Patriots

by A. J. Langguth

  Battle of Princeton, by George Washington Parke Custis.

  DIETRICH BROTHERS AMERICANA CORPORATION

  Princeton

  1776–77

  DURING THE trip back to George Washington’s headquarters on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware, the German prisoners cowered in the boats. Had they shared a language with their captors, they would have discovered that their backgrounds were not so different. In Germany, until their princes sold them into this distant war, they had been weavers and tailors, shoemakers and carpenters, butchers and bakers, masons and plasterers. To charge them up for battle, British commanders had warned them that the American rebels were cannibals who would skin a Hessian with their tomahawks to make a cover for their drums or would roast his body on a spit and eat him like pork.

  When they saw the Americans taking boyish pleasure in the brass caps they had plucked from Hessian corpses, the prisoners pulled off their own caps and began giving them away. One American guard smiled as he watched his friends, many shoeless and with the elbows out of their shirts, jamming the caps over their wet hair and capering and strutting on the way to camp.

  General Washington had chosen a farmhouse five miles from the Delaware for his new headquarters. On the evening of December 28, he entertained twenty-eight Hessian officers, all in their dark-blue uniforms. The talk had to be conducted through interpreters, but as the evening wore on a frankness emerged between the fellow soldiers. Washington spoke with Lieutenant Andreas Wiederhold, who had been stationed at the guardhouse, and praised his conduct under fire. That emboldened Wiederhold to tell Washington how he would have conducted the battle if he had been in Rall’s position. He claimed afterward that General Washington had commented favorably on his acumen, and Wiederhold decided that the American commander in chief was a fine, polite man. He hadn’t said much, though, as he listened to Wiederhold outlining his strategy, and at times the lieutenant thought that Washington was looking rather sly.

  —

  George Washington usually communicated with his men through written orders read aloud to the ranks. But with less than forty-eight hours until their enlistments expired, he had the men lined up so that he could address them in person. The army was back in Trenton. After two days of rest and sobriety, time to wash and sleep, they had put on clean rags and been ferried once more across the Delaware. The second crossing had been worse than the first. Intense cold had frozen even more ice in the river, and moving the boats with poles and oars was exhausting.

  When they reached the battle site, the Americans found that all was quiet. The British and the Germans had ceded the town and retreated—perhaps to Princeton, where General Howe kept large stores of munitions and supplies. This time, John Cadwalader had got his men across the river and was urging Washington to take advantage of the enemy’s disarray and strike again. But the New England regiments were due to go home, and even with hundreds of militia volunteers coming from Philadelphia, Washington couldn’t launch another attack without battle-tried veterans.

  When the New England regiments were in place and ready to hear him, General Washington rode to the center of their ranks and asked the men to give him six more weeks. Never again could they do more for their country, he said, than they could do now. Washington had cast off his normal austerity, and one sergeant found his tone warm, even affectionate. But Washington knew better than to trust to sentiment. He had sent an urgent note to Robert Morris, a Philadelphia banker, asking to borrow enough money to pay a ten-dollar bonus to each soldier who would extend his enlistment for six weeks. “Every lover of his country must strain his credit,” Washington wrote. “No time, my dear sir, is to be lost.”

  To avoid any denial or delay, Washington told Morris to send the money back with the man who had brought his message. Morris met the challenge. Since the troops wanted hard money, not the Continental paper issued by the Congress, he filled two canvas bags with four hundred and ten Spanish silver dollars, along with a French half crown and ten and a half English shillings. Morris told Washington he would borrow the rest in silver, promise repayment in gold and then try to raise the gold as best he could. The banker had heard that Washington was low on wine and sent along a quarter cask of a good vintage.

  In addition to those funds from Philadelphia, Washington had received copies of recent resolutions by the Congress in Baltimore that gave him sweeping emergency powers. Even Samuel Adams had agreed that the commander in chief must be entrusted with those powers, though they could make him a dictator. When Adams wrote home to Boston, he underlined that the authority had been granted for a limited time, no more than six months. Washington himself seemed disturbed that he might be accused of conniving for power and wrote reassuringly to the Congress that the sword, which was the last resort in preserving liberties, ought to be laid aside once those liberties were firmly established.

