George Washington's Surprise Attack

by Phillip Thomas Tucker

  Once again, Forrest and his Philadelphia guns, the six-pounders and five and a half-inch howitzers, were in the right place at the right time, and they opened fire with authority and a renewed fury. Additionally, Captain Moulder’s French four-pounders from Philadelphia and other field pieces of Sullivan’s Division had been moved to east to Queen Street and beyond. But inflicting the most damage were the artillery pieces that blased away at close range and from higher ground just north of Petty’s Run. These well-placed cannon fired on Scheffer’s von Lossberg troops fusiliers situated on lower terrain just below the ice-covered watercourse. Unleashed in unison, this combined cannonfire from two directions, north and west, whizzed around the surviving grenadiers and fusiliers, who were exposed on the open ground of the apple orchard “like a swarm of bees.”43

  Consequently, Scheffer’s final attempt to escape to the northeast was thwarted hardly before it had begun, with the concentrated fire of Washington’s artillery throwing the two boxed-in regiments into some confusion. Artillery explosions erupting around the Hessian ranks caused the two battered regiments to become “mixed together,” ensuring the lack of concerted action. Having played their last hand in yet another thwarted tactical gamble, the bloodied fusiliers and grenadiers were now trapped in the apple orchard, just below the frigid waters of Petty’s Run that afforded little cover. Once again the Hessians attempted to regroup as best they could in the apple orchard. Here, trapped on relatively low ground and in an exposed position upon which it “rained cannon balls and grapeshot here, and the snow, rain and sleet came constantly into our faces,” in Scheffer’s words, the severely punished remnants of the Rall and von Lossberg Regiments awaited their grim fate that was now inevitable.44

  North of Petty’s Run, meanwhile, Colonel Hand played the leading role in the final entrapment of the Rall brigade’s two best regiments. The young, dashing Marylander Major Wilkinson felt confident because the Hessians had sought in vain to move “up the Assunpink, with the apparent inclination to escape to Princeton [but] General Washington threw the brave Colonel Hand and his distinguished rifle corps [and the German Regiment] in their way,” sealing their doom.45 Hand had been born in a little thatched roof cottage in the small farming village of Clydruff, Ireland, just west of Dublin, on Christmas Eve 1744. The twisting course of Hand’s life and even his coincidental birth date (age thirty-two) seemed to have ordained that this hard-fighting Irishman would play a prominent role in reaping decisive victory this Thursday morning.

  Even more ironically, Hand’s combat prowess and leadership skills had been partly the product of more than half a decade of British Army service. He had served in the Eighteenth Regiment of Foot, or the Royal Irish. Besides the honor and memory of old Ireland, Hand also now battled the Hessians for the defense of his transplanted Lancaster, Pennsylvania, homeland, and wife Katharine, called Kitty. Hand had married “My Dearest Kitty,” a young, pretty Scotch-Irish girl, in March 1775, less than three years before. She was the mother of his beloved “Little Sally,” who had been born on December 8, 1775. Hand’s personal odyssey began when he retired from the Royal Irish, who fought at Lexington and Concord, in June 1774, before taking command of his elite rifle regiment of Pennsylvania frontiersmen. The Irishman’s audacious battlefield feats early became the talk of the Continental Army. As written in a recent prophetic letter, Hand fully realized that Philadelphia’s “fate must soon be determin’d,” and this destiny for America’s capital was now being played out the field of Trenton. As revealed in a letter with words that now applied to the climactic showdown at Trenton, Hand had been confident for ultimate success, because “If confidence can be put in a good Cause, and Numbers of as Good Soldiers as I ever saw, we need not doubt success.”46

  Appropriately and to Hand’s liking, no American fighting force now delivered more severe punishment upon the boxed-in Hessians with cascading volleys of close-range musketry during their relentless surge south toward the apple orchard than Colonel Hand and his Pennsylvania boys—Washington’s best rifle regiment—from the counties of Northampton, Cumberland, Lancaster, Berks, Northumberland, Bedford, and York. These veteran Pennsylvania frontiersmen, consumed by the sheer excitement of the fight that overcame fatigue, fired with a high degree of accuracy. Beside these Pennsylvanians, meanwhile, the Continentals of Washington’s German Regiment likewise advanced in high spirits. These Teutonic warriors now blasted away at their fellow countrymen with clear consciences in what had become a bitter civil war among Germans that possessed a host of surreal aspects.

