Prior to the invasion of New York, the Howe brothers, General William and Admiral Richard, pursued a political solution. They believed in a minimal use of force whenever possible—as well as a minimal loss of life. In some ways, these beliefs mirror the modern (and sometimes flawed) tenets of counterinsurgency warfare. Howe eventually even offered a pardon to anyone who renounced the Patriot cause and swore allegiance to the Crown. Given the pitiful condition of Washington’s army, it seemed like a prudent measure. Thousands of Americans flocked to British camps and pledged their peaceful obedience to the king.
Frustrated with the slow pace of the war and realizing the importance of destroying the Continental Army, Howe’s top general, Sir Henry Clinton, asked for permission to sail to New Jersey and put an end to Washington’s army once and for all. As an alternative, he suggested sending his men up the Delaware River to strike the American capital at Philadelphia and capture the Continental Congress. He saw the importance of envelopment and maneuver. Howe rejected both ideas.
From a strategic standpoint, the Howe brothers had a different aim from catching the Americans and crushing them. They wanted to keep Washington’s army in retreat while they dispatched five thousand troops under Clinton to seize the port of Providence, Rhode Island, which would serve as an additional base for the British fleet because the waters around Manhattan typically froze solid during the winter.
This proved to be a crucial error, one that allowed Washington’s army to escape once again. The Americans reached New Brunswick, a fateful milestone, on November 29. The enlistments for many of Washington’s regiments, including the Marylanders of the Flying Camp, were up on December 1, dramatically reducing the size of the army. William Beatty remembered the exodus: “Two or three days after our arrival in Brunswick, being the first of December and the Expiration of the Flying Camp’s troops time, our brigade marched to Philadelphia.” Washington urged the men to stay, but most of the units whose enlistments had expired returned to their home states, as required by law—Washington’s army was melting away and numbered only about three thousand men.
December 1776 marked a low point in the Revolution. Most of the Continental Army’s twelve-month enlistments were about to expire by the end of the year,17 and troops were becoming scarce as many headed back home. Smallwood’s men’s enlistments expired on December 10, and his once proud battalion of nearly a thousand had dwindled to under one hundred. Samuel Smith noted the pitiful condition of the troops: “[Our] numbers by battles, sickness, and desertion, were reduced to ninety men and a few officers.”
17. The enlistments of men who signed up on different dates expired at various times during the month of December 1776.
But from the bones of the old battalion, the new 1st Maryland Regiment and several other regiments were formed. Many of the remaining survivors of Smallwood’s Battalion, including Gist, Jack Steward, and Nathaniel Ramsay, officially enlisted in the Continental Army for three years around December 10 and became part of the 1st Maryland Regiment. Other officers followed suit, and they were joined by many of the men from the Flying Camp, such as John Eager Howard and William Beatty.18 Even though Otho Williams remained in captivity following the Battle of Fort Washington, he retained an honorary command and was even promoted while imprisoned. John Stone, formerly a captain in the battalion’s 1st Company, temporarily led the 1st Maryland Regiment while Smallwood returned to Maryland to recruit new men. Smith, Gist, Colonel Stone, Ramsay, Steward, and a small core group of men were all that remained of the proud unit.
18. Most of the men in Smallwood’s Regiment who reenlisted formed the 1st Maryland Regiment, the independent companies formed the 2nd Maryland, and the Flying Camp formed additional regiments. Congress mandated an army of eighty-eight battalions; Maryland was expected to furnish eight regiments but outfitted only seven. Rather than follow each regiment separately, this book follows the principal officers and enlisted men who were a driving force in each of these units.
