Glover Maneuvers Skillfully, As If At Sea
While Colonel Stark continued to lead the way east along Second Street with his onrushing New Hampshire regiment, batter the Knyphausen Regiment’s crumbling left, and fight his way closer to the strategic Queen Street sector, the charging soldiers of Colonel Sargent’s New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts brigade also maintained equally heavy pressure on the Knyhausen Regiment in pushing east along Front Street only a block to the south. Meanwhile, the largest brigade of Sullivan’s Division, Glover’s New England brigade, advanced behind Sargent’s surging brigade. Meanwhile, just to the northwest, Sullivan’s rearmost regiments, or reserves, yet pushed down the River Road, where the snow had been trodden down by this time to leave a sheet of ice that made footing treacherous. Moving at the double quick behind Glover’s Bay State and Connecticut soldiers, the most rearmost of St. Clair’s troops, New Hampshire and Massachusetts Continentals, poured down the River Road toward Trenton’s southwestern edge and the intensifying battle.
As a well-deserved reward for having saved such a large percentage of Washington’s Army by evacuating them safely off Long Island and out of Howe’s clutches in late August, Glover now commanded a full brigade of 865 veterans in one Connecticut and four Massachusetts Continental regiments. His veteran Massachusetts contingent included his fellow 177 Marbleheaders of the Fourteenth Massachusetts Continental Regiment, which was Glover’s favorite (his old command), if not somewhat pampered, regiment. Unleashing high-pitched, piercing war cries straight from the depths of New Hampshire’s pine and spruce backwoods, Stark and Sargent’s troops, from north to south respectively, continued to surge through the town’s southern end, loading and firing on the run.
While Sullivan’s foremost soldiers, under Stark and Flahaven’s New Jersey vanguard, had first entered the frozen lower town by having followed the southeast-running River Road that terminated at King Street in the northern sector of the lower town before plunging farther south and deeper into the southern, or lower, end of Trenton to apply pressure on the Knyphausen Regiment’s left, Sullivan’s rearmost troops, St. Clair’s New Hampshire and Massachusetts brigade, had continued to advance down the River Road, bringing up the column’s rear. At the River Road intersection of the first north-south-running, or perpendicular, street that was King Street, St. Clair’s brigade had then divided: with the first arriving regiments of Sargent and Glover’s brigades having shifted south first to Second Street and then to Front Street one block to the south, while the last of St. Clair’s regiments, the Fifteenth Massachusetts Continental Regiment, pushed steadily east toward King Street north of Colonel Stark, who advanced east on Second Street along with the “right” of St. Clair’s brigade consisting of two regiments, and Sargent and Glover’s troops, respectively, likewise poured east a block south along Front Street below Stark’s surging New Hampshire Regiment.
While colorful Massachusetts battle flags snapped in the stiff breeze blowing from the northeast, Glover’s elated New England soldiers continued to swarm east into snowy Front Street, a parallel artery just below the River Road, where both King and Queen Streets terminated in Trenton’s southern end and the street closest to the river. This southernmost and lowest-lying area of town was the commercial district of shops and private businesses that had long intercepted, and then sold, the heavy flow of all variety of goods transported down the Delaware on the short journey to Philadelphia.
