In contrast to the pervasive lament of golden opportunities lost with the wreckage of Howe’s carefully laid strategy that crushed the British government’s hopes for ending the war, Americans across the land now sensed a decisive turning of the tide. While morale soared and prospects brightened across the breath of America, British and Hessian spirits sank to new lows: a dramatic reversal of fortune and public opinion, thanks to what Washington had accomplished during a mere forty-five minutes of intense combat at Trenton. In the words of one rejuvenated colonist, who expressed this new electrifying faith in the revolution’s ultimate success that had spread like wildfire with the unbelievable news of Washington’s winter successes: “by the late providential turn of affairs, the God Almighty was visibly on our side.”85
Likewise, Colonel Knox, giving thanks to God, emphasized in a letter how “Providence seemed to have smiled on every part of this enterprise.”86 Meanwhile, from an uneasy White Hall shrouded by the darkening gloom of the stunning Trenton reversal, Lord George Germain, the leading voice on Lord North’s cabinet, provided a cautionary warning for the future: “It is to be hoped that the dangerous practice of underestimating the enemy may make a lasting impression on the rest of the army.”87
Thanks to Washington’s brilliant stroke, German arms had been tarnished as never before. A stunned Donop admitted to Grant on December 29, 1776: “the shame . . . for our nation to have lost six cannon, with fifteen banners and three regiments at one attack and this in a section of the country greatly demoralized [while] Colonel Rall was to have been buried with his Lieutenant Colonel [Dechow] yesterday.”88
Epilogue
Trenton’s Long Shadow
In late November 1776 during the struggle for liberty’s darkest period, a letter written by an American from France revealed how the series of sharp American reverses, especially New York City’s loss, had all but ended any possibility of French intervention, which was absolutely necessary for a successful experiment in rebellion: “The success of the King’s forces against the revolted provinces has been so rapid, and the panic which this success has struck through the rebels . . . that the court of Versailles . . . must now abandon so weak a system of policy [because] the present winter, will most probably terminate the rebellion before the next spring. . . .”1
Howe’s relatively easy capture of New York City, the victorious push all the way to the Delaware, and the ambitious plan to capture Philadelphia, America’s capital, were deliberately calculated to discourage England’s ancient foe, France, from entering the conflict on the American revolutionaries’ side. France had long anxiously awaited convincing tangible evidence—a solitary victory of importance by Washington—that this common people’s rebellion against a major European power was not just another ill-fated revolt of starry-eyed, fumbling rebel leaders, as in Ireland or Scotland, that was easily crushed by superior British military might.
A string of British victories in 1776 seemed to have eliminated any possibility of a successful American resistance effort. France, therefore, began to lose all hope of avenging New France’s 1759 loss by depriving England of her thirteen colonies. France also hoped to tie the British down in a lengthy conflict of attrition—a “ruinous war against herself”—to steadily drain the British Empire’s manpower, morale, prestige, and resources. But before France could officially intervene, the American revolutionaries must first demonstrate that they were worthy of official support—a formal French alliance—by proving that they could actually win a significant battlefield victory. To prevent the possibility of a French alliance (England’s worst nightmare in overall global terms), England had gambled on winning the war with one single, knockout blow during a single campaign season of 1776. But Washington ruined that possibility by safely retiring across the Delaware in early December and denying Howe the means to cross the river and capture Philadelphia.2
Ironically, Washington’s victories at Trenton and Princeton—essentially hard-hitting raids in force—were viewed as insignificant by those British military commanders and civilian leaders who were not yet aware of the nuisances, implications, and complexities of insurgency warfare. In consequence, Washington’s dual winter successes were generally considered “only skirmishes” by the least enlightened British leadership, but he had in fact inflicted significant losses of more than two thousand men while losing only one-tenth of that number during the Trenton-Princeton Campaign: a new way of waging war.
As one complacent correspondent, who attempted to put Trenton’s loss in perspective, penned to William Eden in London, “The British cause in American certainly does not depend on the conduct of a Hessian Colonel [named Rall because] The back of the snake [rebellion] is [yet] broken.”3 But traditional English political leaders failed to understand the complex psychological, symbolic, and moral dimensions of Washington’s most unexpected success in reinvigorating the pulse of America’s common people, restoring their faith and resolve.