At New Brunswick, Cornwallis again caught up with the Americans. During the afternoon of December 1, Washington’s forces had caught sight of British Light Dragoons on the far bank of the Raritan River outside town. Washington called upon a crack artillery unit led by twenty-one-year-old West Indian Alexander Hamilton. Like Gist, the brilliant young officer had raised his own artillery company and enforced discipline with the lash when necessary. The well-oiled unit caught the eye of Washington, who eventually made Hamilton his senior aide. Hamilton went on to be one of the most influential founding fathers of the United States, arguing the need for a strong national government after the war and helping to establish the nation’s financial system. But on that cold December day, the young artillerist was helping defend the crossings and cover the American withdrawal from the town.
Enoch Anderson of the Delaware regiment recalled, “A severe cannonading took place on both sides, and several were killed and wounded on our side.” The fight continued until “near Sundown,” when the Delaware men received their orders to retreat. Unlike most of the army, the regiment had, until this time, managed to hold on to its tents. But this latest retreat left it as poorly equipped as the rest of the Americans. Anderson wrote:
Colonel Haslet came to me, and told me to take as many men as I thought proper, and go back and burn all the tents. “We have no wagons,” said he “to carry them off, and it is better to burn them than they should fall into the hands of the enemy.” Then I went and burned them—about one hundred tents. When we saw them reduced to ashes, it was night and the army far ahead. We made a double quick-step and came up with the army about eight o’clock. We encamped in the woods, with no victuals, no tents, no blankets. The night was cold and we all suffered much, especially those who had no shoes.
Haslet’s men and the Marylanders camped thirteen miles away in the town of Kingston. The next morning, the British crossed the river into New Brunswick. There, Cornwallis received orders to halt. Like the Americans, his army was also in poor shape. Many of the exhausted Hessians were barefoot, their shoes worn out from marching and fighting since August. To regroup, Cornwallis paused for several crucial days, letting Washington put additional distance between himself and the British. Arriving in Princeton, the Americans had “comfortable lodgings in the college,” but their ranks were now down to twenty-five hundred men, with more leaving every day. With the British behind him, Washington faced another obstacle—the Delaware River. If the British trapped his men on its banks, his force could easily be annihilated.
To slow the advancing British, Washington left fourteen hundred men under the command of Lord Stirling in Princeton. The rest of the men continued on to Trenton, which lies on the bank of the Delaware River. The Delaware Regiment and some of the Marylanders marched in the rear of the main portion of the army, accompanied by the commander in chief himself. “We continued on our retreat; — our Regiment in the rear . . . —tearing up bridges and cutting down trees to impede the march of the enemy,” recalled Anderson. “I was to go no faster than General Washington and his pioneers.” They made it across the approximately four-hundred-yard-wide river around noon on December 2.
For five days, the American army crossed the wide river in boats by the light of huge pyres lit beside the river. Charles Willson Peale, a member of the Pennsylvania militia, described the setting as “the most hellish scene I have ever beheld, all the shores were lighted up with large fires, boats continually passing and repassing, full of men, horses, artillery, and camp equipage . . . made rather the appearance of hell than an earthly scene.” Scores of the bedraggled troops filed past Peale. “A man staggered out of line and came toward me. He had lost all his clothes. He was in an old, dirty blanket jacket. His beard long and his face full of sores . . . had so disfigured him that he was not known to me at first sight. Only when he spoke did I recognize my brother James.”
Ensign James Peale was one of the approximately one hundred survivors of Smallwo
od’s Battalion.
Throughout the retreat, Washington repeatedly ordered General Charles Lee to join the forces in Pennsylvania. But Lee was moving at a snail’s pace. For reasons known only to him, he stopped at a tavern in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, with a small guard. In the morning, still smarting from the decision to make Washington commander in chief, Lee sat down to write a letter to General Horatio Gates. “Entre nous, a certain great man is damnable deficient,” he complained. “He has thrown me into a situation where I have my choice of difficulties: if I stay in this province, I risk myself and army; and if I do not stay, the province is lost forever. . . . In short, unless something which I do not expect turns up, we are lost.”