With the hard-fighting Colonel Paul Dudley Sargent leading the way, below Stark’s regiment, the mostly New Englanders of this fine Continental brigade surged east toward Queen Street with cheers echoing through the frigid air and unnerving even some veteran Knyphausen fusiliers, who must have thought that demons were descending upon them. Unlike most soldiers of Sullivan and Greene’s columns, Glover’s mariners charged through the streets behind Sargent’s troops with the distinct advantage of fixed bayonets. Therefore, during close quarter fighting that swirled through the deserted lower town when visibility was low and quite unlike Mercer’s troops, especially the frontier westerners armed with deadly Long Rifles, who possessed relatively few bayonets, to the north, Glover’s feisty soldiers met Knyphausen fusiliers on their own terms with steel bayonets in the swirl of confused fighting along the snow-covered side streets, backyards, and alleys of the darkened lower town.24
But most significantly, some of Glover’s men, almost certainly the old mariners, carried the longtime weapon of choice of men at sea, the blunderbuss. The large-caliber, short-range musket, actually more of a shotgun because it fired clusters of shot, was the best possible weapon for not only fighting at close quarters, but also during a raging snowstorm when relatively little could be seen. In fact, no weapon was more ideally suited for the conditions of urban warfare, and Glover’s former seamen proved themselves especially formidable with this short shotgun-like musket with the flared barrel at the end. A non-issued weapon long beloved by pirates, the blunderbuss was early brought into Glover’s ranks from home by individuals, who appreciated the lethality of this unique firearm that was carried by no other troops on either side at Trenton.25
By this time, Glover’s multi-dimensional and versatile men, who now demonstrated that they could perform as well on land as hard-hitting infantrymen as mariners on water, felt supremely confident, especially after their sterling performance during the river crossing. After all, these hardy “fishermen from Marblehead had sure shown [all] those landlubbers from New York and Pennsylvania how to handle a boat—even in a damn flat-bottomed river boat surrounded by ice cakes!”26
Now the Marblehead mariners were determined to prove to the haughty Virginia cavaliers of Greene’s Second Division how well they could perform as infantrymen on land. However, in truth, Glover and his Bay State Continentals had nothing to prove in this healthy, but often intense, rivalry, especially after all that they had already accomplished on New York soil on an unforgettable October 18, 1776, barely two months ago. At that time, Glover and his well-trained Massachusetts brigade, including his own Fourteenth Massachusetts Continental Regiment, had fought magnificently along the coast to save Washington’s Army while it withdrew north for the safety of White Plains at the battle of Pell’s Point, or Pelham Bay. After Howe’s Army had surprised Washington by a successful amphibious landing on Westchester County, New York, soil north of New York City, Glover’s Massachusetts brigade rushed to the rescue to meet the threat. Fighting tenaciously, they bought precious time by frustrating Howe’s ambitions, keeping a powerful invading British-Hessian army from advancing rapidly inland in one of the war’s most brilliant delaying actions. Without Glover’s skillfully orchestrated defensive stands behind a series of lengthy stonewalls that spanned Westchester County’s fields and meadows against the odds, Howe would have smashed into Washington’s slow-moving retreat to White Plains or gained the Continental Army’ s rear.27
While battling his way through the snow-filled streets, the swirl of sulphurous haze, and the most southernmost elements of the Knyphausen Regiment, Glover now especially relied upon the formidable combat capabilities of two veteran regiments that had played such a vital role in saving the day at Pell’s Point: Colonel William Shepard’s Third Massachusetts Continental Regiment, of 217 men, and Colonel Loammi Baldwin’s 113 soldiers of the Twenty-Sixth Massachusetts Continental Regiment.28
Colonel Baldwin was just the kind of aggressive regimental commander who made Glover’s brigade such an excellent command. At age thirty-two, Baldwin was a Renaissance man of ability and promise, but he never lost the common touch. A dotting father of “our little son,” he was a highly educated civil engineer from Woburn, Massachusetts. This well-laid out agricultural community, located just north of Boston and at the principal source of the Mystic River, had been founded by the colonel’s own enterprising father. Baldwin was a scholar-soldier, who was blessed with an inquisitive mind made sharper at Harvard College. The son was also good with his hands as a master cabinetmaker. Later Baldwin’s love of
nature and the soil literally bore fruit, when he later became the widely acclaimed father of the “Baldwin” apple, which he developed on his own manicured farm. Even more, he eventually gained renown as the distinguished father of American engineering. As seemingly in everything that he embarked upon in life, Baldwin excelled as an inspiring regimental commander, leading his Bay State soldiers onward on the double through the lower town’s snowy streets. He was so highly motivated at Trenton because, as he recently penned in a December 19, 1776 letter to his pretty Salem wife, Mary Fowle, whom he had married in July 1772, he was “determined to exert my self to the last” to win a new nation’s independence.29
While the falling snow continued to hamper visibility during the close-quarter, urban combat raging through the smoke-wreathed lower town, Glover’s Marbleheaders once again demonstrated the same kind of feisty fighting spirit seen on that October 18 day at Pell’s Point. Pouring east along Front Street with New England battle flags waving in the stiff northeast breeze, Sargent and Glover’s charging soldiers, respectively and with the southernmost of St. Clair’s onrushing New Hampshire and Massachusetts troops on their heels, ran a gauntlet of fusilier bullets. Proving as handy with a flintlock and blunderbuss as a lengthy wooden oar, Glover’s men blasted away at fusilier targets of opportunity. Massachusetts men armed with conventional weapons then rammed bullets down large-caliber smoothbore musket barrels with wooden ramrods for the next shot at Dechow’s finely uniformed men in bright red coats. With the snow and sleet pelting down that bestowed a certain surreal quality to the combat in the streets, the foremost New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut soldiers hurriedly took an advanced position behind a sturdy wooden fence, painted bright red by its image-conscious owner, of too much pride and vanity for a Quaker, to deliver greater punishment upon the southern flank of Dechow’s Knyphausen Regiment. Wrapped in threadbare garments and anything that they could lay their hands on before crossing the Delaware, veteran New England officers had also halted their panting men at this point so that they could gain their breath.
