Meanwhile, to continue to cut off Rall’s line of retreat and to play his leading role in closing the southern arm of Washington’s encirclement movement in the lower town, Glover encouraged his mariners onward across the Assunpink Creek Bridge. With bayonet-attached muskets, the breathless New Englanders filed across the stone bridge, trotting through the steadily dropping snow in high spirits, as if on a light rain shower on a soft April morning along the rocky coast of eastern Massachusetts, and basking in another sparkling tactical success.
Moving swiftly, these tough New England veterans, with muskets and blunderbusses on shoulders, were careful about their footing on the stone surface covered with ice. As a precaution and thinking ahead as usual, Glover barked out orders for two Marblehead companies to serve as guardians at each end of the bridge. Glover knew that the Assunpink bridge had to be now kept in American hands at all costs. After skillful tactical maneuvering that was as swift as it was efficient, Glover now held the key position to effectively block any future Hessian effort to force passage over the easiest crossing point along this rain-swollen tidal creek.
However, Glover typically refused to rest on his laurels or bask in his most recent success while an intensifying battle was yet raging fiercely under dark, leaden skies. The opportunistic Marblehead commander instinctively knew that he had to keep his troops moving on the double to exploit the tactical advantage and achieve greater gains. Keeping up the momentum, Glover, consequently, continued to demonstrate even more resourcefulness and initiative that separated winner from loser on this bitter Thursday morning.
After crossing the Assunpink, therefore, he immediately shifted his troops to the left, or east. Glover’s men then pushed up a lengthy east-west ridge, nestled between the overflowing creek and the equally high Delaware, which commanded the wide creek bottom to the north. Here, immediately below, or south, of the stone bridge, the narrow road to Bordentown turned east to ascend the ridge that closely paralleled the creek before following this snow-covered strip of high ground in an easterly direction. Fortunately, this little road, Glover’s new avenue to reaping additional tactical gains, provided easy access for his brigade’s artillery to be hauled up the snowy slope by teams of hard-working New England gunners’ tired horses lashed by drivers. Across the commanding terrain, Captain Winthrop Sargent then hurriedly deployed his two Massachusetts six-pounders to protect the bridge and support the two companies of Glover’s infantrymen, who now gained their breath after having won the race to gain the vital bridge. Most importantly, Knox’s artillerymen now held the most dominant high ground on both the north and south of Trenton, sandwiching the battered Hessian brigade between an encroaching ring of cannonfire, whose deep, harsher voices thundered above the crisp and sharper chorus of crackling musketry.
Now saddled with the key mission of safeguarding the Assunpink bridge, Captain Winthrop Sargent, a young artillery officer from Boston, was Colonel Sargent’s intellectual nephew, who had graduated from Harvard. The young man had been born in the fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, as the prodigal son of a wealthy Massachusetts militia colonel. Therefore, brigade commander Sargent felt pride upon viewing the sight of nephew Winthrop’s fast-working six-pounders firing on the Knyphausen Regiment, including fusiliers like twenty-one-year-old Ensign Heinrich Zimmermann, from the high ground just below the Assunpink bridge. Such timely action continued a distinguished Sargent family tradition of invaluable military service in their homeland’s defense. Despite his youth and scholarly ways, Captain Sargent was a resourceful long-arm commander. He also possessed longtime common maritime experiences like Glover, having served as a seafaring captain on one of his father’s sailing ships.45 As fully expected by Washington, meanwhile, Colonel Glover and his swarthy fishermen and rawboned sailors continued to surpass themselves as hard-hitting infantrymen, demonstrating how these versatile Marbleheaders, as they had so boldly warned earlier in 1776, “would not tamely part with their rights and Liberties,” especially to foreign soldiers from Germany.46
