George Washington's Surprise Attack

by Phillip Thomas Tucker

  Equally ironic in the years ahead, America eventually developed a closer identification with Germany—in no large part because of a shared Protestantism—instead of its wartime ally, Catholic France, which was sufficiently inspired by the American Revolution to embark upon its own people’s revolution against monarchy in 1789, despite the vital strategic alliance between the two nations that Washington helped to secure with his victory at Trenton.38

  Despite a remarkable victory of mostly Protestants over fellow Protestants in a non-religious war, Washington’s success at Trenton was most of all a great moral victory for a beleaguered nation, providing America with a timely reconfirmation that God was indeed on the revolutionaries’ side. Washington’s seemingly divinely bestowed Trenton success verified the validity of the American people’s strong Old Testament faith, now infused with Age of Enlightenment ideology, and reinvigorated the conceptual and spiritual idea that America was a sacred, moral, and holy place under the sun. Viewed as a symbolic moral showdown, Washington’s remarkable success at Trenton reconfirmed in people’s minds that America was indeed a specially blessed place in God’s grand scheme of things, far removed from Old World corruption and decadence. In this sense, Washington, like an ancient Old Testament prophet, had indeed led his people to the promised land by crossing the Delaware and capturing Trenton. Consequently, Washington’s December 26 victory rekindled the righteous faith that America was destined to fulfill its sacred mission as a blessed land of liberty and holy place, based upon cherished Old Testament moral principles and values.

  More than any other single episode of the American Revolution’s tortured course, Washington’s impossible success—seemingly an actual miracle to people on both sides of the Atlantic—at Trenton revived the almost-extinguished spiritual and seemingly mystical faith that America offered a righteous new beginning not only to Americans, but also to people around the world, fulfilling John Winthrop’s original utopian vision “that wee shall be a Citty upon a Hill. . . .”39

  At the last moment when seemingly the idealstic dream of America had died, Washington’s outstanding success at Trenton breathed new life into the new republican faith in which the common people ruled themselves and determined their own destiny in “a new Jerusalem” according to God’s wishes without the arbitrary dictates of autocratic kings, class, privilege, and wealth. In the end, Washington’s Trenton victory ensured that America’s popular uprising would not be crushed like so many other people’s rebellions as in Ireland and Scotland. Americans once again began to believe that moral good could indeed conquer evil, and that even the mighty English Empire, and its Hessian allies, could be defeated because God was indeed on the American revolutionaries’ side. Most of all, Washington’s sparkling victory at Trenton not only set the stage for the eventual winning of the struggle for liberty, but also provided an indispensable stepping stone along the evolutionary path of overall human progress with the widespread recognition that a people’s republic, and its golden promise of a fresh, new beginning for mankind, was the best form of government for Americans and people around the world.40

  More than eighty years after the battle of Trenton and on another bitterly cold winter day like that which had been endured by Washington and his half-frozen, hopeful soldiers during their grueling march through the winter storm to a rendezvous with destiny at Trenton, newly elected President Abraham Lincoln traveled east from the windswept Illinois prairies of the vastness of America’s heartland with his own sense of destiny. He journeyed toward the nation’s capital (no longer Philadelphia as in 1776), now named in honor of the revered Virginian, by train in February 1861. Lincoln was on his way to take the highest office of the self-destructing American republic with the American experiment in democracy unraveling at its very seams after seven Southern states had already seceded from the Union during the turbulent winter of 1860-1861. This was now the darkest hour for America’s fortunes since just before Washington launched his high stakes attack on Trenton.

  Drawing upon the meaningful historical lessons of the last time that the American republic had confronted a greater national crisis and life-threatening peril, Lincoln realized that he now faced a task “greater than that which rested upon Washington” in late December 1776, and that he could only succeed with “the assistance of the Divine Being.” For the first time in his life, Lincoln stopped at Trenton in a symbolic pilgrimage, after just having visited Philadelphia, the “Cradle of Liberty,” on George Washington’s birthday. But eerily, it was almost as if the president-elect had been to Trenton before, because Lincoln had so often read about the stirring story of Washington’s Delaware crossing and the famous battle of Trenton since the lazy days of his youth.

  Therefore, the deep moral inspiration of Washington’s Trenton victory that saved a dying infant nation and a revolutionary struggle yet burned vividly in the mind, heart, and memory of the spare, fifty-one-year-old Illinoisan (near Colonel Rall’s age when he died at Trenton) who had traveled from deep inside America’s sprawling heartland of endless bounty. Here, at Trenton, Lincoln felt the ghostly, inspirational presence and moral weight of when Washington had been at his best to literally save the day for America at the last minute. Consequently, Lincoln now saw Washington as “the mightiest name of earth,” in no small part because of what he had accomplished at this very place located along the Delaware River.

