing hours had given Washington time to fall back on the iron willpower that constituted so
much of his character. He would later tell Hancock, “I determined to push on at all events.”32
It was now nearly four a.m. Washington’s officers urgently formed the men into long
columns to be led along Bear Tavern Road. Earlier in the evening, Washington had sent a
brigade of his trusted Virginians to form a screen of sentries around the Americans’ toe-hold on
the Jersey side of the river. He often relied on fellow Virginians to lead the way, and he made
certain that they would be at the front during these intense hours. The Virginian brigade, led by a
Scottish-born doctor named Adam Stephen who had accompanied Washington on many of his
adventures in the French and Indian War (where the two rivals had formed a hostile personal
relationship), formed up at the head of the line of infantry regiments that soon stretched out over
a mile along the frozen shoulders of the dirt road.
Scouting for the main body of troops were two advance parties, each approximately forty
men strong. They were to move ahead quickly, establishing road blocks and capturing anyone
who might be on the road to keep the army’s march a secret.
One party was led by a stocky, good humored Virginian named Captain William
Washington, a second cousin of the commander-in-chief who had left his divinity studies to join
the revolution. His trusted lieutenant was another college drop-out, a tall, dark-haired youth
named James Monroe. Though he would one day helm the future country as the fifth president of
the United States, he was, on this stormy evening, still an eager teenager, albeit one ready for
action, “broad and square-shouldered and raw-boned.”33 Captain Washington and Monroe were
to lead their party overland away from the river and sneak up on the town from the north.
The other party was made up of New Jersey volunteers. Led by an aggressive officer
name Captain John Flahaven, many of these men were locals, dressed in “plain farmer’s habit,”34
who could easily find their way through the dark woods and rolling terrain along the lower River
Road running beside the Delaware River. As news of the army’s crossing had spread, these
civilian farmers had rallied to the landing site to serve as mounted guides for the rest of the army.
Behind these tendrils, Washington formed the rest of his forces into two divisions. He
placed one under the command of General Nathaneal Green. Only thirty-three, Green had proven
himself to be an irreplaceable “object of confidence” in the eyes of Washington, a “fighting
Quaker” who had risen overnight from a militia private to the youngest general officer in the
American army based almost exclusively on his innate ability and self-taught military
knowledge.35 Washington gave command of his second division to General Sullivan.
According to Washington’s plan, the two divisions would separate at Burlington, halfway
to Trenton, where the path forked into parallel roads near Howell’s Ferry down-river.
Washington would stay with Greene’s column and Knox’s artillery along Scotch Road, and then
Pennington Road, while Sullivan led the other column down River Road along the high bank to
the right. They would then approach the town from two quarters and, with a little luck, attack
simultaneously. The Pennington route was slightly longer, and so Sullivan would have to delay a
bit to get the timing right.
Astride his chestnut warhorse “Old Nelson” (steadier under fire than Blueskin, another
favorite) Washington cut a magnificent figure riding with his aides in the shadows beside the
column. Washington had long ago learned how helpful a projected image could be toward
achieving one’s goals, and had been attentive to his own image ever since his youthful
introduction to the wealthy Tidewater planter society. Towering over six foot two inches tall,
with intelligent blue eyes set in a broad face above a proud jaw, his pristine appearance in full
dress uniform at the Second Continental Congress had certainly helped to seal his commission, at
forty three years of age, as commander of the fledgling American army.
Whatever inner turmoil Washington was feeling that night, his men were awed by the
calming silhouette of the stoic commander riding beside them in the dim light thrown by torches
being kept at the ready to light the cannons. Beside him rode William Lee, Washington’s
personal slave and closest assistant, who dazzled the puritan New Englanders with his exotic
turban and riding coat. One Connecticut soldier remembered the scene years later:
The torches of our field pieces stuck in the exhalters sparkled and blazed in the
storm all night and about day light a halt was made at which time his Excellency
and aids came near to the front on the side of the path where soldiers stood. I
heard his Excellency as he was coming on speaking to and encouraging the
soldiers. The words he spoke as he passed by where I stood and in my hearing
were these: 'Soldiers, keep by your officers. For God's sake, keep by your
officers!' Spoke in a deep and solemn voice.”36
But the wonderful thing about Washington was his authenticity; he truly possessed rare
skills that backed up his image of commander-in-chief. Take, for example, his exceptional
horsemanship. He had spent most of his adult life in the saddle, riding daily among the farms of
his beloved Mount Vernon plantation. He was considered an exceptional rider even by Virginia
horse-class standards, riding in an old-fashioned style. Thomas Jefferson praised him as being
“the best horseman of his age, and the most graceful figure that can be seen on horseback.”37
But it was while “passing a slanting, slippery bank” that Washington’s great physical
strength and horsemanship were on full display. Old Nelson lost his footing in the darkness and
the great horse’s hind legs began to slide out from under him. Instinctually, Washington rose up
in the saddle and “seized his horse's mane,” shifting his weight and literally pulling the animal
back onto its feet.38 Such skill awed men who lived in an age when everything moved by
horsepower alone.