Just north of the Assunpink’s dark, high waters, meanwhile, Colonel Stark overcame all resistance to finally reach his tactical objective of Queen Street. Stark typically remained at the forefront near where Second Street met Queen Street, with his New Hampshire boys blasting away at the remaining Knyphausen soldiers. Like an ancient Celtic warrior from his family’s picturesque ancestral homeland of Ulster Province, Stark continued to perform like an unleashed force of nature. Exceeding expectations was nothing new for Stark. He had encouraged his Continentals to aim lower and fire faster on that bloody June day at Breed’s Hill. But Stark was now essentially accomplishing what he had always done best when he had led his green-coated mostly Scotch-Irish frontiersmen of Rogers’ Rangers as the legendary major’s dependable right-hand man for four years. As an impetuous young man from the unruly Merrimack Valley frontier he had hunted the White Hills with Rogers himself, so these harsh winter conditions were nothing new to him. In fact, Stark seemed almost invigorated by the snowstorm’s rigors, leading his New Hampshire Continentals with a demonic fury that even astounded the reeling Hessians. Most of all, he was motivated by the burning desire to crush every single Hessian who stood before him, as when he, in authentic Indian dress, had led Rogers’ Rangers against the hated “French dogs” in the north country wilderness.47
Lieutenant Piel, dispatched by Rall on the crucial mission to ascertain if the Assunpink bridge was open, finally reached the bridge’s vicinity. Here, he was shocked to see that the entire area, including the snow-covered high ground located just south of the creek, was swarming with Americans. In astonishment, the yet unmarried lieutenant, in his mid-thirties, also saw that Glover had already set up a secure roadblock on the bridge’s other side, holding a good defensive position bolstered by Captain Sargent’s two Massachusetts six-pounders. Clearly, the escape route south across the bridge to safety was now closed shut not only to the Knyphausen Regiment but also the von Lossberg and Rall Regiments.
An out-of-breath, glum Lieutenant Piel finally returned north up Queen Street to his beleaguered command and brought the disturbing news to Rall. With Piel’s stunning report tumbling from his mouth and the angry growl of Captain Sargent’s Massachusetts cannon to the south echoing like thunder in his ears to mock his best efforts, Colonel Rall, an overachieving sergeant’s son from Hesse-Cassel, now realized that he had missed his last chance to escape south. Ironically, the strategic Assunpink bridge had remained firmly in Hessian hands for nearly an hour this morning after the battle opened: a missed opportunity for the Rall brigade to slip away from Washington’s entrapment and fight another day. While Washington’s masterful double envelopment closed tighter like a noose to slowly choke more of the fast-fading life out of the Hessian brigade, Rall’s never-say-die attitude, determination to prevail in the end, and sense of professional pride had ensured that this elite brigade had not attempted to escape south.
After digesting the gloomy tidings that the Assunpink bridge was firmly in Glover’s hands, Rall realized that his tactical dilemma was even greater than anticipated. Indeed, by this time, hundreds of shouting, elated Americans continued to advance and fire on the run toward the hemmed-up Hessians on three sides, while an ever-increasing volume announced the glowing success of Washington’s almost complete encirclement of the Rall brigade, which was now all but vanquished, or so it seemed to the most optimistic Americans.48
Indeed, while Washington’s troops of both divisions advanced from three directions, Rall’s brigade was not yet united. Hessian offensive and defensive efforts had been disjointed and piecemeal all morning, assisting in the fulfillment of Washington’s divide-and-conquer formulate for success. A host of self-inflicted wounds by the Hessians themselves had significantly reduced the Rall brigade’s overall combat capabilities and, hence, chances for survival by this time.
On this day of destiny when every soldier in the ranks was needed to prevail, Washington was not hampered by hesitation, self-doubt,
or indecision unlike his vexed opponent, who had been victimized by the most brilliant tactical plan of the war. Seemingly, every Continental soldier on the field was now actively engaged in doing all their power to vanquish the Hessian brigade when so much was at stake. And now with the Assunpink bridge secured by Glover, the Rall’s brigade’s best escape route south out of the nightmarish urban cauldron was now closed forever, ensuring that the Hessians would have to do or die on this bloody morning. All the while, Washington’s brilliant tactical trap was closing tighter around the finest Hessian brigade in America, and sealing its fate as never before.
