Section III

ON CHRISTMAS EVE, Washington called a meeting at Greene’s headquarters to go over the final details.

The army was to attack across the Delaware at three places. A force of 1,000 Pennsylvania militia and some 500 veteran Rhode Island troops, led by General John Cadwalader and Joseph Reed, were to cross downriver at Bristol and advance toward Burlington.

A second smaller force of 700 Pennsylvania militia under General James Ewing was to attack directly across the river at Trenton and hold the wooden bridge over Assunpink Creek at the foot of Queen Street, which the enemy might use as an escape route.

The third and much the largest force of 2,400 of the Continental Army led by Washington, Greene, Sullivan, and Stirling would cross the Delaware, nine miles upstream from Trenton, at McKonkey’s Ferry.

Once over the river, Washington’s army would head south, then halfway to Trenton divide into two columns, one led by Sullivan, taking the River Road, the other, commanded by Greene, taking the Pennington Road farther inland. Four of Knox’s cannon were to advance at the head of each column. Washington would ride with Greene.

According to the latest intelligence, the enemy’s force at Trenton numbered between 2,000 and 3,000 men.

The first step, the crossing, was set for midnight, December 25, Christmas night. By marching through the night, the two columns were to arrive at Trenton no later than five in the morning. The attack was set for six, an hour before daylight. Officers were to have a piece of white paper in their hats to distinguish them. Absolute secrecy was demanded. A “profound silence” was to be observed, the orders read, “and no man to quit his ranks on pain of death.”

Christmas Day the weather turned ominous. A northeast storm was gathering. The river was up, and filled with broken sheets of ice.

In the course of the day, Joseph Reed arrived from Bristol, accompanied by Congressman and physician Benjamin Rush, who, since the adjournment of Congress, had reported to Reed and Cadwalader to volunteer his services. Years later, Rush would recall a private meeting with Washington at Buckingham, during which Washington seemed “much depressed.” In “affecting terms,” he described the state of the army. As they talked, Washington kept writing something with his pen on small pieces of paper. When one of them fell to the floor by Rush’s foot, he saw what was written: “Victory or Death.” It was to be the password for the night.

When Rush, or possibly Reed, warned the general not to expect very much from the militiamen under Cadwalader, Washington scratched out a note that he asked Rush to take to Cadwalader as soon as possible:

I am determined, as the night is favorable, to cross the river and make an attack on Trenton in the morning. If you can do nothing real, at least create as great a diversion as possible.

The crossing of Washington’s force was to be made in big flat-bottomed, high-sided Durham boats, as they were known, normally used to transport pig iron on the Delaware from the Durham Iron Works near Philadelphia. Painted black and pointed at both ends, they were forty to sixty feet long, with a beam of eight feet. The biggest of them could carry as many as forty men standing up, and fully loaded they drew only about two feet, and so could be brought close to shore. The oars—or sweeps—used to propel the boats were eighteen feet long.

Henry Knox was to organize and direct the crossing, and the biggest, most difficult part of the task, as he knew, would be transporting eighteen field cannon and fifty horses or more, including those of the officers. Again, as at Brooklyn, John Glover and his men were in charge of the boats.

Before leaving his headquarters to lead the march, Washington, in what seems to have been a state of perfect calm, wrote to Robert Morris, “I agree with you that it is vain to ruminate upon, or even reflect upon the authors of our present misfortunes. We should rather exert ourselves, and look forward with hopes, that some lucky chance may yet turn up in our favor.”

Drums rolled in the camps, and starting about two in the afternoon the army began moving out for the river, each man carrying sixty rounds of ammunition and food enough for three days.

***

IT WAS NEARLY DARK and raining when the first troops reached McKonkey’s Ferry where the boats waited. Henry Knox’s unmistakable bass voice could be heard bellowing orders above the rising wind and rain. According to one account, had it not been for the powerful lungs and “extraordinary exertions” of Knox, the crossing that night would have failed.

Knox himself later praised the heroic efforts of Glover and his men, describing how ice in the river made their labor “almost incredible,” and the “almost infinite difficulty” they had getting the horses and cannon on board the boats.

The Delaware was not so broad at McKonkey’s Ferry as at Trenton or below Trenton, where it became a tidal estuary. Under normal conditions the width of the river at McKonkey’s Ferry was about eight hundred feet, but with the water as high as it was that night, the distance was greater by fifty feet or more, and the current strong, the ice formidable, as all accounts attest.

Glover’s men used oars and poles to get the big boats across. The troops went standing, packed on board as close as possible.

Washington crossed early and watched the slow process from the New Jersey side. About eleven o’clock, the storm struck, a full-blown northeaster.

Among the most vivid firsthand accounts of the night was that of John Greenwood, the young fifer from Boston, who after the march to New York in April had been sent off to serve in Canada and had only just rejoined Washington’s army.