Along the wooden fence standing alone in the snow, Sargent and Glover’s Continentals, along with veterans on the right of Stark’s New Hampshire Regiment just to the north on their left, rested their flintlocks on sturdy wooden rails. Here, they steadied their aim to unleash an accurate fire upon on the southernmost of Dechow’s fusiliers. Blasting away with volleys and then firing at will at Hessians too close to miss, Stark’s New Hampshire men and three regiments of St. Clair’s brigade, all except the Fifteenth Massachusetts Continental Regiment that remained on King Street, following behind them, hammered the most lucrative Second Street fusilier targets with a hot fire while Sargent and Glover’s Continentals on Front Street forced the reeling Hessians, caught in a cross fire, to retire farther east and north. Most of all, Dechow’s fusiliers now hoped to escape the nightmare of battling Sullivan’s converging units in a confusing urban environment. Raising a cheer that rang through the embattled lower town, the ecstatic New Englanders then continued onward with renewed confidence and fixed bayonets through the low-hanging palls of battle-smoke, charging east toward Queen Street.
Gathering momentum, Stark, on the north, and Sargent and Glover, respectively and to the south, continued to hurl the Knyphausen troops northeastward, applying more pressure upon the stubborn fusiliers who had met their match in Trenton’s streets. The Marblehead soldiers, especially in blasting away with their giant shotguns the blunderbusses, now relished reaping a measure of sweet revenge upon their old opponent from the battle of Pell’s Point, the Kynphausen Regiment.
But Glover’s soldiers now felt greater satisfaction in thoroughly punishing Dechow’s fusiliers because the British government had deprived them and their lower- and middle-class families of their traditional economic livelihoods by keeping Marblehead sailing ships from fishing the Grand Banks. Therefore, Glover’s Massachusetts and Connecticut troops were especially elated by the sight of troops on the Knyphausen Regiment’s mauled left on the south falling back under the relentless pressure, and additional fusiliers starting to head northeast toward Queen Street and the Quaker Meeting House while other Hessians broke ranks to either seek cover in vacant houses without angry patriot owners or raced south to reach Assunpink bridge and the road, which led south to Bordentown and safety.30
For the first time, Glover now basked in the sight of so many Germans on the run. Meanwhile, he attempted to do all that he could to fulfill Washington’s lofty tactical requirements of achieving an elusive double envelopment. With undisguised contempt, the former Marblehead sea captain viewed Dechow’s fusiliers as detested “poltroons.” Glover knew that this hard-fought struggle raging fiercely through Trenton’s streets would determine if Americans were to be “either freemen or slaves.” In his own words, this hard-nosed Marblehead colonel now led his seafaring “boys” farther into the smoky depths of the lower town so that the people of America and future generations would never become debased “slaves, which is [a fate] worse than death [and] We can but die in conquering them, which will be dying gloriously.”31
With more than two thousand fighting men so imbued with such idealistic sentiments and eager to exploit their already significant tactical gains, Washington and his Continental and state troops were not to be denied this morning. In fact, Glover was only beginning to fight in the urban combat swirling through the lower town. Because Ewing’s Pennsylvania militia troops had been unable to cross over the Delaware and advance into Trenton’s lower end to capture the Assunpink bridge, the most strategic lower town objective, and then join the First and Second Divisions as ordered by Washington, the stone structure was not yet secured to eliminate Rall’s escape route south. Squinting his eyes, Glover peered southeastward through the falling snow toward the Assunpink bridge, expecting to catch sight of Ewing’s Pennsylvania militia troops occupying advanced positions in the lower town. But this full brigade of Pennsylvanians was now mysteriously absent from Trenton’s streets. A perplexed Glover was not yet aware of Ewing’s failed crossing attempt, but he almost certainly surmised as much.
