George Washington's Surprise Attack

by Phillip Thomas Tucker

  Clearly, in the end, only one man in all America could have been so often defeated, criticized, and widely denounced by so many people on both sides, felt a greater measure of personal anguish, and experienced greater depths of frustration, but yet somehow not only persevered against seemingly endless difficulties but prevailed at a time when a revolution’s end seemed inevitable and when the odds for success were seemingly impossible. Emerging stronger instead of having been overwhelmed by all manner of adversity, thanks in part to channeling his “gigantic and troubling” passions toward the goal of vanquishing a full Hessian brigade (something that had not been accomplished before) at Trenton, Washington possessed the uncanny ability to rise up during America’s and his own darkest hour to face his infant nation’s greatest challenge like the proverbial phoenix and to inspire his young, ill-trained troops and convince them that they could indeed accomplish anything against the odds, if they only believed in themselves.

  Emboldened by strength of character, an unshakable faith in God and America’s idealistic, egalitarian promise, and the most brilliant battle plan of the American Revolution, Washington magnificently led his often-defeated revolutionaries to achieve their greatest moral, psychological, and political victory of the American Revolution at Trenton to save an unprecedented republican dream and egalitarian experiment, which Lincoln described as the zenith of mankind’s “political and moral freedom,” from an early tragic death so that America could survive as a shining beacon of hope for the world. Praising the hidden, miraculous work of a divine helping hand (Washington’s often-emphasized “Providence”) which president-elect Lincoln also emphasized in his stirring speech at Trenton on the Civil War’s eve, Colonel Knox wrote in a letter to “my dear [wife] Lucy” on December 28, 1776, how the victory at Trenton was due to “Providence [which] smiled” on America two winter days before.49

  And in another most revealing letter about the Trenton and Princeton victories, the incomparable Knox concluded that he and America should “thank the great Governor of the Universe for producing this turn in our affairs.”50 In regard to his one-sided success at Trenton that led to America’s rebirth, Washington praised God without ever using the word, writing with undisguised awe how “Providence has heretofore saved us in a remarkable manner.”51

  Indeed, most of all, Washington’s victory at Trenton represented a great moral redemption and vindication for “the sacred cause . . . of Liberty,” in Washington’s words, where the determined Virginian and his equally resolute citizen soldiers had backed up Tom Paine’s inspiring words by winning the war’s most dramatic victory to reconfirm to people across America that the real “King of America” in fact “reigns above and doth not make havock [sic] of mankind like the Brute of Britain.”52

  Washington’s remarkable success at Trenton most conclusively delivered a death stroke to the lofty, mystical aura of monarchy’s sacredness and righteous authority by proving that its best professional soldiers in America could be decisively overcome by ordinary men of unshakeable faith against what was widely viewed as an invincible divinely sanctioned and omnipotent power. Perhaps New Englander Captain William Hull said it best in a letter in summarizing the miracle of Trenton: “What can’t Men do when engaged in so noble a Cause.”53

  Won by mostly young, middle-class soldiers, primarily yeoman farmers, who fought and died for “the rights of man,” in Colonel Knox’s words as penned in a late December 1776 letter to his wife who was ahead of her time, Washington’s Trenton victory that surprised the world convincingly demonstrated that anything was possible, including a prosperous life for the infant United States of America, which was no longer fated to die in its cradle, much to almost everyone’s astonishment. After barely surviving its supreme moment of crisis by the narrowest of margins, a new day had dawned for America and the sacred “cause of freedom,” in General Greene’s words, with the most improbable of victories at Trenton, where a dying cause was reborn in the most miraculous fashion when time was running out. Because they never lost faith in America’s golden promise and unprecedented meaning, Washington and his resilient band of homespun soldiers saved a fledgling republic that seemed destined for certain extinction.54

  In the day’s most brilliant political improvisation that resulted in America’s Declaration of Independence, so another creative effort and masterful improvisation only a few months later led to the development of the most brilliant battle plan and the most surprising, unexpected victory in the annals of American history at Trenton. While no political event in American history was more pivotal than the Declaration of Independence, so no battle was more pivotal in the American saga than Trenton.