But Washington’s image of coolness and strength was not all that was inspiring the men
as they silently pushed over those frozen miles. The day before, as the men readied themselves
for the ferry crossing in the fading light of a grey Christmas afternoon, they had read and re-read
copies of a poetic piece of propaganda written by journalist Thomas Paine. Paine had busied
himself with writing down his thoughts during the long retreat across New Jersey, by some
accounts scrawling them on a drumhead every night before the fire at General Greene’s
headquarters. He had printed, at his own expense, the first pamphlet of what would become The
American Crisis in Philadelphia only days earlier during what he described as “the very blackest
of times.” He had written its opening lines in a “passion of patriotism” after reaching the city
devoid of everything except “fears and falsehoods.” After the long retreat, his one vision was
that “the country should be strongly animated” and so he threw all of his energy into being the
spark of exhortation. 39
As Paine’s first published pamphlets began to reach his camps along the Delaware, the
savvy Washington was quick to recruit the writer’s words to steel his men’s resolve, ordering the
pamphlet to be read aloud:
These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine
patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that
stand it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell,
is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the
conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too
lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value.40
The opening lines became a battle cry. The influence of Paine’s fiery words were such
that, as John Adams is said to have later explained, "without the pen of the author of Common
Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”41
Sold for only two pennies (just enough to cover the cost of printing) and widely
circulated among an amazingly literate middling-class army, The American Crisis thundered into
the hearts of Washington’s men. Even Paine’s political rivals cheered the success of the Crisis.
“Militiamen, who, already tired of the war, were straggling from the army, returned. Hope
succeeded to despair, cheerfulness to gloom, and firmness to irresolution,” observed one.42
Washington could only dare to capitalize on the window of opportunity opened up by the
popularity of Paine’s pamphlet, coming when it did. It did more to inspire them as the first
snowflakes of the evening had begun to fall than their commander-in-chief could have ever
dreamed of doing alone.43 If he let the window close again, he was certain it would never open
again.
Over the first mile and a half the road sharply rose to an elevation of around two hundred
feet, circling through dark woods with the “violent storm of rain, hail and snow intermixed”44
driving straight into the men’s faces. Greenwood remembered that the column “began an
apparently circuitous march, not advancing faster than a child ten years old could walk, and
stopping frequently, though for what purpose I know not.”45
Knox’s artillery carriages were the main reason for the delays. As one historian has
pointed out, “the standard practice in European armies during the eighteenth century was to use
two or three ‘battalion guns’ for every thousand infantry. The Americans advanced on Trenton
with seven or eight guns for every thousand muskets, a very large proportion.”46 Knox intended
to throw everything in the American’s arsenal at the Hessians. He had distributed his artillery
among the head of each infantry brigade; this would later give each brigade great strength but
made them clumsy now. Men and draft animals strained at the thick drag ropes draping each gun
carriage, the animals surging the carriages forward and the men acting as brakes when needed.
Though Knox had redesigned new carriages for many of the guns that were lighter and more
maneuverable than what was usual for the time, it was still extremely difficult to maneuver the
heavy guns, some weighing over a ton, on such steep frozen roads.
At Bear Tavern, a simple two-storied frame inn, the route leveled out over a high plateau,
away from the wind, and the columns made better time. They were hindered again by two steep
ravines cutting across the track where Jacob’s Creek, flooded with storm water, flowed east
toward the Delaware. More precious time was lost as horses were unharnessed and heavy
cannons were lowered down the embankments by teams of men hauling on frozen ropes looped
around trees for leverage. Down, across the creek, up, down again, then up—Washington could
only fret and pace the lines, urging on his men, as the dawn raced ever closer.
After the ravines the road opened up again but the wind became worse. The wheeling
arms of the cyclone beat continuously against the struggling army. “During the whole night it
alternately hailed, rained, snowed, and blew tremendously,”47 Greenwood later recalled. The
miles began to blend together during the coldest part of the morning just before dawn.
Exhausted, two men fell out of the column and froze to death. The teenaged Greenwood was
almost among them.