Fifes not being a priority under the circumstances, sixteen-year-old Greenwood carried a musket like every other man and crossed in one of the first boats.

Over the river we then went in a flat-bottomed scow [he wrote]…and we had to wait for the rest and so began to pull down fences and make fires to warm ourselves, for the storm was increasing rapidly. After a while it rained, hailed, snowed, and froze, and at the same time blew a perfect hurricane, so much so that I perfectly recollect, after putting the rails on to burn, the wind and fire would cut them in two in a moment, and when I turned my face to the fire, my back would be freezing. However…by turning myself round and round I kept myself from perishing.

As during the escape from Brooklyn, Washington’s other daring river-crossing by night, a northeaster was again, decisively, a blessing and a curse—a blessing in that it covered the noise of the crossing, a curse in that, with the ice on the river, it was badly slowing progress when time was of the essence. The plan was to have the whole army over the river no later than midnight, in order to reach Trenton before dawn.

According to Washington, it was three o’clock, three hours behind schedule, before the last of the troops, horses, and cannon were across.

At that point the attack might have been called off, the men sent back over the river, since the entire plan rested on the element of surprise and the chances for surprise now seemed gone. It was a decision that could not be delayed and involved great risk either way.

Washington decided without hesitation. As he would explain succinctly to John Hancock, “I well knew we could not reach it [Trenton] before day was fairly broke, but as I was certain there was no making a retreat without being discovered, and harassed on repassing the river, I determined to push on at all events.”

Downstream, as he had no way of knowing, the other part of his plan was failing badly. General Ewing had called off his attack on Trenton because of ice in the river. At Bristol, where ice was piled higher even than at Trenton, Cadwalader and Reed had succeeded in getting some of their troops over to the other side, but then, unable to move their cannon across, they, too, had called off the attack.

“It was as severe a night as I ever saw,” wrote an officer with Cadwalader,

and after two battalions were landed, the storm increased so much that it was impossible to get the artillery over, for we had to walk one hundred yards on the ice to get on shore. General Cadwalader, therefore, ordered the whole to retreat again, and we had to stand at least six hours under arms—first to cover the landing, and till all the rest had retreated again—and by this time the storm of wind, rain, hail, and snow with the ice was so bad that some of the infantry could not get back till next day.

Unable to recross the ice with their horses, Reed and another officer chose to stay on the New Jersey side, concealed in the house of a friend.

Thus, of the three planned attacks on the enemy, only one was moving forward and it perilously behind schedule.

The march south from McKonkey’s Ferry was for many the most harrowing part of the night. The storm grew worse, with cold driving rain, sleet, snow, and violent hail. The troops, as Henry Knox wrote, pushed on “with the most profound silence.”

For the first half mile or more the dark road from the ferry was a steep uphill climb. After another two miles the road dropped into a ravine and crossed Jacobs Creek.

John Greenwood remembered moving no faster than a child could walk, stopping frequently, and suffering terribly from the cold.

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 be-numbed with cold that I wanted to go to sleep. Had I been passed unnoticed, I should have frozen to death without knowing it.

In fact, in the course of the night two of the men did freeze to death.

There was little light to see by. A few men carried lanterns, and torches were mounted on some of the cannon.

The entire 2,400 on the march kept together for five miles, as far as a little crossroads called Birmingham, where the army divided, Sullivan’s column keeping to the right on the River Road, while Washington’s and Greene’s force veered off to the left on the Pennington Road, both routes slick with ice and snow. The distance to Trenton was the same either way, about four miles. Men and horses kept slipping and skidding in the dark.

A Connecticut lieutenant, Elisha Bostwick, remembered Washington coming along on his horse, telling the men “in a deep and solemn voice” to keep with their officers. “For God’s sake keep with your officers.”

When his army had marched out of Boston heading for New York and their first field of battle, the commander-in-chief had traveled by coach. Much of the time since, he had conducted the war from established headquarters in elegant houses. And though he had been with the army the night of the escape from Brooklyn and through the retreat across New Jersey, until now he had never been with them as a field commander on the attack.

When handed a message from General Sullivan saying that the men had found their guns too soaked to fire, Washington answered, “Tell the general to use the bayonet.”

“None but the first officers knew where we were going, or what we were about,” John Greenwood wrote.

This was not unusual, however, as I never heard soldiers say anything, nor ever saw them trouble themselves, as to where they were or where they were led. It was enough for them to know that wherever the officers commanded they must go…for it was all the same owing to the impossibility of being in a worse condition than their present one, and therefore the men always liked to be kept moving in expectation of bettering themselves.

The two columns reached their assigned positions outside Trenton at about the same time, a few minutes before eight, an hour after daylight.