  Now, as Washington finished his appeal to the New England regiments, their officers stepped forward to explain the terms of the bounty Robert Morris was providing. Next came a drum roll as volunteers were asked to step forward. No one moved. For weeks they had fixed their hearts on returning to their families. Only hours away from escape, they would not give up their dreams. Washington spoke a second time. Throughout his life he had nurtured his pride, but now he begged. My brave fellows, Washington said, you have done all I asked you to do and more than could reasonably be expected. But your country is at stake—your wives, your houses and all that you hold dear.

  Again he asked that they give him a little longer, one more month. The drums beat again. Possibly because they had heard the general’s pain, men were looking around at one another. Voices in the ranks said, We cannot go home now. Men told their friends, I will remain if you will.

  They started to step forward until their numbers passed two hundred. Only men too weak to fight stayed behind. The officers asked whether they should sign up each man for his extended service.

  No! said Washington. Men who volunteered at a time like this didn’t need a piece of paper to hold them to their duty.

  —

  When the pleas and the bribes were over, between twelve and fourteen hundred men had agreed to stay with Washington for an extra six weeks—and an extra ten dollars. He also had the Pennsylvania militia to draw upon, its strength estimated from eighteen hundred men to twice that number. At the upper limits, the Americans would be pitting five thousand troops, most of them poorly trained, against an estimated eight thousand British and German professionals. Major James Wilkinson wrote bleakly, “How dreadful the odds.”

  To prevent those odds from getting worse, Washington had made the Hessian officers in his custody sign an oath that they would stay where he sent them and would not pass information to the British. The Hessians were then marched to Philadelphia and put on display to hearten the beleaguered residents. The Germans looked hearty and well dressed beside their barefoot American guards, and onlookers who didn’t understand that the Hessians had been sold to the British were puzzled by their expression. They seemed, one elderly spectator remarked, satisfied.

  The Hessians thought Philadelphia was big and beautiful, but once inside the town they found a mixed reception. Some sympathetic Americans approached them with bread and liquor, until clusters of old women stopped them and screamed that the Germans should be hanged for coming to America to deprive them of their freedom. Many spectators were hostile, but the old women were the most vengeful. Without protection from their American guards, the prisoners would have been killed. At the height of the furor, the American officer in charge said, “Dear Hessians, we will go to the barracks,” and hurried them away. Once they were safe, General Washington issued a proclamation to be posted all over Philadelphia: The Hessians, who had been forced into this war, were blameless and should be treated not as enemies of the American people but as friends.

  With that, the fury subsided. A stream of visitors, rich and poor, brought food to the Hessian barracks. A few days later the Hessian privates we
re marched off to work on Pennsylvania farms in Lancaster County; the officers were sent to Baltimore and then on to Virginia. Before they left, General Israel Putnam shook hands with several officers and insisted they share a glass of Madeira with him. During the ritual, one Hessian inspected Old Put, now in his forty-ninth year, and concluded that he might be an honorable man, but only the Americans would have made him a general.

  —

  With his Eton education and his military tutoring from a Prussian officer, Charles, Lord Cornwallis was closer to a Hessian’s idea of a proper general. Cornwallis had justified that good opinion during the battle for Long Island the previous August and later at Fort Washington. When William Howe decided to put his army into winter quarters, he had given Cornwallis permission to return to England, where his wife was ailing. From the way Washington was fleeing through New Jersey, it looked as though the war might soon be over. If there was another campaign in the spring, Cornwallis could return for it. Then, suddenly, with the attack on Trenton Howe had to question his optimism. He canceled Cornwallis’ leave just as he was about to sail, and on New Year’s Day 1777 Cornwallis rode fifty miles through the rain in one day to arrive at Princeton after dark. He worked throughout the night to prepare his men to march against Washington’s troops. At daybreak on January 2, Cornwallis left one brigade behind in Princeton and led seven thousand men down the main road to Trenton.