“I recollect very well that at one time, when we halted on the road, I sat down on the
stump of a tree and was so benumbed with cold that I wanted to go to sleep; had I been
passed unnoticed I should have frozen to death without knowing it; but as good luck
attended me, Sergeant Madden came and, rousing me up, made me walk about. We then
began to march again, just in the old slow way, until the dawn of the day...”48
At the bottom of another hill the head of the columns finally entered the small village of
Birmingham, the half-way point of the expedition where the two forces were to split. It was
around six a.m. and Washington looked to the gloomy eastern horizon. Dawn was on its way
behind the storm and Washington’s army had miles yet to go.
Washington quickly called his top aides forward for a brief council. He had paused
outside of the house of a man named Benjamin Moore whose family quickly came out to offer
the officers a meager breakfast. Grateful, the men nervously ate on horseback, quickly finalizing
a few last details. As their horses stamped and whinnied under them, they could not know if the
meal they were sharing was to be their last.
Timing was even more critical now. In one of the first recorded instances of synchronized
watches in a military campaign, Washington “gave orders that every officer’s watch should be
set by his, and the moment of the attack fixed.”49 The officers had already placed a piece of
white paper in their hats to make them stand out from the mass of enlisted men, a forerunner to
the “follow-me” stripes later painted on the back of American army helmets. Though they could
not possibly reach Trenton for several more hours, Washington still dared to hope that his army
would catch the enemy by surprise. He issued the same instructions to both columns on how to
act once they reached the town. “I ordered each of them, immediately upon forcing the out
guards, to push directly into the town, that they might charge the enemy before they had time to
form.”50
During the brief pause Washington received more distressing news. As they readied
themselves for the last leg of the journey, the men from Glover’s regiment noticed that their
gunpowder was soaked and useless after sleet and snow had melted into their cartridge boxes
during the long march. Checking their arms they discovered that even the “best secured arms”
were “wet and not in firing condition.” Hesitant to throw his men into an attack without
serviceable weapons, General Sullivan passed the news on to the commander-in-chief. “Advance
and charge,” was all that the determined Washington could say as he watched the snowflakes
melt on the steaming shoulders of Old Nelson.
Colonel Johann Gottlieb Rall had again doubled the amount of Hessian sentries
surrounding Trenton after a small party of American rebels attacked one of his outposts just after
sunset on Christmas Day. Several of his men had been wounded in the fight, but he himself had
led the final charge that had turned the attack party back into the darkness. It was the kind of
action that endeared him to his men, and he knew it. He was the archetype of a soldier, coming
up through the officer ranks of the Hessian army after joining as a cadet thirty-six years earlier—
brave under fire, deferential with his men, good-humored and profanely earthy.
The Hessians were skilled German mercenaries who had been hired, at extraordinary
cost, by King George III to assist the British army in America. Most Hessian enlisted soldiers,
though born as peasants, had been raised in a culture of strict Spartanism where a high ratio of
the population served actively in the army. Rall had been a soldier of fortune and had served in
multiple campaigns before receiving command of a regiment of infantry prior to the war in
America. The Landgrenadiere had seen brutal action already in the battles of Brooklyn, White
Plains, and Long Island, but Rall thrived in such an atmosphere. He spoke no English, but he
loved that the musical expectations of a provincial American audience seemed to elevate the
product of his regimental band. “In Europe we should not have got much honor by our music but
here we passed for masters,” wrote one Hessian musician.51 As such, the colonel delighted in
personally taking the director’s baton in hand.
Rall felt as much superior to the Americans militarily as he did musically. He detested
Washington’s civilian army and maintained a very poor opinion about its ability in the field. “It
never struck him that the rebels might attack,” wrote one of his lieutenants afterward, “and
therefore he had made no preparations against an attack.”52 Actually, the thought had struck him,
but he did little to prepare for an event on the scale that Washington envisioned for him. After
settling in at Trenton, he had dismissed his engineers’ plans for building fortifications along the
upper and lower ends of the village, saying, “Let them come….We will go at them with the
bayonet.” But though contemptuous, he was, after all, a professional, and so he had established a
ring of sentries a mile outside of town and along the river, supporting them with duty companies
and a central alarm regiment that was always on the alert.
Trenton was the last far-flung post on a string of garrisons occupied by the British from
New York, and the most exposed. Rall hated the crossroads town, which had at least six avenues
of enemy approach, and his men hated living in the small humble houses that had, for the most
part, been stripped clean and deserted by their former residents. Rall himself had settled into a
large frame house owned by a Loyalist manufacturer named Stacy Potts which was situated
across King Street from the high-steepled Anglican church in the center of town. From this
comfortable position, where he enjoyed good food and drink—and the occasional game of
checkers—offered by his genteel host, he could easily maintain command of the 1,500 men in
the three regiments under him. But he longed to cross the river, once frozen, and make more
permanent winter quarters in Philadelphia.