TRENTON WAS OFTEN REFERRED TO as a pretty village, which was an exaggeration. With perhaps a hundred houses, an Episcopal church, a marketplace, and two or three mills and iron furnaces, it was, in peacetime, a busy but plain little place of no particular consequence, except that it was at the head of navigation on the river and a stop on the King’s Highway from New York to Philadelphia. There was also a large two-story stone barracks built during the French and Indian War, and the bridge over Assunpink Creek below town.

The principal streets were King Street and Queen Street, which ran parallel toward the river, sloping downhill from the point above town where the Pennington Road and the King’s Highway converged. By Washington’s plan of attack, this point, the head of King and Queen streets, would decide the day.

But in the early light of December 26, in the white blur of the continuing storm, it was difficult to distinguish much of anything about Trenton.

Most of the townspeople had fled, taking as much as possible of their belongings. In the bare houses and the stone barracks were quartered the 1,500 Hessians who occupied the town. Their commander, Colonel Rall, had established himself in an ample frame house on King Street, the home of an owner of an iron furnace, Stacy Potts, who was happy to have the colonel as his guest.

Johann Gottlieb Rall was a sturdy, able career soldier, and at age fifty-six a senior among officers. The command at Trenton had been conferred in recognition of his valor at White Plains and Fort Washington. He was a man of limited imagination. He spoke little or no English and had only contempt for the rebel army. His pleasures were a game of cards, a good drink or two, and martial music, which he relished to the point of absurdity, marching himself with his military band at almost any excuse.

Rall would be roundly criticized later by some of his junior officers for being lazy, lax, indifferent to the possibility of surprise attack, and a drunkard. Captain Johann Ewald, as fair-minded as any Hessian officer who served in America, later wrote that many who criticized Rall after his death were not fit to have carried his sword.

Harassed by rebel patrols that kept coming over the Delaware, Rall had established outposts beyond the town and insisted that each night one company sleep with their muskets ready to be called out at a moment’s notice, and they were called out, it seemed to some, more often than necessary. If anything, the colonel was thought to be too much on edge. (An officer complained in his diary, “We have not slept one night in peace since we came to this place.”)

It was the size of the attack to come, and in such weather, that Rall did not anticipate, and in this he was not alone.

Before departing for New York, General Howe had put James Grant in overall command of the string of outposts in New Jersey. Grant was at Brunswick, twenty-five miles from Trenton. On December 24, he received “certain intelligence” that the rebels were planning an attack on Trenton. While he did not think them “equal to the attempt,” he alerted Rall, telling him to be on guard. Rall received the message at five o’clock the afternoon of the 25th.

Not long after, a dozen Hessians on guard on the Pennington Road beyond town were fired on in the dark by an American patrol, which had quickly withdrawn. Rall himself rode out through the storm to look things over and concluded that this was the attack he had been warned about. On such a night, he assumed nothing more would happen.

Later in the evening Rall attended a small Christmas gathering at the home of a local merchant and was playing cards when, reportedly, a servant interrupted to deliver still another warning message that had been delivered to the door by an unknown Loyalist, and this Rall is said to have thrust into his pocket.

It is not known what time he returned to his quarters or whether, as later said, he had had too much to drink.

***

THE ATTACK BEGAN just after eight o’clock. The Americans under Nathanael Greene came out of the woods and across a field through driving snow about half a mile from town. They were moving fast, at what was called a “long trot.” The Hessians on guard on the Pennington Road had trouble at first making out who they were and how many there were. “The storm continued with great violence,” Henry Knox wrote, “but was in our backs, and consequently in the faces of the enemy.”

The Americans opened fire. The Hessians waited for them to get closer, then fired and began quickly, smoothly falling back into town, exactly as they had been trained to do when retreat was the only choice. Washington thought they performed particularly well keeping up a steady retreating fire.

As Greene’s and Sullivan’s columns converged on the town, Washington moved to high ground nearby on the north where he tried to keep watch on what was happening.

His 2,400 Americans, having been on their feet all night, wet, cold, their weapons soaked, went into the fight as if everything depended on them. Each man “seemed to vie with the other in pressing forward,” Washington wrote.

In town the Hessians came rushing out of their houses and barracks into the streets. Drums beat, the band played, officers shouted orders in German, and as fast as the Hessians began forming up, Knox’s artillery were in position at the head of King and Queen streets.

The cannon opened fire with deadly effect down hundreds of yards on each street, and in minutes—“in the twinkling of an eye,” Knox said—cleared the streets.

When the Hessians retreated into the side streets, they found Sullivan’s men coming at them with fixed bayonets. For a brief time, a thousand or more Americans and Hessians were locked in savage house-to-house fighting.

It was all happening extremely fast, in wild confusion and swirling snow made more blinding by clouds of gunpowder smoke. “The storm of nature and the storm of the town,” wrote Nathanael Greene, “exhibited a scene that filled the mind during the action with passions easier conceived than described.”