Thousands of colonists across America now sensed that something meaningful—a great spiritual and moral vindication and rejuvenation of the revolutionary faith—lay in the surprising Trenton victory, and to a lesser degree at Princeton, and not unlike the Court of Versailles in faraway Paris. Consequently, Washington’s unprecedented Trenton success altered the overall balance of the strategic situation by once again opening the door to significant French invention, including vital Gallic naval support and ground troops on a widespread scale, which was necessary for decisive victory. After the Continental Congress had fled Philadelphia for Baltimore to additionally lessen the possibility of French intervention in a significant political setback, Washington and his senior officers had fully understood by Christmas Day that a victory at Trenton was necessary to send a powerful message to the wavering French King Louis XVI and the Court of Versailles, which was now under the sway of the anti-interventionists, after New York City’s capture and Washington’s dismal retreat across New Jersey.
Consequently, like a sudden thunderbolt from the sky, no single event of the American Revolution more thoroughly shocked foreign leaders and capitals across Europe, from Madrid, Spain, to Moscow, Russia, and turned the political tide in America’s favor than the unbelievable news of the almost incomprehensible capture of an entire Hessian brigade at Trenton. Washington’s victory was widely proclaimed as a “masterpiece of military skill.” Wise heads realized that Washington’s remarkable success at Trenton now placed France in an advantageous position to eventually bestow full recognition and open the door to large-scale intervention (with the 1777 Saratoga victory concluding what Trenton had begun) that was necessary for winning the revolution.
But none of this remarkable reversal of fortune would have been possible without the December 26 victory at Trenton. Quite simply, Washington’s success at Trenton was the beginning of the end of British imperial ambitions for the conquest of America. Thanks to Washington’s Trenton victory, for the upcoming spring campaign of 1777 until the final October 1781 showdown at Yorktown, where a combined American-French Army reaped the final decisive victory on the James River, Washington’s Continental Army was supplied with tons of the best French arms, especially the model 1766 French musket, munitions, and supplies.
In a chain reason, Washington’s Trenton success (won without French weapons except for a handful of cannon) set the stage for massive French aid that paved the way for victory at Saratoga, where Horatio Gates’s Army scored a victory in no small part because 90 percent of its weaponry and munitions were obtained from France. Washington’s Trenton and Princeton winter victories so upset the strategic situation in 1777 that Howe remained too far south of Albany, New York, at a most decisive moment. Instead, he was too intently focused on Washington’s unpredictable army that might again suddenly lash out as at Trenton, taking his strategic focus away from a crucial linkage with General John Burgoyne’s march south from Canada and down the Hudson toward Albany to split the colonies in half to reap decisive victory in the northern theater. Theref
ore, in the end, Trenton’s legacy played a key role in sealing the fate of “Gentleman Johnny” at Saratoga and British fortunes in America.4
Quite simply, without Washington’s dramatic victory at Trenton which was the “necessary precursor,” neither the Saratoga victory or the all-important French Alliance were possible. In his diary, Reverend Erza Stiles, the esteemed president of Yale University in 1778, made the connection between “the Action at Trenton [and] a Gent[leman who] arrived [from England where he had] heard Gen.[Ireland-born Eyre] Massey declare on Change that a french War was [now] inevitable & that the Rebels would hold America.”5
Thanks to the timely French Alliance of February 1778 that bestowed official recognition on the new people’s republic, a proud Great Britain suffered its “only clear defeat” in what was its lengthy global struggle against France and an expansive conflict of attrition that stretched from the Revolution of 1688 to Napoleon’s defeat in the Belgium fields and meadows of Waterloo in mid-June 1815.6