The Americans had constantly tested Rall’s sentry lines and harassed his foraging parties
ever since his arrival at Trenton. Many of these Americans were not official militia under
Washington’s control but bands of defensive civilians resentful of the Hessian occupation of
their countryside. Every movement by Rall outside of the outskirts of Trenton seemed to cost
Hessian lives. Rall was reduced to sending messages to his superiors at Princeton, twelve miles
to the northeast, with an escort of 100 men.
The worst attacks had come from Ewing’s forces directly across the river. Ewing had lost
80 percent of his strength since the summer, but the 600 surviving men under him still possessed
boats, some artillery, and a fierce fighting temper. On December 17 some of them had come over
the river before dawn and destroyed one of the Hessian outposts in a flash attack. Rall had
reinforced that section of his lines near the ferry landing but was hit again the next morning by a
rebel force twice as large as the previous one. The morning after that, Rall had roused the entire
garrison before dawn and dragged two cannons down to the riverfront in anticipation of another
attack. The Americans did not come. But two days later Hessian alarms had sounded again as a
group of Ewing’s men slipped across the river with blackened faces and set several houses on
fire. Rall had no access to boats to pursue the raiders. For days afterward the Hessians were set
on edge, losing precious sleep and morale, while Ewing continued to target groups of them from
across the river with his large guns. Every Hessian soldier had been ordered to sleep with his
clothes on, and many were now performing extra duties as Rall reinforced his sentry posts yet
again.
An experienced combat leader, Rall knew that the strain was beginning to stretch his men
thin. One of his officers wrote, “We have not slept one night in peace since we came to this
place. The troops have lain on their arms every night and they can endure it no longer.”53 He had
appealed to his superiors to send him reinforcements, telling them his men were exhausted and
explaining that Trenton was indefensible as a proper garrison. The British general in Princeton
had been helpful, but Major General James Grant, the effete high officer in charge of the line,
had scorned his request.
“I am sorry to hear your brigade has been fatigued or alarmed. You may be assured that
the rebel army in Pennsylvania which has been joined by Lee’s Corps, Gates’s and
Arnold’s, does not exceed eight thousand men, who have neither shoes nor stockings, are
in fact almost naked, starving for cold, without blankets, and very ill-supplied with
provisions. On this side of the Delaware they have not three hundred men. These are
scattered about in small parties under the command of subaltern officers, none of them
above the rank of captain, and their principal object is to pick up some of our light
dragoons.”54
The unresponsive Grant had also once claimed, before the war, that he could go from one end of
America to the other and personally “geld all of the males.”55 Rall had been left alone to fume.
Rumors of a larger attack had also been circulating for several days. On Christmas Eve
two deserters had come across the river to inform Rall that the American army was beginning to
march. Rall had sent out a large scouting party upriver, but it had only engaged in a minor
skirmish before returning exhausted with nothing new to report. Then a Loyalist doctor had
come to warn him that American raiders were planning to cross the Delaware. Another local man
had warned him of the same thing on Christmas Day. Again he sent out another patrol and
personally inspected his ring of outposts.
Rall had returned to his headquarters late that afternoon. All was quiet until the attack
was made on the outpost where he had mounted his horse to chase the raiders back into the
gathering darkness. Half a dozen of his men had been wounded in the hit-and-run assault, and so
he had concluded that he had just repelled the American attack that he had been warned about.
But just to be on the safe side, he had sent out orders to double the night sentries and ensure that
another dawn patrol be made at first light before the day pickets would once again take over. He
believed he had exceeded his duty with these cautionary measures. “These clodhoppers will not
attack us, and should they do so, we will simply fall on them and rout them,” he had told his
aide.56
The weather had worsened as night fell, and so he returned to his cozy quarters to prepare
for a Christmas party he had been invited to by a local merchant. As snow and ice began to build
up on the window panes, Rall began to relax even more, enjoying his Christmas feast. It had
been a long week of constant enemy harassment, but there was little chance of an attack now in
such weather. As Rall indulged himself in a late-night game of cards with his host, a servant
came in to slip him a note that had just been delivered by a Loyalist who lived upriver. Immersed
in his game, and perhaps reveling in the effects of a well-deserved drink or two, Rall had merely
slipped the note into his pocket without bothering to read its contents. The note, warning him of
Washington’s certain movements across the Delaware, would be found on his body the next
morning, unopened.
Washington was seething. His army had marched all through the night, enduring a
horrific winter storm, and now all seemed lost at the end. It was around 7:30 a.m. and the sun
was already up behind a dark filter of low clouds and blinding snow. He had been riding with
Greene’s column only a few miles outside of Trenton when his scouts had run into a group of
fifty Virginians riding the other way. This was the raiding party that had been chased by Rall the
night before. They had been hiding in the thick woods outside of Trenton all night, evading
Hessian patrols.