When the Hessians rolled out a field gun midway on King Street, a half dozen Virginians led by Captain William Washington (a distant cousin of the commander) and Lieutenant James Monroe rushed forward, seized it, and turned it on them.

Colonel Rall, who had been rousted from his bed and was quickly on horseback and in command in the midst of the fray, ordered a charge. Men were being hit all around him. The line faltered. He ordered a retreat into an orchard at the southeast edge of town. Then Rall, too, was hit and fell from his horse. Mortally wounded, he was picked up and carried to the Potts house.

The Hessians in the orchard, finding themselves surrounded, lay down their arms and surrendered.

It had all happened in forty-five minutes or less. Twenty-one Hessians had been killed, 90 wounded. The prisoners taken numbered approximately 900. Another 500 had managed to escape, most of them by the bridge over Assunpink Creek.

Incredibly, in a battle of such extreme savagery, only four Americans had been wounded, including Captain Washington and Lieutenant Monroe, and not one American had been killed. The only American fatalities were the two soldiers who had frozen to death during the night on the road.

“After having marched off the prisoners and secured the cannon, stores, etc.,” wrote Knox, “we returned to the place nine miles distant, where we had embarked.” Thus after marching through the night a second time, back to McKonkey’s ferry, the army crossed the Delaware once again back to the Pennsylvania side of the river.

***

NOT SINCE TAKING COMMAND the summer of 1775 had Washington ever addressed the army with such words of praise, affection, and gratitude as he did in his general orders for the following day, December 27. And never had he greater reason. It had been their triumph, he wanted them to know.

“The general, with the utmost sincerity and affection, thanks the officers and soldiers for their spirited and gallant behavior at Trenton yesterday,” he began. “It is with inexpressible pleasure that he can declare that he did not see a single instance of bad behavior in either officers or privates.”

In appreciation of such “spirited behavior” he would see that all who had “crossed the river” would receive, in cash, a proportionate part of the total value of the cannon, arms, horses, and “everything else” captured at Trenton.

Allegedly there had been some less-than-stellar behavior, which either Washington did not see or chose to ignore given the spirit of the moment. With the battle over, a number of soldiers reportedly broke into the Hessian rum supply and got roaring drunk.

Far more, however, would be said later and repeated endlessly of Hessians who supposedly, on the morning of the attack, were still reeling drunk or in a stupor from having celebrated Christmas in the Germanic tradition. But there is no evidence that any of them were drunk. John Greenwood, who was in the thick of the fight, later wrote, “I am willing to go upon oath that I did not see even a solitary drunken soldier belonging to the enemy.”

Major James Wilkinson, the young officer who had been present at the capture of General Lee and who also fought at Trenton and later wrote an account of the battle, made no mention of anyone being drunk.

What Wilkinson did record, memorably, was riding to Washington with a message just after the Hessians had surrendered. “On my approach,” he wrote, “the commander-in-chief took me by the hand and observed, ‘Major Wilkinson, this is a glorious day for our country.’ ”

They all felt something of the kind. They knew they had done something big at last. “The troops behaved like men contending for everything that was dear and valuable,” Knox wrote to Lucy. Nathanael Greene told his wife, “This is an important period to America, big with great events.”

Writing to Governor Trumbull earlier, Washington had prophesied that some “lucky blow” would “rouse the spirits of the people,” but he could hardly have imagined how stunning the effect of the news of Trenton would be on the morale of the country.

In a matter of days, newspapers were filled with accounts of Washington’s crossing of the Delaware, the night march and the overwhelming success of the surprise attack, the numbers of prisoners taken, the cannon, arms, swords, horses, even the number of drums and trumpets from Colonel Rall’s military band. But fast post riders and word of mouth spread the story more rapidly still.

John Adlum, the seventeen-year-old private from York, Pennsylvania, who had been captured at Fort Washington and was among the fortunate prisoners—mostly officers—confined to houses in New York and allowed some freedom of movement, wrote later of how he heard the news of Trenton. The owner of a grocery store had pulled him into a back room and kept shaking his hand and trembling with such emotion he was unable to speak.

“I looked at him and thought him crazy or mad,” Adlum wrote, “but as soon as he could give utterance to his word he says to me, ‘General Washington has defeated the Hessians at Trenton this morning and has taken 900 prisoners and six pieces of artillery!’ ”

I did not wait to hear anything more said, but dropped the basket and ran out into the street and passed two [British] sentinels that I had given the countersign on my way to the store. Though they challenged me, I did not stop, but ran as fast as I could to my quarters…. By the time I got home I was quite out of breath and ran into the room where the officers were sitting around the table. Several of them asked what’s the matter, and as soon as I could recover breath to speak I spoke with considerable emphasis: “General Washington has defeated the Hessians at Trenton this morning and has taken 900 prisoners and six pieces of artillery.”