In analyzing the supreme importance of Washington’s improbable victories at Trenton and Princeton in the shaping of not American but also world history, British historian George Trevelyan summarized without hyperbole how: “It may be doubted whether so small a number of men ever employed so short a space of time with greater or more lasting effects upon the history of the world.”7 Quite simply, the tide had been turned by Washington during the Trenton-Princeton Campaign. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson who eventually preceded him as Virginia’s wartime governor, Yorktown-born Thomas Nelson, Jr., penned in a letter: “Our affairs have had a black appearance for the two last months, but [now] We have at last turned the Tables upon these scoundrels by surprize.”8
And a prophetic Robert Morris, who had defiantly remained in Philadelphia while the rest of Congress fled to Baltimore, praised Washington in a December 28 letter: “we rejoice in your [recent] success at Trenton as we conceive it will have the most important publick consequences. . . .”9 Indeed, “no other victory has meant more to American history, and very few battles in all history have had the lasting significance of Trenton.” Washington’s Trenton-Princeton Campaign “changed the history of the world” and in the most dramatic way possible.10
In the words of one modern historian, “Had Washington lost this battle [of Trenton], the defeat almost certainly would have spelled the end of the revolutionary army and therefore the revolution itself, leaving Britain in control of the North American colonies for an indeterminate period in the future. . . .”11 In a strange irony, perhaps the only patriot in America who was not thoroughly impressed by Washington’s amazing success at Trenton was his own mother. When she first heard of her son’s remarkable victories at Trenton and Princeton, Mary Ball Washington merely dismissed the exciting news and lavish praise heaped upon her commander-in-chief son as, “Here is too much flattery.”12
A lampooning Benjamin Franklin, who gained a great deal more credibility as the American ambassador in Paris to secure the decisive French Alliance with the Trenton victory, waxed satirically in February 1777 in regard to the large payment due from the British government to the German princes for each Hessian soldier lost at Trenton by presenting a biting satire about the prince of Hesse-Cassel’s imagined cynical, sarcastic response to the Trenton disaster: “I have learned with unspeakable pleasure [of] the courage our troops exhibited at Trenton, and you cannot image my joy on being told that of the 1,950 Hessians engaged in the fight but 345 escaped . . . Do you remember that of the 300 Lacedaemonians [Spartans] who defended the defile of Thermopylae, not one returned?How happy should I be could I say the same of my brave Hessians!It is true that their king, Leonidas, perished with them: but things have changed, and it is no longer the custom of princes of the empire to go and fight in America for a cause with which they have no concern . . . I am not at all content with [the] saving [of] the 345 men who escaped the massacre at Trenton.”13
Most importantly, Washington’s one-sided success at Trenton gave new life not only to the resistance effort, but also to the very existence of the Continental Army that had been headed for certain extinction. For the first time, Washington proved that the most feared professional soldiers in the British Army could be vanquished by mostly ex-farmers, poorly trained and ill-clothed, imbued with a burning love of liberty. Washington’s amazing victory at Trenton, therefore, guaranteed that a good many new recruits rallied to Washington’s Army by the start of the 1777 Campaign, regenerating and fueling the resistance effort from its pre-Trenton nadir.14
While America celebrated Washington’s one-sided success at Trenton, other patriots felt a good deal less joyous. The young wife of Captain Daniel Neil, Eliza, suffered her most devastating personal loss that overshadowed news of the Trenton and Princeton victories. Neill, who was “personally very brave and greatly beloved by his men,” had just won a well-deserved promotion to major for his splendid performance at Trenton, but never saw it officially confirmed, falling to rise no more at Princeton. Eliza Neil was not even comforted by the return of her husband’s body to their Acquackanonk farm along the Passaic River because the promising New Jersey artillery captain was buried at an unknown location just north of Clark’s farm at Princeton. With her husband dead and once-splendid New Jersey farm ransacked by the British and Hessians, a grieving Eliza, with two young children to support on her own, found herself without a provider. Therefore, during the same harsh winter that her young husband was killed, she and her children became entirely “destitute.”