Something unexpected did turn up—a group of British cavalry that included the fiery redhead Cornet Banastre Tarleton. The son of a merchant and slave trader, Tarleton squandered most of his inheritance on wine, women, and gambling, saving just enough to purchase his cavalry commission. His ruthless Light Dragoons became one of the most feared units of the war, and they faced off against the Marylanders on several occasions. On this day, they quickly surrounded the inn and killed or drove off the guards posted outside. Tarleton recalled, “I ordered my men to fire into the house through every window and door, and cut up as many as they could.”
Begging for mercy, the female tavern owner ran to the door and shouted that Lee was inside. In response Tarleton promised to begin burning the building down unless Lee gave himself up.
After only a few moments, Lee himself came to the door, still in his dressing gown, and placed himself at Tarleton’s mercy, saying that “he trusted he would be treated as a gentleman.”
With no intention of trapping Washington on the banks of the Delaware, Cornwallis continued his leisurely pace across New Jersey. He left New Brunswick on December 7 and arrived in Princeton that afternoon, one hour after the American rear guard led by Stirling vacated the village. The British paused there that night, ransacking the college library.
Meanwhile, Washington had been rounding up as many boats as possible and bringing them to the Pennsylvania side of the river. Every boat, no matter how small, for miles up and down the river was pressed into service and kept out of the hands of the British. At the same time, the Pennsylvania navy piloted nine galleys up the Delaware to help patrol the river and prevent the British from crossing. In addition, Washington strategically placed his artillery to defend the key crossing points.
On December 8, the Redcoats and Hessians entered Trenton, and Howe and Cornwallis approached the river with some aides. According to a Hessian officer on the scene, no fewer than thirty-seven American guns opened fire. Despite the artillery, Howe refused to leave, displaying “the greatest coolness and calm for at least an hour.” The officer added, “Wherever we turned the cannon balls hit the ground, and I can hardly understand, even now, why all five of us were not killed.”
Once again, the Americans had escaped. One of the Hessian battle captains opined, “It became clearly evident that the march took place so slowly for no other reason than to permit Washington to cross the Delaware safely and peacefully.” Historian Charles Stedman agreed, writing, “General Howe appeared to have calculated with the greatest accuracy the exact time necessary for the enemy to make his escape.”
Safely on the other side of the Delaware, the Marylanders were assigned to guard crossing points along the river. Pennsylvanian Charles Willson Peale visited the Maryland camp and wrote that the men were “scattered through the woods in huts made of poles, straw, leaves, etc., in a dirty, ragged condition.”
The British army now occupied much of New Jersey, its goal from the start. Howe wanted to push the American army out of New Jersey without sustaining many casualties and to capture its rich farms before the armies could pick them clean of lifestock and forage. The British supply line stretched back more than three thousand miles to London, making it difficult to feed the men and horses. Initially, the British planned to compensate local inhabitants for the supplies they needed. However, instead of paying in hard currency, they issued IOUs that would often prove to be worthless or simply took what they needed. New Jersey was filled with Loyalists, many of them middle-class farmers with abundant fields and livestock. But instead of protecting its sympathizers in New Jersey, the Hessians ransacked the farms. “All the plantations in the vicinity were plundered, and whatever the soldiers found in the houses were declared booty.” Some Loyalists and British also got in on the action. The American army wasn’t innocent either, but Washington attempted to keep their marauding in check. Many of the colonists remained torn between their loyalty to the Crown and their desire for fair treatment. The plundering continued as long as the British occupied New Jersey and was a factor in swaying the allegiance of the locals.