  In a sweeping charge from the northeast, from exactly where Scheffer had earlier hoped to escape Washington’s rapidly closing trap, to seal the doom of the von Lossbergers and the Rall grenadiers in the apple orchard, Hand’s expert riflemen of the First Pennsylvania Continental Regiment could not be stopped. Hand’s Pennsylvanians fired small-caliber Long Rifles, while the onrushing soldiers of Haussegger’s German Regiment split the air with crashing musketry from their large-caliber smoothbores. Both Continental regiments unleashed a blistering fire along a lengthy front of blazing musketry, exploding in a sheet of flame across the snow-covered slope.

  With his well-honed Pennsylvania frontier, where he had been stationed for seven years as a redcoat officer before the revolution, instincts rising to the fore, Colonel Hand knew to keep the pressure on the hard-hit Hessians, who were now completely exposed amid the low ground of the apple orchard. In a futile attempt to defend themselves, the desperate Hessians hurriedly formed up in an U-shaped alignment, with the two regiments poised and facing three sides with bristling rows of bayonets to confront simultaneous threats. Above all else, Hand was determined to continue to advance south to maintain an even heavier and closer fire upon the Rall and von Lossberg regimental soldiers to allow them no respite.

  Leading the way as usual, therefore, Hand encouraged his Pennsylvania riflemen farther down the snow-covered slope and toward Petty’s Run to deliver punishment at closer range. With only Petty’s Run now separating rivals, Hand’s veteran marksmen, who could not miss at such a close range despite the blinding haze of falling snow, fired into the defenseless Hessian formation at a distance of only fifty paces. While the acid stench of drifting battle-smoke stinging lungs and mouths, the Americans were able to get so close to their opponents, wrote one German, because “no fire was opened upon the enemy in front of them,” due to wet muskets and ammunition.

  To the rear of Washington’s fast-advancing lines, meanwhile, Knox’s cannon of Greene’s Second Division continued to be inched south by hardworking gunners to occupy even more advantageous, high ground above Petty’s Run and closer to their blue- and red-uniformed quarry exposed in neat ranks on the open ground. By this time, the surviving band of pinned up Hessians in the apple orchard were practically surrounded “by a semicircle of field guns,” and hundreds of onrushing, elated Americans, who could now taste a decisive battlefield success as never before. Indeed, Hamilton’s two six-pounders had moved south down Queen Street by the New Yorkers and were then turned east to face the two Hessian regiments at close range from the west, while Forrest’s four Pennsylvania artillery pieces were aligned on the north and Baumann’s three three-pounders to the east.

  With the double-lines of Fermoy’s and Stephen’s Continental brigades, from left to right, rolling south and ever-closer to the hemmed-in Hesssians and with Washington’s lengthy formations now dominating the northern horizon above the grenadiers and fusiliers, the battle was beginning to turn into a slaughter. Raked by a torrent of multiple close-range fires, the U-shaped formation of weary German defenders began to crumble, falling to pieces. Once-neat Hessian ranks were transformed into a bloody “disorganized force” that was now doomed. With their quarry hopelessly cornered on the orchard’s lower ground just below Petty’s Run and with even more Hessian soldiers dropping to a hot, close-range fire that could not be returned because of wet powder, something quite remarkable now happened among the converging line of American soldie
rs, who were on the verge of their most remarkable victory to date.

  Some of the foremost Continentals of Washington’s German Regiment, including Colonel Haussegger, whose empathy for his fellow countrymen ran especially deep, suddenly began to have a change of heart. Instead of systematically destroying the almost helpless Hessians or “poor fellows,” in Knox’s words, standing before them, some Americans began to wonder if perhaps these unfortunate, all-but-vanquished soldiers from mostly Hesse-Cassel, who were about to be wiped out, could be saved from needless slaughter. Even in the heat of battle, some of Washington’s German Continentals not only felt sympathy for their seemingly about to be exterminated opponents, but also a sudden sense of compassion.