  Not only saving the Continental Army and a newborn people’s republic—the first created ever “intentionally by thought and moral choice” in mankind’s history and the blueprint for the successful modern nation-state—by his most improbable of all victories, Washington most of all saved the “great idea” of America as the world’s enduring symbol, its limitless promise, and the bright vision of a new beginning for the common man. The idealistic, utopian dream of America and the infant republic, “founded on the intrinsic sacredness of all men and women,” would have perished if Washington, who was at his best when the situation was darkest, had lost his greatest gamble when everything was at stake at a little western New Jersey town during the most important battle in American history.55

  In a most revealing letter, Captain William Hull, Nineteenth Connecticut Continental Regiment, Glover’s brigade, perhaps said it best. He described exactly why and how Washington and his citizen soldiers, who had been united as a determined band of brothers by the forge of adversity for the greater good as never before, had overcome the odds to prevail, when “the fate of America,” in Washington’s words, hung in the balance on the bleak, frigid morning of December 26, 1776, when he undertook his greatest, but well-calculated, gamble with the life of America at stake in going for broke, because he most of all sincerely believed in what his men could accomplish because they were “engaged in so noble a Cause.”56

  After the American-French victory at Yorktown in October 1781, Washington stopped at Annapolis, Maryland, and received a heartfelt “City Address” (printed in the Maryland Gazette on November 29, 1781) from the people of the state capital that emphasized without exaggeration or hyperbole the supreme importance of Washington’s winter 1776 campaign that saved America, “We derive peculiar pleasure from the contemplation, that the successes at Trenton and Princeton laid the corner stone of our freedom and independence:” the true birth and real beginning of the United States of America.57

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. Maryland Gazette, Annapolis, November 29, 1781.

  2. John Ferling, The Ascent of George Washington, The Hidden Political Genius of an American Icon, (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), pp. 89-123; Rodney Atwood, The Hessians, Mercenaries From Hessen-Kassel in the American Revolution, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 95-96, 100; William Heath, Memoirs of Major-General William Heath by Himself, (New York: William Abbatt, 1901), p. 95; William S. Stryker, The Battles of Trenton and Princeton, (Trenton: Old Barracks Association, 2001), pp. 176, 187, 194; Rod Gragg, By the Hand of Providence, How Faith Shaped the American Revolution, (New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 2011), pp. 87, 89-91; David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. ix; Alan Dershowitx, America Declares Independence, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003), p. 1; Robert Harvey, “A Few Bloody Noses,” The Realities and Mythologies of the American Revolution, (New York: The Overlook Press, 2003), pp. 214-215; Suetonius Transquillus, Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), pp. 29-30.

  3. Joseph J. Ellis, American Creation, Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), p. 6; Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, pp. 206-244.

  4. Ray Raphael, Founding Myths, Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past, (New York
: MJF Books, 2004), pp. 1-266.

  5. Edward G. Lengel, Inventing George Washington, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2011), pp. 1-5, 132-135.

  6. Ibid., pp. 1-5, 8-214; Robert K. Wright, The Continental Army, (Washington, D.C.: The Center of Military History, United States Army, 1983), p. 320; David Bonk, Trenton and Princeton 1776-77, (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2009), pp. 19-20; John B. B. Trussell, ThePennsylvania Line, Regimental Organization and Operations, 1775-1783, (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1993), pp. 225-226; Victor Von Hagen, TheGermanic People in America, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), pp. 159-162.

  7. Scott G. Rall, Waldorf, Maryland, to author, July 22, 2010; Henry J. Retzer, The German Regiment of Maryland and Pennsylvania in the Continental Army 1776-1781, (Bowie: Heritage Books, 2006), pp. 5, 51, 79, 131; Weiser Family Information, Conrad Weiser Homestead Archives, State Historic Site, Womelsdorf, Pennsylvania.

  8. Atwood, The Hessians, pp. 12, 41, 99, note 82; Bonk, Trenton and Princeton 1776-1777, p. 49; Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, pp. 201, 239-240, 256; Joseph M. Malit, Hessian historian, Maplewood, New Jersey, to author, July 9, 2010; Lengel, Inventing George Washington, p. 200.