On February 19, 1777, Eliza penned a desperate, pathetic appeal directly to Washington: “The unhappy situation in which I am left by the late Catastrophe of my Husband, major Daniel Neil of the Artillery who was slain at the Battle in Princeton January 3, 1777–induces me to apply to your Excellency [because] the Farm on Wich [sic] wee [sic] lived is rendered useless by the Enemy–so that I am left with two small Children destitute of Support, unless the honorable the Continental Congress will allow me the Benefit of a Resolution I am informed was made relative to the support of the Widows & orphans, who will be rendered thereby comfortable during the Calamities of War.”15
Nevertheless, an impoverished Eliza and her two infants continued to suffer during one of the worst winters in recent memory. Deeply moved by the family tragedy, Washington sent Eliza’s plea for relief to Congress with his own February 28 letter of support: “Inclosed you have a Letter from the Widow of a brave Officer who was killed at princeton [and] I can venture to recommend her as a proper Object, to made some Reparation for her great Loss.”16 Unfortunately, for Eliza and other grieving, destitute widows of deceased Continental soldiers across America, Congress had not yet created a relief program for women who had lost their soldier-husbands in battle. Therefore, near the end of April 1777, a somewhat embarrassed Washington informed Eliza Neil how “that Honble body have, I presume, thought it too early to adopt a measure of this kind . . . as I sincerely feel for your distress, I beg your acceptance of the Inclosed [$50.00], as a small testament of my Inclination to serve you upon any future occasion.”17 Bestowing a timely charity long unrecognized by historians and forgotten, the compassionate Washington assisted Captain Neil’s widow with funds out of his own pocket.
New York-born Governor William Livingston later appealed to the state legislature in mid-September 1777 for relief to the “distressed Widow and orphans of that brave Officer,” Daniel Neil. But even this appeal from the state’s highest ranking official, New Jersey’s first revolutionary governor, fell on deaf ears. New Jersey, now that the revolution’s tide had turned thanks partly to Captain Neil’s courageous efforts at Trenton, had seemingly turned its back on Mrs. Neil in “her present Situation [that] is truly deplorable. . . .”18
In a letter, Rhode Island-born General Greene, who led the Second Division with distinction at Trenton, lamented Eliza’s tragic situation, which “melts the hearts of all.”19 Not until June 1781—only a few months before the final victory at Yorktown, and more than four and a half ye
ars after Captain Neil’s battlefield death—and thanks to the unsung humanitarian efforts of Washington and Knox, who mutually lamented how the handsome, young artillery captain had been killed “at the head of his [artillery] Company while nobly supporting the Liberties of his Country,” was Eliza and her children finally awarded some financial relief, although yet insufficient, from the state.20
Although long overlooked and forgotten by America, Washington’s capable infantry and artillery commanders, like Captain Neil, played stirring roles in securing victory at Trenton. A secret of his remarkable success on December 26, Washington benefitted immensely from commanding a determined, highly motivated soldiery, especially so many talented leaders of his unsung officer corps: ironically, generally young men who could never have obtained officer’s commissions in the British Army. But this secret formula for success was no accident. Early recognizing talent and leadership ability, Washington had personally groomed and promoted militarily inexperienced men from civilian life, especially Knox and Greene, who evolved into his capable top lieutenants, who rose to the fore at Trenton. All in all, Washington could not have achieved victory at Trenton without the boundless ability, skill, and resourcefulness of some of the finest natural regimental, brigade, and division commanders ever to serve together on a single battlefield from 1775-1783.
Captain Neil was only one such dynamic young leader who rose splendidly to Trenton’s formidable challenge. Fortunately, the forty-five-year-old Washington had possessed an excellent supporting cast of capable, hard-fighting top lieutenants, general officers, and colonels for the dramatic showdown at Trenton: John Glover, John Stark, Hugh Mercer, Henry Knox, Alexander Hamilton, John Haslet, John Sullivan, Nathaniel Greene, Edward Hand, Lord Stirling, and fine lower-grade officers and unit commanders like Captains William Washington, Joseph Moulder, Thomas Forrest, Winthrop Sargent, John Fleming, and Lieutenant James Monroe and other fine leaders, who were no less determined to achieve victory on December 26. These were self-made men whose natural talents and gifts would not have risen to the fore in the old class-based European system based on proper aristocratic bloodlines, especially Hamilton and even Washington, and hence they would have been doomed to relative obscurity. These resourceful, enterprising leaders of outstanding natural ability were literally America’s best and brightest, and they demonstrated as much at Trenton in splendid fashion. Such shining stars in the constellation of Washington’s officer corps represented the rise of a new generation of young, dynamic leaders. Without the many contributions of this extraordinary group of exceptional leaders, who rewarded Washington’s trust and faith on December 26, the final outcome at Trenton might have been altogether different.21 These men of promise rose magnificently to the challenge and put their lives on the line at Trenton because, as explained by the eloquent words of John Adams, “I must study . . . war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy” and other higher pursuits in life.22
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