Astonished to see them, Washington grilled their leader, a captain named George Wallis.
Wallis sheepishly explained they had been sent on a revenge mission by their commander,
Washington’s old rival Adam Stephen. Stephen, who had lost a man several days earlier to a
Hessian bullet, had rashly retaliated on Christmas morning, but had not bothered informing the
commander-in-chief. In a flash, Washington called Stephen to account on the spot, separating
him out of from the head of the column. “You, Sir, may have ruined all my plans by having put
them on their guard!”57 The men observing Washington’s tirade were struck by the power of his
temper. But now was not the time for settling scores. Just as quickly, Washington calmed
himself, turning back to the group of Virginian raiders skulking before him and contritely asking
them to join in on the attack. With only a mile or two left until the first Hessian outpost, there
was no time now for anything but pressing forward.
The great column of men and animals slogged forward through the gloomy frenzy of the
storm. Suddenly a scout appeared to report that the Hessians had set up an outpost in a cooper
shop just ahead. Washington immediately halted the column on the road behind a thick copse of
trees. The senior officers quickly formed the men into three attack prongs, with the forward
Virginian troops led by Captain Washington and Monroe at the center. The troops made final
nervous adjustments to their weapons and accoutrements as Washington took his place in front
of the center brigade. Signaling to the units on his left and his right, Washington dug his heels
into Old Nelson’s flanks and started off at a “long trot,” picking up the pace as the army entered
open fields on both sides of Pennington Road.
It was now after 8 a.m., almost a full hour after sunrise. Across the snow-covered field
the door to the little frame cooper shop opened and the silhouette of a man appeared in the
doorway. Somewhere behind Washington an American flintlock went off, followed by another
report, and then another. The silhouette disappeared for an instant and then multiplied into
seventeen figures standing in a solid line outside of the trade shop. After a smattering third
volley of American guns, the Hessians responded in unison. They did not fall back until the full
force of the American prong began to completely envelope the outpost.
Just then, away south toward the river, Washington heard the booming of his own
cannons. Sullivan’s column was launching its own attack from River Road just minutes after
Washington had led his own. He heard Hessian kettle drums answer the artillery from the center
of town. Washington was thrilled; against all odds, he was taking Trenton by surprise. He turned
his attention back to the task at hand, sending the brigade to his left to attack the Hessian outpost
on Princeton Road and cut off the north side of town. Washington proudly noted that when his
tired men “came to the charge, each seemed to vie with the other in pressing forward.”58
As the American forces ousted the Germans from their outposts, the Hessian infantry
retreated in a cool, orderly fashion back toward their garrison. Washington was amazed at their
professionalism when faced with 1200 screaming attackers who had suddenly materialized out of
a driving snow storm. He later wrote that the defenders “behaved very well, keeping up a
constant retreating fire from behind houses.”59
Washington led the charge down Pennington Road to where it intersected with Trenton’s
two main streets on a rising bluff to the north of the town. From this high ground, his army could
see the action unfolding in the town and along the river below. He was now attacking the
Hessians on three sides. Across the Delaware, in answer to the outbreak of gunfire around the
town, Ewing had launched another “cannonade” with his artillery, sending the Hessians along
the river running as cannonballs punched dark holes in the ice.
As Knox began to position his own cannons toward the town center, Washington could
see that the Hessians still had an avenue of retreat across the stone bridge over Assunpink Creek
to the southeast of town. If the enemy made a prolonged fighting retreat beyond the bridge
before Sullivan’s men could cut them off, and the Hessians received quick reinforcement from
the surrounding British garrisons, his army could still be trapped and crushed against the
northern banks of the river.
The Hessian defenders massed quickly and effectively in the center of town, led by a
startled Colonel Rall, who had just been roused from sleep, on horseback. Contrary to later
claims, the Hessians were not recovering from Christmas celebrations the day before.
Greenwood later recollected that he “did not see even a solitary drunken soldier belonging to the
enemy.”60 Instead of retreating across the bridge, as Washington anticipated, the three Hessian
regiments began forming up to make a strong counterattack. Washington was puzzled by their
reaction. He could see that “their main body” was “formed, but from their motions they seemed
undetermined how to act.”
The Hessians did have two cannons in play. The two brass six-pounders were quickly
pulled forward by eight draft horses and placed behind the last houses on King Street. Hessian
gunners opened up on the Americans on the hill, firing twelve quick rounds in succession but
only managing to wound an American horse in the belly. Washington’s artillery quickly
answered in kind, with each battery swinging into action just as quickly as the damp conditions
allowed. Two of the gun crews who commanded Queen Street, Trenton’s other main avenue,
were led by a young captain in the dandy uniform of the New York Provincial Company of
Artillery by the name of Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, who would one day engineer the
complex foundation of America’s economy as the first Secretary of the Treasury, was at this
moment concerned only with forcing enemy troops from the snowy street below.