Desperate Attempt to Gain the Trenton-Princeton Road
No eighteenth-century soldiers could stand up to such severe punishment, both artillery and musketry, which was now delivered upon the Hessians, just east of Queen Street, from three sides. To additionally diminish the Rall brigade’s combat capabilities, two field pieces had been captured, leaving only three three-pounders operable after the disabling of one Knyphausen field piece on Queen Street by the accurate fire of Hamilton’s New York gunners. This rapidly deteriorating situation and the systematic silencing of half of the Rall’s brigade’s artillery now meant that the von Lossberg, Rall, and Knyphausen Regiments, from north to south and just east of Queen Street, were now outgunned by more than five-to-one by Knox’s guns: a disastrous ratio for Hessian fortunes.
While the dwindling number of Hessians were steadily punished by cannonfire and musketry in the front from the north, they also continued to be raked on the left flank by Mercer and Stirling’s troops from the west and northwest, and Sullivan’s soldiers fired into them from the south and southwest as well. After additional muskets were cleaned off and flints were dried or chipped and larger numbers of Washington’s men found better firing positions, the volume of gun fire increased from the troops of Mercer’s brigade from the west, Haslet’s Delaware men from the northwest, and Stirling’s other soldiers of his Delaware, Virginia, and Pennsylvania brigade from the north. With blazing rifles and smoothbore muskets, these well-positioned soldiers from Maryland, Connecticut, and Massachusetts of Mercer’s brigade blasted away from the windows of second-story wooden structures and from open spaces between houses. What was becoming increasingly obvious was that for Rall’s three regiments to simply remain stationary was now a certain guarantee of not only a thorough decimation of ranks, but also of the brigade’s complete encirclement and destruction.
However, caught amid a confusing urban battle and surrounded on three sides by elated American soldiers surging forward and firing on the move, Rall possessed very few tactical options or solutions at this time. Many Hessian troops had been already cut down or escaped across the Assunpink bridge, before secured permanently by Glover. And an unknown number of Rall’s soldiers, unnerved by the savagery of urban combat, stayed under cover or hid in darkened houses to escape Washington’s wrath rather than attempting to fight out in the open against the harsh elements and the even harsher American tide that was unstoppable.
By this time, Ensign Carl Wilhelm Kleinschmidt, the Rall Regiment’s acting adjutant, who had killed a fellow officer in a duel aboard their ship during the long journey to America and who became an American soldier in 1781, had regained the regimental banners from the von Lossberg fusiliers of the von Hanstein Company. While lamenting how so “many men of the regiment had already been wounded,” he then restored these sacred flags to the Rall Regiment’s color company to lift the grenadier’s morale and fighting spirit.
With his formations realigned just east of Queen Street north of the Knyphausen Regiment, Rall then wisely ordered his troops to march farther out of town, which had become the swirling eye of the storm. Rall knew that he had to escape the confused fighting and horror of urban warfare that continued to rage fiercely through the streets and along even narrower alleys and houses against a resourceful, highly motivated opponent, who already sensed victory. Rall, therefore, then led his troops farther east beyond Queen Street with intact discipline and the determination to get “out of town” before it was too late.
Most of all, Rall fully realized that he had to move both regiments farther away from the clusters of wooden-frame houses spitting a stream of gunfire and out of what had become a roaring hornet’s nest. Rall made his decision. With his one remaining field piece in tow, consequently, Rall’s troops headed toward the relative safety of open ground on the town’s eastern outskirts, the apple orchard. The generally level terrain of the apple orchard, located to the east and just south of Petty’s Run, offered a relatively safe haven for the two regiments to reorganize and gain a breather from Washington’s fierce onslaught.