“Who told you so?”

I could not tell as I did not know the gentleman’s name, but I told them it was where I purchased the groceries…. At which some of theofficers laughed and asked me various questions, while others did not say a word and looked very serious, as if doubting the news, and others thought it too good to be true.

Washington was extolled as he had been at Boston, as a hero and savior. “It appears to us that your attack on Trenton was…[a] success beyond expectation,” wrote Robert Morris from Philadelphia on behalf of the Executive Committee of Congress, and this was entirely befitting “a character which we admire and which we have long wished to appear in the world with that brilliancy that success always obtains and which members of Congress know you deserve.”

From Baltimore, addressing Washington on behalf of the entire Congress, John Hancock said that the victory at Trenton was all the more “extraordinary” given that it had been achieved by men “broken by fatigue and ill-fortune.”

But troops properly inspired, and animated by a just confidence in their leader will often exceed expectation, or the limits of probability. As it is entirely to your wisdom and conduct, the United States are indebted for the late success of your arms.

To General James Grant, Howe’s commander of the New Jersey outposts, and thus the one who bore the responsibility for what had happened, Trenton was an “unlucky.”

“cursed” affair, quite beyond comprehension. “ ’Tis an infamous business. I can not account for the misbehavior of the Hessians,” Grant wrote to General Harvey. He had been sure, Grant told Harvey, that the Hessians at Trenton were “as safe as you are in London.”

How Colonel Rall could have failed to act upon the warning he had been given was more than Grant could understand. But then Rall had died of his wounds and would have no chance to speak in his own defense.

In New York, William Howe responded to the news of Trenton by taking immediate action. Cornwallis, his leave canceled, was ordered to return at once to New Jersey with an army of 8,000.

***

WASHINGTON HAD BEEN WEIGHING his next move and worrying over how possibly to keep his army together. His decision, given the way events had turned and his own nature, was not surprising. He would go after the enemy once again.

Thinking that Washington was still in New Jersey, General Cadwalader, in a bold move, had crossed the Delaware downstream at Bristol, and General Mifflin was joining him with more recruits.

On December 29, Washington, Greene, Sullivan, Knox, and their troops were on the move, marching through a six-inch snowfall, to cross the Delaware at McKonkey’s Ferry and nearby Yardley’s Ferry, an undertaking that was as harrowing as the crossing of Christmas night. At Yardley’s Ferry, where Greene’s troops crossed, the river was iced over, just thick enough for the men to pick their way warily across, but too thin for horses and cannon. At McKonkey’s, it was only with the greatest difficulty that Washington and the rest were able to get over. Amazingly, Knox and Glover succeeded this time in transporting some 40 cannon and their horses, twice what had been managed Christmas night.

At Trenton, Washington drew up his forces on a low ridge along the south side of Assunpink Creek, with the Delaware on their left flank, a patch of woods to the right. It was December 30. The following day, the last day of 1776, he made a dramatic appeal to the veteran troops of the Continental Army to stay with him.

Having no authority whatever to do so, he offered a bounty of ten dollars for all who would stay another six months after their enlistments expired that day—a considerable sum for men whose pay was six dollars a month.

“I feel the inconvenience of this advance,” Washington would later tell Congress. “But what was to be done?” To Robert Morris he said more bluntly, “I thought it no time to stand on trifles.”

One of the soldiers would remember his regiment being called into formation and His Excellency, astride a big horse, addressing them “in the most affectionate manner.” The great majority of the men were New Englanders who had served longer than any and who had no illusions about what was being asked of them. Those willing to stay were asked to step forward. Drums rolled, but no one moved. Minutes passed. Then Washington “wheeled his horse about” and spoke again.

“My brave fellows, you have done all I asked you to do, and more than could be reasonably expected, but your country is at stake, your wives, your houses, and all that you hold dear. You have worn yourselves out with fatigues and hardships, but we know not how to spare you. If you will consent to stay one month longer, you will render that service to the cause of liberty, and to your country, which you can probably never do under any other circumstance.”

Again the drums sounded and this time the men began stepping forward. “God Almighty,” wrote Nathanael Greene, “inclined their hearts to listen to the proposal and they engaged anew.”

In the last hours before New Year’s Day, Washington would learn that on December 27, by the vote of Congress, he had been authorized to “use every endeavor,” including bounties, “to prevail upon the troops…to stay with the army….” Indeed, for a period of six months the Congress at Baltimore had made him a virtual dictator.

“Happy it is for this country,” read part of the letter transmitting the resolution, “that the general of their forces can safely be entrusted with the most unlimited power, and neither personal security, liberty, nor property be in the least degree endangered thereby.”