  The Hessians in the British column were determined to make the Americans pay for their victory over Colonel Rall. Their commander went through the ranks telling the Germans that any man who took a prisoner would receive fifty stripes of the lash. They understood him. They were to kill any American who surrendered.

  When the British reached Trenton, near sunset, Cornwallis found George Washington in a worse predicament than he could have hoped. Washington’s inexperience, coupled with his pride in the fluke he had brought off a week ago, had left his army with its back to the Delaware. But this time no boat could cross. The river was frozen, and yet not frozen solid enough to march men across it. From the outskirts of Trenton, Henry Knox’s artillery was lobbing shells into the town, but that was merely to annoy the British upon their arrival. All that separated Cornwallis’ men from the Americans was Assunpink Creek, and the Hessians escaping from the earlier battle had proved that it was possible to ford it.

  From the British camp, Lord Cornwallis sent invitations to the ranking officers back at Princeton and at Maidenhead, off the Trenton road, to join him the next day and celebrate his victory over the Continental Army. An officer on his staff, Sir William Erskine, recommended not waiting until daylight but attacking across the Assunpink this same night.

  “My lord,” Erskine warned, “if Washington is the general I take him to be and you trust these people tonight, you will see nothing of them in the morning.”

  But the terrain was unfamiliar, and Cornwallis knew that his men were almost as tired as their commander. “Nonsense, my dear fellow,” he said. “We’ve got the old fox safe now. We’ll go over and bag him in the morning. The damned rebels are cornered at last!”

  Erskine and the ranking Hessian colonel urged Cornwallis at least to send a patrol to the creek to keep watch over the American flank facing away from Trenton. Cornwallis didn’t think that was necessary.

  Cornwallis had not learned the lesson of Brooklyn Heights. Washington kept his campfires burning throughout the night while he led his men stealthily along an unobserved stretch of land well east of Trenton. Washington was going to confound every conventional expectation by not retreating but going on the offensive instead. His target was British supplies where they were now poorly defended, at Princeton. The weather relented and became Washington’s ally. A thaw that day had threatened to leave the roads a mire of mud, but the night brought a freeze. The Quaker Road hardened, and Washington took his men and cannon, their wheels muffled with rags, north to Princeton.

  At dawn, a cold sun revealed the branches of an orchard near the town. The trees were glistening with hoarfrost, and behind them were British scouts. As the Americans drew closer, the British opened fire. An early shot hit General Hugh Mercer as he was shouting for his men to retreat. When the Americans scattered, British soldiers ran after them and stabbed to death men who were trying to surrender. Mercer was wearing an overcoat that concealed his rank, and the British troops were sure they had captured George Washington. They jeered at Mercer, calling him a rebel and demanding he give up. Instead, he struck out with his sword. They overpowered him and stabbed him with their bayonets, seven times to the body, twice to the head. Mercer, mortally wounded, lay absolutely still. He heard one of his assailants say, “Damn him, he is dead. Let us leave him.” But Mercer guessed from shouts in the far distance that the battle had turned. He died a few days later.

  When Washington saw Mercer’s men running away from the British, he galloped to the very front of his own ranks and cried out to the men to hold their ground. The new militia from Pennsylvania seemed to waver, but the Continental Army veterans from New England didn’t break. With that shield, Washington could retrieve some of Mercer’s soldiers and point them back to battle. Riding a white horse, he led the troops as they moved up a hill toward the British line. When they were within thirty yards, he called, “Halt!” and then “Fire!” Washington was so near the enemy guns that Colonel John Fitzgerald at his side pulled his hat down over his eyes so that he wouldn’t see the general fall. The Americans fired, and the British began dropping back. As the smoke cleared, Fitzgerald looked to Washington’s position. The general still sat unharmed on his white mount.