Here, in the relative security of the little apple orchard, Rall would also gain time to confer with his top lieutenants and contemplate his next tactical move in an increasingly no-win situation. However, the Rall and von Lossberg Regiments had to first cross over marshy, low-lying ground just south of Petty’s Run, known as “the Swamp” to locals, who wisely knew better than to enter this morass, even in winter.49 Relieved to finally escape the blinding swirl of urban combat and the palls of battle-smoke that lay like a cloud over Trenton, Lieutenant Wiederhold described in his diary how Rall, after displaying some hesitation about the proper course of action, then “moved out his regiment to the right [east] of the city, under the apple trees,” and away from Trenton that had become hell on earth for the hard-pressed Germans.50 In a letter to “my dear Lucy,” Knox basked in the glow of what had been accomplished in hurling the Hessians out of the war-torn town: “It must give a sensible pleasure to every friend of the rights of man to think with how much intrepidity our people pushed the enemy” out of Trenton.51
The unbelievable sight of so many Hessians retiring east and moving like clockwork in a close-order formation out of Trenton provided an instinctive signal, unleashing Washington’s troops to take off in pursuit of their quarry. In the words of one Virginian who described how “Our cannon [especially Captain Hamilton’s guns in firing down Queen Street by also from cannon firing from the west] dispersed them and the fight became a chase” through the smoke-filled streets amid the falling snow and sleet.52 By marching his well-organized troops east to reach the open ground “under the apple trees,” Rall hoped to gain better visibility away from Trenton’s fiery cauldron and develop new tactical options. Most of all, Rall also sought to minimize his losses and maintain command cohesion in the hope of somehow regaining the initiative to strike back and yet turn the tide. Escaping Trenton’s deadly streets, slick with a mixture of ice, snow and blood, and reaching the open ground of the apple orchard east of town offered a sanctuary of sorts for the Hessians, but only in relative terms.
Once he aligned his disciplined grenadiers and fusiliers in the apple orchard beyond the dark row of Trenton’s outlying fringe of easternmost houses, the shrieks of the dying, and the sulphurous canopy, Rall carefully surveyed the tactical situation. He now quickly developed a new plan that was as bold as it was audacious. Most of all, Rall was proving that he was a tactically flexible commander, who had long smoothly adjusted to fast-paced tactical developments on conventional battlefields and excelled in consequence.
However, everything was now entirely different. Rall faced the unprecedented and imposing challenge of confronting a victorious, confident opponent advancing on two fronts, which guaranteed no ready answers or easy tactical solutions. As in earlier having taken the offensive in an attempt to capture the commanding terrain at King Street’s head, Rall once again realized that he had to launch another desperate offensive effort, or his cherished brigade was doomed to certain annihilation.
Consequently, Rall flew into action, making hasty preparations to lash out once again at his swarming tormentors. He now planned hit and turn Washington’s exposed left flank (the left of Stirling’s brigade), which was yet hanging in midair, just northeast of the head of Queen Street. But in no small part because the unrelenting storm was yet to his back, Washington’s high ground perch
allowed the commander-in-chief, who was like a vigilant hawk this morning, to survey the roaring battlefield, unlike Rall who could see relatively little from lower-lying ground, where a rising pall of sulphurous smoke and the falling snow obscured vision on a morning when the sun was obscured by black clouds, at the apple orchard along Petty’s Run. Therefore, Rall’s preparations for his next move in what was turning out to be a chess game for the possession of Trenton and his adroit tactical adjustments out of urgent necessity were early ascertained by Washington.53
Even though Rall had escaped Trenton’s suffocating confines and gained more ability to maneuver after reaching the open ground of the apple orchard, Washington’s vise was still rapidly closing in on the Hessian colonel and his beleaguered survivors, who were now positioned just south of Petty’s Run. In fact, the Rall and von Lossberg Regiments were now more exposed on the open ground, blanketed in a thick layer of snow, east of town, if the Americans continued to advance east and converge upon them in overwhelming numbers. Perhaps Rall might have been wiser to have made a defensive stand inside the row of wooden houses on Trenton’s eastern outskirts, where his Rall and von Lossbergtroops could have at least dried off weapons and had a better chance to defend themselves while awaiting reinforcements—first from the Knyphausen Regiment just to the south and then garrison troops from either Princeton or Bordentown, or both—rather than aligning out in an exposed position amid open orchard east of Queen Street.
George Washington's Surprise Attack Page 58