In his letter of reply to the members of Congress, Washington wrote:

Instead of thinking myself freed from all civil obligations by this mark of their confidence, I shall constantly bear in mind that as the sword was the last resort for the preservation of our liberties, so it ought to be the first thing laid aside when those liberties are firmly established.

“The year 1776 is over. I am heartily glad of it and I hope you nor America will ever be plagued with such another,” Robert Morris wrote to Washington on New Year’s Day. But the campaign was not over just yet.

***

BY JANUARY 1, 1777, Cornwallis and his army had reached Princeton. On January 2, Cornwallis left part of his force there, and with 5,500 strong, set off down the road to Trenton, ten miles away.

There had been a sudden thaw and the mud of the road slowed the march.

Colonel Edward Hand and the Pennsylvania riflemen sent to check the enemy advance fought with deadly effect but could only fall back against such a force. By dusk the Americans were retreating back through Trenton, down Queen Street toward the bridge over the Assunpink, and it was only Knox’s cannon from across the creek that held the British at bay.

“The enemy pushed our small party through the town with vigor…[then] advanced within reach of our cannon, who saluted them with great vociferation and some execution,” Knox wrote. British artillery answered and Cornwallis ordered three successive attacks on the bridge, only to be driven back each time.

Dr. Benjamin Rush, who had arrived with Cadwalader’s brigades to help establish a field hospital, wrote later of this his first direct encounter with war. Indeed, Rush was one of the very few signers of the Declaration of Independence yet to see the reality of the war firsthand.

The American army retired and left the British in possession of Trenton. The scene which accompanied and followed this combat was new to me. The first wounded man that came off the field was a New England soldier. His right hand hung a little above his wrist by nothing but a piece of skin. It had been broken by a cannon ball. I took charge of him and directed him to a house on the river which had been appropriated for a hospital. In the evening all the wounded, about 20 in number, were brought to this hospital and dressed by Dr. [John] Cochran, myself, and several young surgeons who acted under our direction. We all lay down on some straw in the same room with our wounded patients. It was now for the first time war appeared to me in its awful plenitude of horrors. I want words to describe the anguish of my soul, excited by the cries and groans and convulsions of the men who lay by my side.

In the last light of day Cornwallis and his commanders had convened to decide whether to carry the attack across the Assunpink still again, or to wait for daylight. “If Washington is the general I take him to be,” one of them, Sir William Erskine, is alleged to have commented, “he will not be found in the morning.” Cornwallis is said to have replied that they would “bag him” in the morning.

It was an understandable decision. Night attacks could be extremely costly and there seemed no reason not to wait.

The British engineer Captain Archibald Robertson thought the Americans had positioned themselves extremely well. “We…durst not attack them,” Robertson recorded in his diary. “They were exactly in the position Rall should have taken when he was attacked, from which he might have retreated towards Borden’s Town [downstream on the Delaware] with very little loss.”

It had turned cold again. The British troops slept that night on the frozen ground and without campfires in order to keep watch on the rebels and their fires across the creek.

But when morning came, the Americans were gone. Leaving a small force to keep the fires burning and make the appropriate noises of an army settling in for the night, Washington and some 5,500 men, horses, and cannon had stolen away in the dark. But instead of heading south to Bordentown as would be expected, he struck off on a wide, daring sweep on little-known back roads to attack Cornwallis’s rear guard at Princeton.

They marched east to Sandtown, then north-northeast to Quaker Bridge by mud roads frozen as hard as rock. Fields along the way were covered with hoarfrost, and with a few dim stars overhead the night was not as dark as it might have been. But for men with scant clothing and broken shoes, or no shoes, it was again an extreme ordeal.

Washington’s plan, as at Trenton, was again to divide his force, with Greene’s column going off to the left, Sullivan’s column to the right.

The battle broke out at sunrise, Friday, January 3, when Greene’s vanguard and British forces ran into each other by chance two miles out from Princeton. General Hugh Mercer with several hundred men went off to the left to destroy a bridge on the King’s Highway, to stop any enemy retreat from the town in that direction. Mercer and his men arrived just as the British commander at Princeton, Colonel Charles Mawhood, and two regiments were setting off from Princeton to join Cornwallis at Trenton.

For the British the appearance of the Americans at that hour and in such numbers was totally unexpected. “They could not possibly suppose it was our army, for that, they took for granted, was cooped up near Trenton,” Knox would write. “I believe they were as much astonished as if an army had dropped perpendicularly upon them. However, they had not much time for consideration.”

Both sides opened fire, and in a battle that quickly escalated on the sweeping open fields and orchard of William Clarke’s farm, the fighting turned as furious as any of the war, the dead and bleeding strewn everywhere.

Mercer, who had dismounted when his horse was hit in the midst of a British bayonet attack, fought with his sword until he was clubbed to the ground, then bayoneted repeatedly—bayoneted seven times—and left for dead. Colonel John Haslet, who tried to rally the brigade, was killed instantly by a bullet in the head.