  Meanwhile, other members of the German Regiment, both those men born in Germany and in Pennsylvania and Maryland, were sickened at the sight of the cruel decimation of the two proud Hessian regiments right before their eyes. At close range, the German Regiment’s Pennsylvania and Maryland soldiers now witnessed this destruction of helpless grenadiers and fusiliers on the battlefield for the first time with a growing sense of revulsion.

  Without orders to do so, therefore, additional numbers of Haussegger’s common soldiers now hesitated to slaughter their defenseless fellow countrymen, who were firmly ensnared in Washington’s spider web and with no escape. Instead of killing the surviving Hessians without mercy, these compassionate Continentals, who had already seen enough of killing for one day, now either cradled muskets in arms or dropped stocks of their weapons to the snowy ground. With flintlocks soaked and fouled, the Hessians were unable to fire back. They, consequently, were now entirely defenseless, only waiting to die. As Lieutenant Colonel Scheffer explained the cruel fate and dilemma, “None of our muskets could fire any longer.” Worse of all for Hessian fortunes, additional guns of Knox’s artillery (Forrest on the north, Hamilton to the west, and Baumann to the east), loaded with grapeshot (Forrest) and canister, were steadily pushed closer to the two hapless Hessian regiments trapped in the apple orchard.

  Clearly, Washington’s wise decision to significantly empower his around 2,400 attackers with eighteen (now seventeen) field pieces, while even Napoleon later operated by the firm principle that “it is necessary to have four guns to every thousand men,” (a ratio nearly doubled by Washington) continued to pay more high dividends and just at the right time. Disturbed by the sight of defenseless grenadiers and fusiliers falling to a scorching fire at only fifty feet unleashed by Hand’s fast-firing marksmen, who systematically cut down Rall’s soldiers with the well-honed ease of shooting turkeys off their elevated roosts on an early spring Pennsylvania evening, an unknown German-speaking member of Washington’s German Regiment himself suddenly took action on his own. He shouted out unexpected words in flawless German, calling for his fellow countrymen to surrender to avoid certain annihilation.47

  Then, in a spontaneous act of mercy amid the gently falling snow, other Maryland and Pennsylvania Germans, who refused to kill any more of Rall’s helpless men, likewise picked up the merciful cry in the hope of preventing more slaughter, imploring the Hessians to surrender before it was too late. Then, a chorus of shouts, almost frantic pleas, in both German and English rang out echoed down Washington’s ranks and over the windswept apple orchard, calling for the Hessians “to stack their arms and surrender” to prevent a massacre. Perhaps Washington’s German Regimental members implored their fellow countrymen to give up in part because of the fear that they would receive no mercy from Washington’s much less sympathetic Anglo-Saxon, Scottish, and Irish Continentals, who looked upon these Hessians with far less benevolent sentiments.48

  Clearly, what was now happening among the rows of bullet-scarred apple trees just below Petty’s Run was actually something rather remarkable, rising partly out of the tragedy of a civil war between Germans on American soil. Most significantly, this spontaneous compassionate effort to halt the mindless killing came not from high-ranking officers, but from the humble privates and common soldiers who thought for themselves, especially about doing what was morally right based upon the Bible’s moral lessons and not flowery directives or dry, textbook regulations from army headquarters.

  Some American historians have recently attributed this unauthorized effort to bestow last-minute mercy on the Trenton battlefield as resulting from entirely unique sets of American cultural values and a more humanitarian New World morality, stemming partly from humanistic revolutionary ideology. But in truth, this relatively rare display of mercy—generally not shown by the most enthusiastic Age of Enlightenment idealists toward Indians—amid the heat of combat in the little apple orchard, located just outside Trenton, was instead sparked primarily by the Hessians’ own Teutonic countrymen of Washington’s German Regiment and among the Pennsylvania Germans of Hand’s regiment: a more valid and less American-centric Old World explanation as opposed to an alleged wholly New World phenomenon of the bestowing of mercy and Christian compassion that was missing in savage wars against Native Americans.