  Fitzgerald broke into tears of relief and called to him, “Thank God, Your Excellency is safe!”

  “Bring up your troops, my dear Colonel,” Washington answered him. “The day is our own.”

  —

  The victory was as sweet as it had been unorthodox. Writing to his wife, Henry Knox told of Washington’s two daring strokes in language a civilian could understand: “The enemy were within nineteen miles of Philadelphia; they are now sixty miles. We have driven them almost the whole of West Jersey.” Washington intended to march from Princeton to Brunswick, where General Howe maintained another supply depot and a reported seventy thousand pounds in cash. But his men were too fatigued to make the seventeen-mile march. At the first halt, soldiers dropped to the ground and refused to move. Washington instead took them north to an easily defended site in the hills near Morristown. A solar eclipse had been forecast, and Washington issued a warning so that his troops wouldn’t become frightened when the sun vanished from the sky.

  William Howe’s army was only twenty-five miles away. But Howe himself, snug in New York with Elizabeth Loring, was done with fighting for the winter.

  The hour’s battle at Princeton had stirred Washington’s blood. He had felt for a moment that he was back on the plantations of Virginia, and when the British began to run he had stood in his stirrups and shouted, “A fine fox chase, my boys!” Both he and Cornwallis had likened the struggle to a gentlemen’s hunt, but the world quickly understood who had been run to earth.

  General Howe wrote home to Lord George Germain, the secretary for America, that he couldn’t see a way to end the war except with a major offensive. His previous tactic of attrition, accompanied by a campaign to win over the people of the conquered territories, was not working. Receiving news of the two American victories, Lord Germain thought he knew a better way to end the war. The Howe brothers had been soft on the rebels, he said. From now on, the Americans must feel the horror of warfare until “through a lively experience of loss and sufferings, they may be brought as soon as possible to a proper sense of their duty.”

  Before these last battles, America had respected George Washington because of the title that Congress had bestowed upon him. A few rival generals might have questioned his skill, but his men had responded to his imposing calm and a courage verging on recklessness. With these successes came a new reputation for the Continental Army, and f
or its commander. The troops noticed that the same residents of New Jersey who had been sullen and skeptical only a few weeks ago were cheering now as they marched through the countryside, and more civilians were coming forward to take up arms. As for George Washington, the new nation was ready to elevate him to the realm of folklore and myth. According to a letter in the Pennsylvania Journal, “If there are spots in his character, they are like spots in the sun, only discernible by the magnifying powers of a telescope. Had he lived in the days of idolatry, he would have been worshipped as a God.”

  Washington did not become intoxicated by the legends rising around him. When affairs had gone badly, he had let his friends and family know the degree to which others were to blame for each disaster. Even in victory he complained to Martha Washington’s son, Jack Custis, about the “mixed, motley crew” of undependable men he had to rely upon as soldiers. After two battles already being hailed as classics in the history of warfare, Washington was telling his stepson, “In a word, I believe I may with truth add that I do not think any officer since the creation ever had such a variety of difficulties and perplexities to encounter as I have.” He knew exactly how much of his recent success had been due to German sloth and British overconfidence, to turns in the weather, to luck or, as he preferred, to Providence.

  Washington’s mother in Fredericksburg agreed that George was receiving too much credit. When neighbors came to congratulate her on the outcome in New Jersey and to read aloud newspaper accounts of her son’s genius, Mary Washington dismissed the reports as far too flattering. But she could assure her listeners that the American commander could withstand the excessive praise. “George,” said his mother, “will not forget the lessons I have taught him.”

  Gates

  1777

  THOMAS JEFFERSON’S behavior since he drafted the Declaration of Independence had exasperated even his closest allies. When the Congress asked him to go to France with Benjamin Franklin to urge the Comte de Vergennes to aid the beleaguered American Army, he refused. His colleagues accused him of preferring his comfortable life in Virginia to the hardships of serving his country. Jefferson tried to hint at his reasons for abandoning politics, but his explanation was couched so obliquely that he only angered the other delegates even more.