On his own, consequently, Glover remained undaunted. He now began to realize that he and his Massachusetts boys would have to accomplish what Ewing’s Pennsylvania brigade had been assigned to do: capturing the strategic Assunpink bridge to bar the escape of the Rall brigade or reinforcements dispatched north from Bordentown. Washington later lamented how a large percentage of Rall’s garrison escaped over the bridge because “Ewing was to have crossed before day at [the South] Trenton Ferry, and taken possession of the Bridge leading out of Town, but the Quantity of Ice was so great” to allow a crossing of the Delaware. For ample good reason, consequently, the ever-vigilant Glover now feared that the Knyphausen Regiment could yet escape Washington’s closing entrapment by making a dash south and down Queen Street to gain the key bridge over Assunpink Creek. At this time, the stone bridge at Queen Street’s lower end yet remained in Hessian hands, offering an open avenue for the Rall brigade’s escape. Glover, therefore, knew that something had to be done to slam this open door shut and as soon as possible if the Rall brigade was to be entrapped as Washington envisioned with the complete closing of the arms of his pincer movement.
Making his own independent tactical decision on the spot, Glover hurriedly made preparations to capture the Assunpink bridge, which had suddenly become the most strategic point on the battlefield, on his own. As so often in the past, the former sea captain and his disciplined Massachusetts Continentals would have to fulfill this vital tactical mission that less capable troops—untrained and undisciplined militia—had already failed to accomplish.
With no time to seek orders from Sullivan or Washington, Glover now acted on his own, as if yet commanding his own ship once again on a lengthy voyage to the Grand Banks. As usual, he once more relied on his own initiative, aggressiveness, and tactical instincts in a key battlefield situation. Knowing instinctively that no time could be wasted, Glover led his Massachu
setts troops onward in a bid to secure the bridge, spanning dark, flooded waters, to cut off Rall’s southern escape route. With muskets and blunderbusses on shoulders, Glover’s soldier-sailors sprinted southeast through the whitish downpour in an effort calculated to drive yet another nail in the Rall brigade’s coffin. On the double, Colonel Glover led his Bay Staters southeast below Sullivan’s main body of advancing troops, including Sargent and St. Clair’s brigade, respectively, to tighten the fatal noose around Rall’s three regiments by capturing the bridge.32
Guarded by only a forlorn eighteen-man Hessian detail under the command of Sergeant Johannes Mueller, who had been given an impossible task, the stone bridge with three graceful arches over the Assunpink was now ripe for the taking. Glover was now taking full advantage of the overall lack of initiative demonstrated by the Kuynapshusen Regiment throughout the cold morning. Clearly, Dechow’s regiment was guilty of having made its initial fatal delay by remaining stationary in the vicinity of Queen and Second Streets for too long Indeed, when first formed in front of Major Dechow’s Queen Street headquarters and later just below the Quaker Meeting House, the Knyphausen Regiment troops had stood in position far too long, thanks to its officers failing to act on their own initiative, even while escalating cannonfire from Knox’s guns boomed to the northwest and Sullivan’s musketry crackled to the southwest.
However, in truth, some of this lengthy delay that allowed Sullivan’s First Division to penetrate into Trenton’s southwest outskirts was entirely excusable. Because the Knyphausen Regiment’s fusiliers had been quartered on both sides of Assunpink Creek—perhaps as far west as the Barracks located on the river bottoms and as far south as the wooden houses situated along the road on the creek’s south side—and over a wider area than either of its two sister regiments, Major Dechow’s troops had initially taken longer to come together and form for action to meet the threat than either the Rall or von Lossberg Regiments.
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