Perched amid his booming cannons, Knox was struck by the “scene of war” below, “of
which I had often conceived, but never saw before.” Later, he would proudly describe the
crowning moment of his hard work the night before in a letter to his wife. “The hurry, fright and
confusion of the enemy was [not] unlike that which will be when the last trump shall sound.
They endeavored to form in streets, the heads of which we had previously the possession of with
cannon and howitzers; these, in the twinkling of an eye, cleared the streets.”61
Losing men and horses, the Hessian gun crews finally abandoned their two guns in the
street. American riflemen, now firing from open windows and doorways as they moved from
house to house on the enemy’s flank, began picking off any Hessians loitering in the side streets
beyond the guns. Seeing his men falling back under the heavy musket fire, Rall led a retreat
toward the cover of a large apple orchard east of the town. Riding between the rows of bare trees,
he rallied the two regiments who had followed him out of the town and urged them up the hill on
Washington’s left, hoping to flank the American artillery positions.
Washington instinctively countered the movement. He would explain the maneuver to
Hancock the next day. “Being hard pressed by our troops, who had already got possession of part
of their artillery, they attempted to file off by a road on their right leading to Princetown, but
perceiving their intention, I threw a body of troops in their way which immediately checked
them.”
So, instead of pushing on up the hill, Rall made a mad dash back toward his abandoned
brass guns. The rebel fighters pulled the noose tighter, pouring a deadly crossfire into the
jumbled maze of houses and outbuildings in the town’s center. Desperate to make up lost
ground, a group of German troops valiantly pushed on through and regained control of the guns.
Immediately, a party of Virginian infantry and New England artillerymen surged forward
down the hill, led by Captain Washington and Lieutenant Monroe with swords drawn. The group
succeeded in driving the Hessian troops back from the field pieces, but not before the burly
Washington went down in the charge with severe wounds to both hands. Monroe instantly took
his place, but he too dropped as a Hessian musket ball passed through an artery in his left
shoulder. He was quickly carried back to safety where a volunteer surgeon named John Riker
clamped the wound shut. A local doctor, Riker had hurled curses at Monroe’s advance party the
night before when they had stumbled across his yard and awakened his dogs, assuming they were
British raiders. Delighted to find that his visitors were actually scouts for a marching American
army, he had begged Monroe to let him join the attack so that he “may be of help to some poor
fellow.” Monroe had accepted the offer, and the life of the “poor fellow” Riker would save the
next morning would be that of a future American president.62
The attack party immediately turned the guns around in the street directly outside of
Rall’s headquarters and fired them on the confused Hessians. A messy period of close urban
combat followed where once-peaceful scenes of domestic tranquility were broken by the screams
of mutilated men and animals. Seventy men from one German regiment alone were killed or
wounded in the street fighting, and several Trenton residents were killed in the crossfire on their
doorsteps. During the action many of these civilians turned on their unwelcome Hessian guests,
firing muskets at fleeing Germans from the open windows of their own kitchens and parlors. The
American infantry lines also pressed forward. Turning to help a dying aide, Colonel Rall was
suddenly struck twice in the side. Reeling in the saddle, his men dragged him into the nearby
church and laid him out on an empty pew.
At this, the bulk of the Hessian defenders broke ranks and retreated back toward the far
side of the apple orchard. The Americans pushed through the town after them, flushing out
Hessian stragglers attempting to hide in basements and root cellars. Washington joined in on the
chase with the same gusto he had exhibited hunting foxes in his Mount Vernon woods. The
young Greenwood, whose regiment had just passed by the two brass cannons, “by the side of
which lay seven dead Hessians,” watched in exhilaration as the general “on horseback and alone,
came up to our major and said, ‘March on, my brave fellows, after me!’ and rode off.”63
With Washington riding pell-mell across the battlefield, pressing his men forward, the
American lines finally ensnared the surviving Hessians behind the orchard. The volunteer
German immigrants in Washington’s army began to call out to the Hessians in their own
language urging them to “stack their weapons and surrender.”64 As most of the Hessian officers
had by now been killed or wounded, the Germans readily agreed. An American officer, after
riding out to offer terms of peace, returned behind the rebel lines carrying a wounded German
captain across his saddle. Pressing the fight to the very end, Washington rode up to Captain
Thomas Forrest’s Pennsylvania battery on the hill to order another devastating round of artillery
when Forrest stopped him:
“Sir, they have struck.”
“Struck!”
“Yes, their colours are down.”