During these dark days for America, a volunteer who carried a musket and a pen captured the mood of the country and also issued a call to arms. Radical and journalist Thomas Paine, the author of the widely read pamphlet Common Sense, wrote the first in a series of pamphlets called The American Crisis at this time. His immortal words are etched in the minds of many Americans while they are schoolchildren: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine Patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he, that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of men and women.” Paine ordered his pamphlet to be sold at no more than two pennies, or just the cost of printing, and it “flew like wildfire through all the towns and villages of the counties.” Surprisingly for the eighteenth century, most of the American army was literate. The little book was also read aloud to small groups of privates and corporals, as well as townspeople, across the colonies. In the crisis and dark times, “people began to think anew. Thomas Paine’s pamphlet caught that spirit and helped it grow. The American Crisis was more than an exhortation; it was a program for action. . . . Most important, he concentrated the mind of a nation on the single-most urgent task, which was to rebuild its army and to do it quickly,” wrote historian David Hackett Fischer.
The pamphlet expressed the groundswell of actions that ordinary people individually and collectively took to change their circumstances.
Now encamped in Trenton with thirteen thousand men at his disposal, Howe was poised to strike Philadelphia and wipe out the Marylanders and what was left of the American army. In anticipation of a British assault on the capital, the Continental Congress fled the city. Eventually, it settled in Baltimore. However, instead of striking decisively, the British pursued a European, gentlemanly style of warfare and chose to encamp for the winter. To solidify their gains, Howe set up a series of fortified posts across New Jersey. He garrisoned British and Hessian troops in various towns, such as Perth Amboy, New Brunswick, Princeton, and Trenton. The decision proved fateful. Concentrated en masse, the British army was nearly invincible. But when it was separated and segmented in this way, any part was vulnerable to a focused American attack.
The strategic situation was also fraught with potential peril for the Patriots. A sudden cold snap could freeze the Delaware River, enabling the British to cross by foot. This fact, coupled with the unraveling of American financing behind the war effort and compounded by the enlistment problem, made the situation look grim. Washington wrote to his brother Samuel, “I think the game is pretty near up.”
Yet in the midst of this despair, Washington glimpsed an opportunity. He decided on a bold gamble that might result in either a battlefield victory or the complete defeat of his army and the potential loss of the war.
Chapter 15
Victory or Death—
The Gamble at Trenton
Inside his tent on the banks of the Delaware River, General George Washington methodically wrote the same three words over and over on several small pieces of paper. He had decided on a daring plan: crossing the ice-choked Delaware River on Christmas night and mounting a surprise attack on the Hessian garrison there. Knowing tha
t the assault could not hope to succeed if word of the plan reached the enemy, he detailed a Virginia brigade to serve as sentries around the Patriot camp. He ordered them “not to suffer any person to go in or come out—but to detain all persons who attempts either.” The general himself selected the password for the night, and that was what he was writing on scraps of paper for distribution to the unit commanders. While the surgeon general of the Continental Army was visiting Washington, one of the slips happened to fall to the floor. “I was struck with the inscription on it,” the physician wrote. “It was ‘Victory or Death.’”
Contrary to the myth perpetuated by many children’s books, the Hessians in Trenton were neither drunk nor idle. Their experienced commander, Colonel Johann Rall, the courageous hero of Chatterton’s Hill and Fort Washington, kept his men in constant readiness and on patrol. A series of raids by Washington’s army and the local militia in the prior days had put them on edge, and the men slept dressed and armed. Waiting for the Americans in Trenton were fifty Hessian Jaegers, twenty British Light Dragoons, and three Hessian infantry regiments led by Rall, Wilhelm von Knyphausen, and Friedrich Wilhelm von Lossberg, more than fourteen hundred men total. In addition, they had six artillery pieces. Rall realized the precarious nature of the Trenton outpost and frequently demanded reinforcements—to no avail. Unwisely, he decided not to entrench his garrison. Instead, he opted for flexibility and mobility, explaining, “I have not made any redoubts or any kind of fortifications because I have the enemy in all directions.” In exasperation, he complained, “Scheiszer bey Scheisz [shit on shit]! Let them come. . . . We will go at them with the bayonet.” British spies had warned of an impending attack on Trenton, but no one knew the exact day and time. The intelligence, combined with the raids, put Rall and his men in a perpetual state of alert and began to fray their nerves.
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