  9. W. E. Woodward, George Washington, (Greenwich, Conn: Fawcett Publications, 1956), p. 206.

  10. Ibid., pp. 10, 35; Ron Chernow, Washington, A Life, (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), pp. 15-268; Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, pp. 203, 264-265; Ray Raphael, Founders, The People Who Brought You A Nation, (New York: MJF Books, 2009), p. 267; Ferling, The Ascent of George Washington, p. 92; Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, pp. 202-203

  11. Ferling, The Ascent of George Washington, pp. 89-122; Lengel, Inventing George Washington, pp. 77-92, 132-135, 201; Willard M. Wallace, Appealto Arms, A Military History of the American Revolution, (New York: Harpers and Brothers, 1951), p. 127; Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, pp. 260-261, 423; Stryker, The Battles of Trenton and Princeton, p. 402.

  12. Lawrence E. Babits, A Devil of a Whipping, The Battle of Cowpens, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. Xiii-10, 61-160; Harry M. Ward, Major General Adam Stephen and the Cause of American Liberty, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), p. 100; John T. Goolrick, The Life of General Hugh Mercer, (New York: The Neal Publishing Company, 1906), pp. 13-74; Frederick English, General Hugh Mercer, Forgotten Hero of the American Revolution, (Lawrenceville: Princeton Academic Press, 1975), pp. xii, 25-28, 58-59, 81; B. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy, (New York: Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1961), pp. 48-49.

  13. Gragg, In the Hands of Providence, pp. 89-96; Thomas Fleming, Liberty! The American Revolution, (New York: Viking, 1997), pp. 217-218, 245, 253-262, 324-226.

  14. Alan Valentine, Lord Stirling, Colonial Gentleman and General in Washington’s Army (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).

  Chapter I

  1. Ellis, American Creation, p. 43.

  2. William Dwyer, “The Day is Ours!,” An Inside View of the Battles of Trenton and Princeton, November 1776-January 1777, (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutger’s University Press, 1983), p. 108.

  3. Worthington C. Ford, “British and American Prisoners of War, 1778,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, no. 2, vol. 17, (1893), pp. 159; Dwyer, The Day is Ours!, p. 165.

  4. Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, pp. 216-216, 392-393; Bonk, Trenton and Princeton 1776-77, p. 35; Stryker, The Battle of Trenton and Princeton, pp. 129, 130, note 1, 360; Alan Valentine, Lord Stirling, Colonial Gentleman and General in Washington’s Army, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 196; George Athan Billias, General John Glover and his Marblehead Mariners, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1960), pp. 6-7; Mark V. Kwasny, Washington’s Partisan War, 1775-1783, (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1998), p. 98; Richard M. Ketchum, The Winter Soldiers, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1973), pp. 247-248; “The History of Johnson’s Ferry,” Information Guide, Washington’s Crossing, New Jersey State Historic Site, New Jersey; A Young Patriot in the American Revolution, p. 80; Samuel Steele Smith, The Battle of Trenton, (Monmouth Beach: Philip Freneau Press, 1965), p. 18; Richard Hanser, The Glorious Hour of Lt. Monroe, (Brattleboro: The Book Press, 1975), p. 126; “Historic Resources of Washington’s Crossing the Delaware,” Paper, National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service, United States Department of Interior, Washington, D.C.; Ron Chernow, Washington, A Life, (New York: Penguin Press, 1910), p. 270; Chastullex, Marquis d., Travels in North-America in the Years 1780-1781, (New York: 1882), p. 122; David G. Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon, The Mind and Methods of History’s Greatest Soldier, (New York: Scribner 1966), p. 145; Raphael, Founders, p. 286.

  5. Stryker, The Battles of Trenton and Princeton, p. 360; Martin I. J. Griffin, Catholics and the American Revolution, (2 vols., Ridley Park: Martin I. J. Griffin, 1907), vol. 2, p. 382; Billias, General John Glover and his Marblehead Mariners, pp. 6-7; John Buchanan, The Road to Valley Forge, How Washington Built the Army That Won the Revolution, (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2004), p. 156.

  6. Andro Linklater, An Artist in Treason, The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson, (New York: Walker and Company, 2009), pp. 27-28; Chernow, Washington, p. 273; Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, p. 210; Francis Rufus Bellamy, The Private Life of George Washington, (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1951), pp. 53-54, 315, 347.

  7. Gregory T. Edgar, Campaign of 1776, The Road to Trenton, (Bowie: Heritage Books, 2008), p 330; Chernow, Washington, pp. 269, 272-273; Gerald Mulvey and Elliot Abrams, “A Forensic Meteorological Perspective on the American Revolutionary War, Battles of Trenton and Princeton, AccuWeather, September 17, 2009, Power Point Presentation, internet.