  Inspired by the American Revolution’s enduring moral and spiritual legacies and Washington’s timeless example, Lincoln feared that the American nation was about to lose forever what Washington and his ill-clad soldiers of courage and faith had reaped at Trenton and what the revolutionary generation—truly America’s greatest—had created with so much blood, toil, and sacrifice. Therefore, for Lincoln, Washington and his improbable Trenton success provided the best inspirational example about what it would take to rejuvenate an even more progressive revolution in America, while restoring the American revolution’s original idealistic promise—yet unfulfilled—of equality for all men. Here, during the third week of February 1861 and basking in the symbolic and historic significance of standing on the most sacred ground of America’s fabled saga in the nation’s creation story, Lincoln spoke slowly, but eloquently, with growing emotion to the New Jersey legislature on the very spot where Washington had reaped his incredible victory. Lincoln immediately drew a direct parallel between the American nation’s two greatest national trials and fiery upheavals: 1776 and 1861.

  With the late February weather betraying the first slight hint of an early New Jersey spring and a symbolic, although unrealized at the time, new beginning for America, the president-elect reflected with awed, solemn reverence upon Washington’s inspirational example in leading his tattered band of followers across the Delaware on the darkest of nights during a fierce northeaster to achieve the most improbable and surprising of victories at the very spot where he now stood. In a most thoughtful Gettysburg Address-like speech to the New Jersey Senate at Trenton, Lincoln explained the essence of his own personal sense of moral mission and sacred duty as the American nation’s newly chosen leader to preserve the Union, on the verge of the ultimate nightmare of civil war, while sounding eerily much like an equally determined General Washington, whose motivation had been “Victory or Death,” back when the young nation’s greatest crisis situation seemed without any solution whatsoever and America’s fortunes had never been lower than on that frozen December morning in western New Jersey: “away back in my childhood, the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a small book, such a one as few of the younger members have ever seen, ‘Weem’s Life of Washington.’ I remember all the accounts there given of the battle-fields and struggles for the liberties of the country, and none fixed themselves upon my imagination so deeply as the struggle here at Trenton, New Jersey. The crossing of the river; the contest with the Hessians; the great hardships endured at that time, all fixed themselves on my memory, more than any single revolutionary event; and you all know, for you h
ave all been boys, how these early impressions last longer than any others, I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that these men struggled for. I am exceedingly anxious that thing which they struggled for; that something even more than National Independence; that something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world in all time to come. I am exceedingly anxious that this Union, the Constitution and the liberties of the people shall be perpetuated in accordance with the original Ideas for which that struggle was made, and I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, as the chosen instrument, also in the hands of the Almighty, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle.”41

  Indeed, near the eighty-fourth anniversary of Washington’s birthday, barely a week after his own birthday some fifty-two years before in the rolling hills of north central Kentucky, Lincoln fully understood exactly what had most of all inspired Washington’s young men and boys, both northerners and southerners to unite together as one, to risk all in the war’s most desperate gamble to win an impossible victory that so few people—perhaps only themselves—had believed even remotely possible. Reflecting upon the very core of America’s true meaning and revered symbolic place as a shining beacon of liberty for people around the world, Lincoln reached deep down within his own soul to articulate the most concise answer to the mystery as to why Washington and his hungry, cold, and ill-shod men had fought with so such spirit, courage, and determination to achieve a remarkable victory at Trenton.

  With an insightful brilliance that revealed his unshaken conviction in the meaning of the “self-evident” truths expressed in the Declaration of Independence as his ever-reliable moral compass, Lincoln emphasized the inherent essence of America’s true meaning while also explaining his own determination to make the correct decisions in the future that were necessary to preserve the Union. Inspired by Washington’s dynamic leadership example at this very special place on another cold winter day so long ago, Lincoln was emboldened, feeling more confident in facing the great trials of 1861-1865 that lay ahead, because he understood above all that “There must have been something more than common that those men struggled for [and] something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world for all time to come.”42

  Even more than Age of Enlightenment rhetoric or the Declaration of Independence, what Washington and his tattered, ill-equipped citizen soldiers had kept alive with their long-shot victory at Trenton was the golden dream, idealistic hope, and “the original idea” of America, which bestowed the great “promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance” in life.43

  Lincoln also echoed the utopian words and egalitarian vision of Thomas Paine, who had inspired hundreds of Continental troops, thanks largely to Washington’s well-conceived, timely directive to have Paine’s The American Crisis read by officers to his anxious, young soldiers just before they embarked on the perilous crossing of the Delaware on that bitterly cold Christmas evening, heightening their resolve and determination to succeed in successfully meeting their greatest challenge. As Paine had proclaimed with his masterful blend of passion, common man’s logic, and historical insight: “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”44

  Indeed, the “great promise” that America held out to the world was the optimistic vision and egalitarian dream of a free people pursuing their own “happiness” while ruling themselves by way of consent in a representative government and republic based upon individual liberty: the day’s most enlightened and idealistic philosophical concept that proclaimed an unprecedented birth of freedom in the New World and the emergence of a new kind of truly egalitarian society that was more individualistic, free, and democratic than any other on earth: all of which Washington kept alive and preserved with his sparkling victory at Trenton.45