More Americans rushed forward, many of them Pennsylvania militia with little or no training, who refused to yield, as Washington, Greene, and Cadwalader rode among them to lead the way. The sight of Washington set an example of courage such as he had never seen, wrote one young officer afterward. “I shall never forget what I felt…when I saw him brave all the dangers of the field and his important life hanging as it were by a single hair with a thousand deaths flying around him. Believe me, I thought not of myself.”

“Parade with us, my brave fellows,” Washington is said to have called out to them. “There is but a handful of the enemy, and we will have them directly!”

More Americans descended on the enemy’s flanks and Mawhood and his redcoats were soon in full flight toward Trenton. (“A resolution was taken to retreat,” remembered one of Mawhood’s junior officers, “i.e., run away as fast as we could.”) Washington, unable to resist, spurred his horse and took after them, shouting, “It’s a fine fox chase, my boys!”

The ferocious battle on the Clarke farm, the deciding action of the day, had lasted all of fifteen minutes.

By the time Washington had reigned in his horse and called off the pursuit, another part of the army had entered the town, where some 200 of the British garrisoned there had barricaded themselves inside the large stone main building of the college, Nassau Hall. When Captain Alexander Hamilton and his artillerymen fired a few rounds into the building, the redcoats gave up.

The American dead numbered 23, including Colonel Haslet and General Mercer, who suffered nine days before dying of his wounds. Mercer, a doctor and pharmacist in civilian life who came from Fredericksburg, Virginia, not far from Mount Vernon, had been a favorite of Washington’s.

But losses were greater in British dead and wounded, and the Americans had taken three hundred prisoners. The British, though greatly outnumbered, had put up a fierce fight. But for Washington and the army it was another stunning, unexpected victory.

Washington’s impulse was to push on to Brunswick, to destroy enemy supplies there and capture a British pay chest of 70,000 pounds, and thereby, he speculated, end the war. But his exhausted army was in no shape for another forced march of nineteen miles or another battle, and Greene, Knox, and others talked him out of it, warning of the danger of losing all they had gained “by aiming at too much.”

Thus, the army marched north to Somerset Courthouse and, in the days that followed, on to the comparative security of the hilly, wooded country near the village of Morristown for the duration of the winter.

***

THE CAMPAIGN OF 1776 had ended with a second astonishing victory. Had Washington been born in the days of idolatry, declared the Pennsylvania Journal, he would be worshiped as a god. “If there are spots on his character, they are like the spots on the sun, only discernible by the magnifying powers of a telescope.”

As Nathanael Greene wrote to Thomas Paine, “The two late actions at Trenton and Princeton have put a very different face upon affairs.”

But as thrilling as the news of Princeton was for the country, coming so quickly after the triumph at Trenton, it was Trenton that meant the most, Trenton and the night crossing of the Delaware that were rightly seen as a great turning point. With the victory at Trenton came the realization that Americans had bested the enemy, bested the fearsome Hessians, the King’s detested hirelings, outsmarted them and outfought them, and so might well again.

Among some of the British command, and some skeptical Americans, what happened at Trenton was seen as only a minor defeat, an aggravating affair, but of no great consequence when compared to such large-scale British victories of 1776 as the Battle of Brooklyn or the taking of Fort Washington. Trenton was a “skirmish,” an “engagement,” not a battle.

But some on the British side grudgingly conceded that the “rabble” must henceforth be regarded with new respect. Colonel William Harcourt, the cavalry officer who had led the capture of Charles Lee, wrote in a letter to his father that though the Americans remained ignorant of military order and large-scale maneuver, they had shown themselves capable of great cunning, great industry, and spirit of enterprise. And while it had been “the fashion in this army to treat them in the most contemptible light, they are now become a formidable enemy.”

Measured by the size of its importance to those fighting for the Cause of America, those everywhere in the country who saw Washington and his army as the one means of deliverance of American independence and all that was promised by the Declaration of Independence, Trenton was the first great cause for hope, a brave and truly “brilliant” stroke.

From the last week of August to the last week of December, the year 1776 had been as dark a time as those devoted to the American cause had ever known—indeed, as dark a time as any in the history of the country. And suddenly, miraculously it seemed, that had changed because of a small band of determined men and their leader.

A century later, Sir George Otto Trevelyan would write in a classic study of the American Revolution, “It may be doubted whether so small a number of men ever employed so short a space of time with greater and more lasting effects upon the history of the world.”

Closer to the moment, Abigail Adams wrote to her friend Mercy Otis Warren, “I am apt to think that our later misfortunes have called out the hidden excellencies of our commander-in-chief.”

“ ‘Affliction is the good man’s shining time,’ ” she wrote, quoting a favorite line from the English poet Edward Young.

