A Year With George Washington
January 3rd, 1777 – Washington personally leads the counter-attack and defeats the British at Princeton.
Following the demoralizing success of the King’s troops in New York the previous summer, British officers and enlisted men in common were mocking General Washington and his dwindling army. Lord Rawdon, a priggish young officer in his majesty’s service, remarked that the Americans were “broken all to pieces” and he was certain, “It is well nigh over with them.” Despite the laden pompousness of the statement, he was not wrong.
Looming just ahead, December 1st, 1776, was the date that Maryland and New Jersey troops’ enlistments were set to expire. As the date came and went, so did they. More concerning was the devastating news that British Commander-in-Chief Lord Howe had issued a proclamation offering general amnesty to all those who would offer their loyalty to the king. Many did. New Jersey was now crawling with Loyalists.
With more Continental enlistments set to expire at midnight on December 31st, Washington needed an “important stroke,” as he called it. The sleepy town of Trenton, New Jersey, was it.
Howe’s offer of amnesty was mitigated by his troops’ aggressive pillaging of the New Jersey countryside. Foraging parties were indiscriminate in their seizing of whatever they wished for the benefit of the British army or themselves. It mattered not whether the victims were loyal to the crown or to Washington. For the New Jersey residents, this practice dramatically shifted the tide of emotion for the recoated occupiers toward enmity.
Washington’s Adjutant General, and erstwhile confidant Joseph Reed, had psychologically wounded him just weeks before, when, in a letter to General Charles Lee, Washington came to possess, Reed indiscriminately criticized his supposed friend’s leadership ability.
Betrayal, the still lingering defeats of the previous summer, diminishing troop numbers, and conciliatory overtures toward Americans from the crown were just a few of the headwinds General Washington faced at the close of 1776.
And yet, as Abigail Adams would soon write to her friend and patriot Mercy Otis Warren, “I am apt to think that our late misfortunes have called out the hidden Excellencies of our Commander in chief.” She capped her feeling with a fitting quote from the English poet Edward Young, ‘affliction is the good man’s shining time.’ ”
George Washington was the robust embodiment of Young’s moral sentiment, and after his latest victory at Assunpink Creek, was keen to launch another bold stroke.
The suffering and toil of Washington and his men in late 1776 and early 1777 would seem unfathomable to the modern American. They had crossed the treacherous, icy Delaware River on Christmas night and marched straight into the teeth of a violent nor’easter on their way to Trenton. It was cold – bitterly cold – with temperatures in the teens, and the wind blew at forty miles an hour. Many were without shoes or winter clothes. The weather alternated between heavy rain, snow, and a stinging sleet which pelted their faces as they marched.
After an all-night march, the beleaguered men had defeated the Hessians at Trenton and then crossed back over the Delaware only to be asked to crossed it again a week later for The Second Battle of Trenton (or The Battle of Assunpink Creek) on January 2nd 1777.
Not yet fully clothed, warmed or dry, Washington’s soldiers repel three British assaults across Assunpink Bridge before stealing away toward the tiny college town of Princeton for yet another surprise attack on the British garrison encamped there.
Major James Wilkinson recalled his first impressions when they arrived. The morning was “bright, serene and extremely cold, with a hoarfrost that bespangled every object.”
The “serene” moment was interrupted when British Lieutenant Colonel Charles Mawhood, who had been ordered by Lord Cornwallis to make haste to Trenton, came upon an American force at William Clarke’s farm under the command of Brigadier General Hugh Mercer.
Mercer’s brigade had been detached on a discovery mission when Washington learned to his surprise that there were British troops in front of them. Lt. Colonel Mawhood was even more surprised to stumble into an American Brigade and quickly set two regiments (the 17th & 55th) against them behind a fence at Clarke’s orchard. Mercer’s brigade was quickly overwhelmed and began a hasty retreat. General Mercer, a physician from Fredericksburg, Virginia, and a close friend of Washington, was mortally wounded in the melee. Several British soldiers surrounded him, and thinking he was George Washington himself, demanded he surrender, “Call for quarter, you damn rebel!” Rejecting the taunting overture, Mercer shouted back at them, “I am no rebel!” and swung his sword at his captors. He was gashed with a bayonet seven times or more and left to die. His second in command was also killed.
Washington, fearing that Mawhood would divide his army in two, dispatched the Philadelphia Associators’ militia under the command of John Cadwalader. The Associators, though green, fought with a fierce spirit, but a British bayonet charge was too much for them to defend against, as their own Pennsylvania rifles could not hold a bayonet. They followed Mercer’s men in retreat.
Seeing this, General Washington personally halted the retreat and rallied his men for a counterattack. His men recalled that grapeshot was flying all around them, and yet Washington, atop his white steed, was unmoved by the danger.
Colonel John Fitzgerald, Washington’s aide-de-camp, remembered his general’s words as he waved his hat and shouted to his troops, “Parade with us, my brave fellows! There is but a handful of the enemy, and we will have them directly.”
As Washington charged up the hill ahead of his troops, Fitzgerald recalled covering his eyes with his hat as he could not believe such a large and eye-catching target as George Washington would not be shot. When he finally summoned the courage to remove his covering, the great man sat stoically atop his horse while the blue and gray smoke of the battlefield wafted around him.
Thanks to Washington, Mawhood and his redcoats were chased from the field. Some 200 of Mawhood’s escaping troops sought refuge in the town inside Nassau Hall. Alexander Hamilton employed three of his cannon and blasted away at the building until his fellow patriots stormed the door and broke it down. The British, holed up inside, quickly put up a white flag and laid down their arms.
The Battle of Princeton bookended what is now called the Ten Crucial Days. Washington’s feat was so widely admired that no less than noted military authority Frederick the Great remarked, “The achievements of Washington and his little band of compatriots between the 25th of December and the 4th of January, a space of 10 days, were the most brilliant of any recorded in the annals of military achievements.”
Washington’s fellow Americans must have agreed as recruitment soared in the spring, and they now believed that the citizen soldier could go toe-to-toe with the British regulars.
A British loyalist, Nicholas Cresswell, who had come to America in 1774 to explore and record his travels, put it as well as anyone, “A few days ago, they had given up the cause for lost.” With disdain, he concluded, “Their late successes have turned the scale, and now they are all liberty mad again.”
Pray that we shall forever be – “Liberty Mad.”