  8. Ronald N. Tagney, A County in Revolution, Essex County at the Dawning of Independence, (Manchester: The Crickett Press, Inc., 1976), p. 297-298; Ketchum, The Winter Soldiers, pp. 246, 248-249; Smith, The Battle of Trenton, p. 18.

  9. Chastellux, Travels in North-America, pp. 69-70.

  10. Billias, General John Glover and his Marblehead Mariners, pp. xi-xii, 1-34, 59-131; Tagney, A County in Revolution, Essex County at the Dawning of Independence), pp. 10-11, 161, 207; Samuel Roads, Jr., The History and Traditions of Marblehead, (Marblehead: Press of N. Allen Lindsey & Company, 1897), pp. 1-7, 46-48, 131; Priscilla Sawyer Lord and Virginia Clegg Gamage, Marblehead, The Spirit of ‘76 Lives Here, (New York: Chilton Book Company, 1972), pp. 16-17, 19-35, 61, 63, 69, 84, 91; Ronald N. Tagney, The World Turned Upside Down, Essex County During America’s Turbulent Years, 1763-1790, (West Newbury: Hamilton Printing Company, 1989), pp. 18, 21-23, 32; Wright, The Continental Army, p. 218; Mark Kurlansky, Cod, A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 59-114; William Upham, A Memoir of General John Glover, of Marblehead, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), pp. 2, 4; Priscilla Sawyer Lord and Virginia Clegg Gamage, The Lure of Marblehead, A New Guidebook to its colonial houses–crooked streets–and historic sites, (Marblehead: Marblehead Publications, 1973), pp. 2, 5, 45; Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, pp. 21-22, 219; Egar, The Campaign of 1776, pp. 157-159; Stryker, The Battles of Trenton and Princeton, p. 356

  11. Roads, The History and Traditions of Marblehead, pp. 48, 67-68, 70, 78, 97; Gamage, Marblehead, pp. 30-35, 92; Gamage and Lord, The Lure of Marblehead, pp. 7, 13, 23-24, 27, 32, 34-35, 43, 45, 47; William L. Stone, Letters of Brunswick and Hessian Officers During the American Revolution, (Cranbury: Scholar’s Bookshelf, 2005), p. 192; Bruce E. Burgoyne, Defeat, Disaster, and Dedication, The Diaries of the Hessian Officers Jakob Piel and Andreas Wiederhold, (Bowie: Heritage Books, 2009), pp. 10-11; Chernow, Washington, p. 271; Don Troiani, Military Buttons of the American Revolution, (Gettysburg: Thomas Publications, 2001), p. 93.

  12. Stryker, The Battles of Trenton and Princeton, p. 361.

  13. Griffin, Catholics and the American Revolution, vol. 2, pp. 252-253, 256, 267, 270-271, 305; The American Daily Advertiser, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April 16, 1811; Mark
Mayo Boatner, III, Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, (New York: David McKay, Inc., 1966), pp. 751-752; Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North-America in the Years 1780-1781, (New York 1882), pp. 62, 74.

  14. Billias, General John Glover and his Marblehead Mariners, pp. xi-xii, 1-34, 59-131; Tagney, The World Turned Upside Down, p. 284; Kurlansky, Cod, pp. 112-113; Stryker, TheBattles of Trenton and Princeton, p. 130; Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God, George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), pp. 216-217; Buchanan, The Road to Valley Forge, p. 161; Barnet Schecter, The BattleFor New York, (New York: Walker and Company, 2002), pp. 161-167; Benton Rain Patterson, Washingtonand Cornwallis, The Battle for America, 1775-1783, (New York: Taylor Trade Publications, 2004), pp. 73, 83; Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, pp. 203, 217, 399-401; Smith, TheBattle of Trenton, p. 18; Hanser, The Glorious Hour of Lt. Monroe, p. 136; Chernow, Washington, p. 272; Mulvey and Abrams, A Forensic Meteorological Perspective on the American Revolutionary War, Battles of Trenton and Princeton, AccuWeather, September 17, 2009, Power Point Presentation, internet.

  15. Billias, General John Glover and his Marblehead Mariners, p. 71; Fischer, Washington’sCrossing, p. 22; Stryker, Battles of Trenton and Princeton, pp. 263-264; Smith, The Battle of Trenton, 22.