Mercy Warren, the wife of James Warren and an author, would write in her own history of the American Revolution that there were perhaps “no people on earth in whom a spirit of enthusiastic zeal is so readily kindled, and burns so remarkably, as among Americans.”

The energetic operation of this sanguine temper was never more remarkably exhibited than in the change instantaneously wrought in the minds of men, by the capture of Trenton at so unexpected a moment. From the state of mind bordering on despair, courage was invigorated, every countenance brightened.

***

WITH THE NEW YEAR, news arrived from England that on October 31 in London, His Majesty King George III had once again ridden in splendor from St. James’s Palace to Westminster to address the opening of Parliament on the still-distressing war in America.

Nothing could have afforded me so much satisfaction [said the King] as to have been able to inform you…that my unhappy people [in America], recovered from their delusion, had delivered themselves from the oppression of their leaders and returned to their duty. But so daring and desperate is the spirit of those leaders, whose object has always been dominion and power, that they have now openly renounced all allegiance to the Crown, and all political connection with this country…and have presumed to set up their rebellious confederacies for independent states. If their treason be suffered to take root, much mischief must grow from it.

Another military campaign would be undertaken in America.

The same Whig leaders in Parliament spoke out as they had before, ardently denouncing the “wicked war.” Lord Germain, in response, said the army in America would be reinforced. And as it had before, in what seemed the long-ago October of 1775, the Parliament approved the King’s policy by an overwhelming margin.

When, in March 1777, the news of Trenton reached England, it was said (in the London General Evening Post and elsewhere) that the defeat of the Hessians, while “disagreeable,” was “more than counter-balanced” by the capture of General Lee. Lord Germain saw at once that the importance of the news was the effect it would have on American opinion. Still, he had no doubt that the rebel army was all but finished.

In New Jersey the fighting would continue sporadically as winter wore on. The war itself would continue, endlessly it seemed to many. In all, it would be another six and a half years before the Treaty of Paris ending the war was signed in 1783.

Some who had been with the army and Washington at the beginning, like Joseph Hodgkins, would serve several more years before deciding they had done their duty. Some, like Private Joseph Martin, would serve to the end.

In the campaign in the South that set the stage for the last major battle, at Yorktown, Virginia, Nathanael Greene would prove the most brilliant American field commander of the war. Washington felt that if anything were to happen to him—were Washington to be captured or killed—Greene should become the commander-in-chief.

Of all the general officers who had taken part in the Siege of Boston, only two were still serving at the time of the British surrender at Yorktown, Washington and Greene. Henry Knox, who had become a brigadier general after the Battle of Trenton, and who fought in every battle in which Washington took part, was also present at Yorktown. Greene and Knox, the two young untried New Englanders Washington had singled out at the beginning as the best of the “raw material” he had to work with, had both shown true greatness and stayed in the fight to the finish.

Financial support from France and the Netherlands, and military support from the French army and navy, would play a large part in the outcome. But in the last analysis it was Washington and the army that won the war for American independence. The fate of the war and the revolution rested on the army. The Continental Army—not the Hudson River or the possession of New York or Philadelphia—was the key to victory. And it was Washington who held the army together and gave it “spirit” through the most desperate of times.

He was not a brilliant strategist or tactician, not a gifted orator, not an intellectual. At several crucial moments he had shown marked indecisiveness. He had made serious mistakes in judgment. But experience had been his great teacher from boyhood, and in this his greatest test, he learned steadily from experience. Above all, Washington never forgot what was at stake and he never gave up.

Again and again, in letters to Congress and to his officers, and in his general orders, he had called for perseverance—for “perseverance and spirit,” for “patience and perseverance,” for “unremitting courage and perseverance.” Soon after the victories of Trenton and Princeton, he had written: “A people unused to restraint must be led, they will not be drove.” Without Washington’s leadership and unrelenting perseverance, the revolution almost certainly would have failed. As Nathanael Greene foresaw as the war went on, “He will be the deliverer of his own country.”

The war was a longer, far more arduous, and more painful struggle than later generations would understand or sufficiently appreciate. By the time it ended, it had taken the lives of an estimated 25,000 Americans, or roughly 1 percent of the population. In percentage of lives lost, it was the most costly war in American history, except for the Civil War.

The year 1776, celebrated as the birth year of the nation and for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was for those who carried the fight for independence forward a year of all-too-few victories, of sustained suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, cowardice, disillusionment, defeat, terrible discouragement, and fear, as they would never forget, but also of phenomenal courage and bedrock devotion to country, and that, too, they would never forget.

Especially for those who had been with Washington and who knew what a close call it was at the beginning—how often circumstance, storms, contrary winds, the oddities or strengths of individual character had made the difference—the outcome seemed little short of a miracle.