  Revealing the complexities of comparable emotional, cultural, and psychological factors, the same empathy among the Maryland and Pennsylvania soldiers of Haussegger’s German Regiment, and to a lesser degree among the Pennsylvania Continentals of Hand’s rifle regiment, on December 26 also can be seen in the representative analogous words written in a letter by a German American, who returned to the Old World as a dough boy in 1918 to fight against his fellow countrymen on the western front in France during the First World War: “I never know when I might be shooting at one of my own cousins or uncles.”49

  So that the virtually defenseless Hessians would not suffer the tragic fate of so many of his fellow Celtic-Gaelic countrymen, who had been vanquished for generations in their own wars of liberation against Ireland’s conquer from England, Colonel Hand, a hard-fighting Emerald Islander of Christian (Presbyterian) faith and compassion, confessed in a letter to his wife back in Pennsylvania how “nothing on earth could Give me Greater pleasure than to embrace my Wife & Child,” also played a key role in eventually halting the scorching fire of his Pennsylvania marksmen to stop the slaughter of additional Hessians in the apple orchard.50

  Chapter IX

  Final Drama Played Out in a Snowy Apple Orchard

  However, some cynical Hessian officers yet worried about the prospect of surrendering to these same Americans—they had no idea that they were facing an entire German Regiment which was Washington’s largest such unit of more than 370 men—who they had previously treated harshly, especially at the battle of Long Island.1 After all, Washington’s veterans had heard all of the grim stories about the liberal bloody use of bayonets, rough treatment of prisoners, and the rape of New Jersey girls by the evil Hessians. Therefore, Rall’s von Lossberg fusiliers and grenadiers, who were all but surrounded in the apple orchard, possessed ample good reason to be apprehensive, even after hearing the first calls to surrender, because some of Washington’s soldiers now wanted to exact revenge on the most hated soldiers in America.2

  But by this time, the outgunned Hessians in the orchard just below Petty’s Run really had no choice or alternatives remaining with Washington’s formations closing in from seemingly every direction and additional cannon of Knox’s Regiment pushed forward within even closer range. In a letter that caught the representative mood among Washington’s men, William Hull described with pride how the “Resolution and Bravery of our Men, their Order and Regularity, gave me the highest Sensation of Pleasure.”3

  A former British captain, Twenty-Seventh Regiment of Foot, who had seen duty in occupied Ireland, Major Apollos Morris, a Philadelphia Quaker who now served as a volunteer aide to Washington, realized that the bitter end was fast approaching for these two proud German regiments. Hailing from an old distinguished Irish family which had owned the Fifteenth Century Salem Castle in County Cork, Ireland, ever since the crushing of the 1641 Irish revolt and a patriarchal, freedom-loving Son of Erin, who had resigned from British service to fight for Americ
a’s liberty, Morris described how by this time: “The only resource left [for the Hessians] was to force their way [and therefore] They did not relish” the prospect of fighting their way through Washington’s dense formations of confident soldiers, who possessed plenty of dry powder, securely in cartridge-boxes and powder horns, and whose muskets and rifles were yet operable for the most part.4

  To Americans long conditioned by so many past defeats that the novel concept of victory seemed almost incomprehensible at this time, it now seemed as if the battle was far from over. If nothing else, the ever-combative Rall brigade was most of all a resilient, never-say-die unit, as only recently had been so convincingly demonstrated by the colonel’s final counterattack that penetrated all the way to King Street to momentarily recapture two cannon of the Rall Regiment. In a letter written by Philadelphian Colonel Clement Biddle, a member of the privileged upper class, he described the fate of the Rall and von Lossberg Regiments after “their parties in town gave smart resistance for a while [but then] they passed up the Creek [Petty’s Run] bank [northeast] of the [Quaker] Meeting House where they formed and thought we should have had a smart engagement but they were by that time nearly surrounded. . . .”5

  Perhaps relishing more combat in keeping with his fiery nature, Lord Stirling also expected additional hard fighting to erupt in a final last stand at the apple orchard. As he described in a letter written not long after the battle: “They retreated towards a field behind a piece of wood up the creek [Petty’s Run], from Trenton, and formed in two bodies [the Rall and von Lossberg Regiments], which I expected would have brought on a smart engagement from the troops, who had formed very near them, from the back of the wood, with his Excellency General Washington. . . .”6