Washington turned in his saddle. “So they are.”65
Roughly an hour had passed since Washington’s troops had first charged the cooper shop,
but the battle was not quite over. Shots were still being fired down toward the Assunpink Creek
where the escaping remnants of the third Hessian regiment suddenly found themselves cut off by
New Englanders, many of them members of Glover’s Regiment. A large number of the Hessians,
including twenty members of a British unit of dragoons, had crossed the stone bridge early in the
battle, but escape was hopeless now. Rebel sailors and fishermen had seized the crossing and
now controlled the high banks on the far side of the creek. The Germans, trapped on muddy
ground, laid down their weapons and carried their wounded major off of the field.
Washington rode toward the sound of the muskets but only made it half of the way before
he met a breathless rider coming from the direction of the bridge. This was the same Major
Wilkinson who had ducked the commander-in-chief’s rage the previous evening when he had
delivered his message from Gates. Now the courier was delighted to report his news that the last
Hessian party had surrendered. Grinning broadly, Washington offered his hand to the aide for a
celebratory handshake. “Major Wilkinson,” Washington beamed, “this is a glorious day for our
country.”66
(Sample Chapter) First In War
Notes to Pages (Sample)
GW = George Washington
LDC = Letters of Delegates to Congress
WGW = The Writings of George Washington
1
General William Maxwell to General Adam Stephen, 10 April 1777, Stephen Papers, Library of Congress, as
quoted in Harry M. Ward, General William Maxwell and the New Jersey Continentals (Westport, Conn., 1997), 59,
197.
2
Thomas Rodney to Caesar Rodney, Dec. 30 1776, quoted in Willard Sterne Randall, George Washington, A Life,
(New York, New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1997), 323.
3
James Wilkinson, as quoted in William S. Stryker, Battles of Trenton and Princeton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1898), 32.
4
John Greenwood, as quoted in Isaac J. Greenwood, ed., The Revolutionary Services of John Greenwood of Boston
and New York, 1775-1783 (New York: De Vinne Press, 1922), 82.
5
George Ross to James Wilson, Nov. 26, 1777 in Paul Smith, ed., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774-1789
(LDC), 26 vols., Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1976, vol. 5, 547.
6
Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency, George Washington, (New York, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 113.
7
Edward Tatum, Jr., ed., The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, (New York: New York Times/Arno Press, 1969),
35.
8
Greenwood, Revolutionary Services of John Greenwood of Boston and New York, 39.
9
James Wilkinson, as quoted in William M. Dwyer, The Day Is Ours! November 1776-January 1777: An Inside
View of the Battles of Trenton and Princeton (New York: Viking Press, 1983), 232.
10
Henry Knox to Lucy Flucker Knox, Dec. 28, 1776, as quoted in David Hackett Fischer, Washington's Crossing,
(New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 218.
11
Ibid,, 219.
12
George Washington (GW), General Orders, July 2, 1776, in John Clement Fitzpatrick, ed.,
The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources (WGW), 38 vols., (Washington, D.C:
United States Government Printing Office, 1931-44), vol. 5, 211.
13
GW to John Augustine Washington, Dec. 18, 1776, in WGW 6:396.
14
Sir William Howe to Lord George Germain, Dec. 20, 1776, in Correspondence of Charles, First Marquis
Cornwallis, Vol I, Charles Ross, Esq., ed., (London: John Murray, Albemarle St., 1859), 25.
15
GW to John Augustine Washington, Dec. 18, 1776, in WGW 6:396.
16
Pennsylvania Council of Safety Proclamation, as quoted in Richard M. Ketchum, The Winter Soldiers: The Battles
for Trenton and Princeton, (New York, New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1973), 205.
17
John Adams to Elizabeth Adams, Dec. 9, 1776, in LDC 6:590-91.
18
GW to Robert Morris, Dec. 22, 1776, in WGW 6:420.
19
GW to John Augustine Washington, March 31, 1776, in WGW 4:445-52.
20
Friedrich von Muenchhausen, At General Howe’s Side, 1776-1778: The Diary of General William Howe’s Aide
de Camp, Captain Friedrich von Muenchhausen, translated by Ernst Kipping and annotated by Samuel Smith,
(Monmouth Beach, New Jersey: Philip Freneau Press, 1974), 7.
21
Charles Lee to Joseph Reed, Nov. 24, 1776, as quoted in Washington Irving, Life of George Washington, vol. 1,
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1876), 303.
22
GW to Lund Washington, Dec. 17, 1776, in WGW 6:345.
23
William Hooper to Joseph Hewes, Nov. 30, 1776, in LDC 5:557-58.
24
Undated intelligence memorandum, Library of Congress: James Grant Papers, reel 37, as quoted in Edward G.
Lengel, General George Washington: A Military Life, (New York, New York: Random House, 2005), 177.