  As Lincoln revealed in his moving words at Trenton in February 1861 on the Civil War’s eve, the inspirational legacy of Washington’s amazing success at Trenton continued to linger deeply in the hearts and minds of future generations of patriotic Americans across the United States. When General Robert Edward Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia invaded Pennsylvania in June 1863 and headed toward the crossroads town of Gettysburg, citizen soldiers of a threatened Philadelphia rallied around an old, silk battle flag carried by Pennsylvania soldiers in the battle of Trenton. Meanwhile, Lee’s ragged invaders—looking more like Washington’s men than the Yankees—identified with the suffering of Washington’s soldiers at Trenton, embracing the appropriate revolutionary analogies and comparing their personal sacrifices to the ragged victors of December 26, 1776. Something legendary and almost mystical, this enduring example of the dedication and faith of Washington’s ill-clothed Continental and state troops at Trenton has continued to inspire American fighting men around the world to this day.

  Therefore, it was especially ironic that young American troops, perhaps including descendants of Washington’s soldiers who fought at Trenton or even Colonel Rall’s Hessians who had remained in America after the American Revolution, captured Cassel, Germany, in April 1945. This picturesque ancient city, once known as Hesse-Cassel, consisted of a population that yet included many old families who had once sent their sons and fathers to fight and die in faraway Trenton as proud members of the Rall’s Grenadier Regiment so long ago.

  Equally ironic, British Royal Air Force bombers dropped tons of heavy ordnance upon the German town of Bremen—another home community of Rall brigade soldiers—on September 5, 1942. Some bombs struck the Bremen Art Museum, destroying the first artistic rendition of the famous painting by Emanuel Leutze, the idealistic German liberal from Wurttemberg, who had created an iconic American work of art in part to remind the German people of the evils of monarchical abuses, including the hiring out of young men and boys as mercenaries to die in faraway lands, Washington Crossing the Delaware. With the cycles of history coming full circle, the United States and Great Britain became allies in a world war in which a new opponent, Germany, was viewed as evil as American colonists had once seen King George III and his invading legions from England and Germany.46

  More than 160 years before the end of the Second World War and as written in the first sentence of his December 27, 1776 report to John Hancock, Continental Congress, a typically modest Washington gave no hint of the importance of what he and his mostly Continentals had accomplished against all odds on snowy December 26. However, this had been in fact the most “decisive day for the creation of the United States”: a near miraculous feat of endurance and arms accomplished by only a relatively few resolute Continental and state soldiers, from America, Ireland, Germany, Scotland, and other faraway nations, because they had stubbornly refused to accept defeat and persevered at a time when no hope for success seemed possible. Never before and afterward would America owe so much to so few fighting men, and especially their never-say-die commander, who overcame almost unimaginable obstacles and the highest odds to ensure that a new republican nation conceived in liberty, rising like a phoenix from near extinction.

  Revealing his sense of humility, Washington began his official Trenton battle report to John Hancock and the Continental Congress by merely presenting plain, matter-of-fact words that little seemed to be an adequate description of the war’s most important victory to date, and a major turning point in American history, in which he and his band of citizen soldiers rose so magnificently to successfully meet their supreme challenge in what was their finest hour: “I have the pleasure of congratulating you upon the Success of an Enterprise, which I had formed against a Detachment of the Enemy lying in Trenton, and which was executed yesterday Morning.”47

  Washington’s hastily written words might well have represented the greatest understatement in American history. In fact, never before had so few fighting men in the annals of military history accomplishe
d so much to achieve a more improbable or important success with a more significant long-term impact for the American nation and the world than Washington and his soldiers of liberty. And no single person was more responsible for this dramatic, unexpected reversal of America’s fortunes that saved the revolution and newborn republic from collapse than Washington.

  During the nation’s darkest hour, he inspired his often-beaten mostly yeomen farmers to believe in themselves—despite everything that said and emphasized the contrary—and to overcome the almost inconceivable challenge of crossing the raging Delaware during a perilous nighttime passage, and then a grueling march of nearly ten miles at night through an unfamiliar countryside amid a snowstorm to descend upon a full Hessian brigade with a vengeance, as if they were refreshed, never defeated, and properly clothed for winter warfare. With dazzling skill, Washington’s brilliantly conceived orchestration of flexible, innovative tactics, both infantry and artillery, overcame the stale, formal, and overly complex tradition of linear tactics of Frederickan warfare and a bygone era. Europe’s greatest conqueror of his generation and Napoleon’s idol, Frederick the Great, was correct in his final summarization of Washington’s Trenton-Princeton Campaign: “The achievements of Washington and his little band of compatriots [in] a space of 10 days, were the most brilliant of any recorded in the annals of military achievements.”48