25
Joseph Reed to GW, Dec. 22, 1776, in William Bradford Reed, Life and Correspondence of Joseph Reed, vol. 1,
(Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1847), 272.
26
GW to Joseph Trumbull, Sr., Dec. 14, 1776, in WGW 6:365.
Joseph Reed to GW, Dec. 22, 1776, in Reed, Life and Correspondence of Joseph Reed, 272.
28
GW to Joseph Reed, Dec. 23, 1776, in ibid., 274.
29
Henry Mercer to Durkee, Dec. 25, 1776, in Stryker, The Battles of Trenton and Princeton, 359.
30
James Wilkinson, Memoirs of My Own Times, (Philadelphia, 1816; rpt. 1973), 1:126.
31
Ibid., as quoted in Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 210.
32
GW to John Hancock, Dec. 27, 1776, in WGW 6:442. On the beehive see Ketchum, The Winter Soldiers, 252.
33
George Morgan, The Life of James Monroe, (Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, 1921), 438.
34
Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 225.
35
For an excellent biographical sketch of Greene, including the quoted descriptors, see David McCullough, 1776,
(New York, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 31-36.
36
William S. Powell, "A Connecticut Soldier Under Washington: Elisha Bostwick's Memoirs of the First Years of
the Revolution." William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series. 6 (January, 1949), 102.
37
Thomas Jefferson, quoted in Paul K. Longmore, The Invention of George Washington (Berkley, CA: University of
California Press, 1988), p. 182.
38
Ibid.
39
Thomas Paine, as quoted in Jack Fruchtman, Jr., Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom, (New York, New York:
Four Walls, Eight Windows, 1994), 90.
40
Thomas Paine, “The Crisis,” in Moncure Daniel Conway, ed., The Writings of Thomas Paine: Vol. 1, 1774-1779,
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894), 170.
41
John Adams as quoted by Jill Lepore, “The Sharpened Quill: Was Thomas Paine Too Much of a Freethinker for
the Country He Helped Free?,” New Yorker, Oct. 16, 2006, 170. This quote has been attributed to Adams as a
statement of 1805—Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward, eligion and oliti al Tho ght, (London: The Continuum
International Publishing Group, 2006), 137—however conflicting attribution is made to the American poet and
diplomat Joel Barlow by Harvey J. Kaye, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, (New York: Hill and Wang,
2006), 5.
42
Ibid.
43
The Crisis was “read in the camp, to every corporal’s guard, and in the army, and out of it had more than the
intended effect.” James Cheetham, Life of Thomas Paine (New York, 1809), 56.
44
Samuel Stelle Smith, The Battle of Trenton (Monmouth Beach, N.J., 1965), citing Pennsylvania Magazine of
History and Biography 8:394.
45
Greenwood, Revolutionary Services of John Greenwood of Boston and New York, 39.
46
Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 223.
47
Greenwood, Revolutionary Services of John Greenwood of Boston and New York, 39.
48
Ibid., 228.
49
William Hull to Andrew Adams, Jan.1, 1777, as quoted in Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 230.
50
GW to John Hancock, Dec. 27, 1776, in WGW 6:442.
51
Jakob Piel, “Diary of the Hessian Lieutenant [Jakob] Piel, 1776 to 1783,” ed. Bruce E. Burgoyne, Johannes
Schalm Historical Association Journal 4 (1989), 14 (Dec. 26, 1776).
52
Ibid.
53
Dwyer, The Day Is Ours!, 222.
54
James Grant to Johann Rall, Dec. 21, 1776, as quoted in Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 197.
55
James Grant, speech, 1775, as quoted in Robert Leckie, George Washington's War: The Saga of the American
Revolution, (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 149.
56
Bruce Burgoyne, ed., Enemy Views: The American Revolutionary War as Recorded by the Hessian Participants
(Bowie, Md., 1996), 91, 117, 346.
57
For validity of the conversation between GW and Adam Stephen see source notes for Fischer, Washington’s
Crossing, 232, 517.
58
GW to John Hancock, Dec. 27, 1776, in WGW 6:444.
59
Ibid., 442.
60
Greenwood, Revolutionary Services of John Greenwood of Boston and New York, 40.
61
Henry Knox to Lucy Flucker Knox, Dec. 28, 1776, as quoted in Stryker, Battles of Trenton and Princeton, 371.
62
Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 231.
63
Greenwood, Revolutionary Services of John Greenwood of Boston and New York, 42.
27
64
Smith, Trenton, 24.
Wilkinson, Memoirs, 1:129-30. For a reconciliatory view of differing accounts of this event see source notes for
Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 251, 520.
66
Douglas Southall Freeman, Washington, abridged by Richard Harwell (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1968), 321.
65