George Washington's Surprise Attack

by Phillip Thomas Tucker

  Not long thereafter, the citizens of America’s capital were greeted with a painful reminder of the high cost of freedom, however. Colonel Haslet’s body was the first to arrive in Philadelphia for burial. As revealed in a leading Philadelphia newspaper on February 4, 1777: “In the action at Princeton . . . the brave col. John Haslet was mortally wounded and his remains were brought to this city . . . with the honours [sic] of war . . . Since his arrival in this country [from northern Ireland] he remained a fair and unblemished character [and possessed an] inextinguishable love of his country and unconquerable zeal for the invaded rights of America . . . undismayed at the danger of war, he nobly sacrificed his invaluable life at the shrine of American liberty.”67

  The Ireland-born Haslet left behind an attractive wife named Jemima, a brood of children, a bountiful plantation along the Millpillion River that flowed gently into Delaware Bay, and a nice house, where he should have been reposing at the time of the battle of Trenton. Ironically, he was killed at Princeton with Washington’s orders in his pocket to proceed to Delaware to recruit a new battalion. But Haslet had been determined to lead his men into battle one more time, ignoring Washington’s directive in his eagerness. Symbolically, Haslet had been killed while coming to the assistance of his fallen Celtic friend, General Mercer. The martyred Irishman’s uniformed body was placed at Philadelphia’s State House yard for an official public viewing and a solemn memorial observance, which was shortly repeated for Mercer.

  Colonel Haslet was buried at the First Presbyterian Church’s cemetery in a casket draped with a large American flag. Symbolically, a good many Irish soldiers from Haslet’s native Ulster homeland, including the finely uniformed cavalrymen of Captain Morris’s First Troop of Philadelphia Light Horse which fought at Trenton, served as the silent honor guard during the funeral. Only two weeks later, another forgotten casualty of the Trenton-Princeton Campaign was Haslet’s wife Jemima. She died of grief and heartache back in Delaware, never rising from her bed after receiving the tragic news of her husband’s death at Princeton.68

  Then yet another shock soon struck the American people like a lightning bolt: General Mercer’s death. With head injuries and multiple bayonet wounds to his stomach, Mercer lingered in agony at the Thomas Clark house on the Princeton battlefield for nine days before dying. When Washington’s good friend and fellow Virginian died, the recognition of Mercer’s important contributions in the formulation of the most brilliant tactical plan of the American Revolution died with him.

  The sad news of Mercer’s death was printed in the Maryland Gazette on January 23, 1777: “Last Sunday evening died near Princeton, of the wounds he received in the engagement at that place on the 3d instant, HUGH MERCER, Esq; brigadier general in the Continental Army. On Wednesday his body was brought to his city [Philadelphia], and yesterday buried in Christ Church yard with [full] military honours . . . The uniform character and exalted abilities and virtues of this illustrouss [sic] officer, will render his name equally dear to America with the liberty for which he” died to preserve.69 Mercer’s many admirers, and no one more than Washington, never forgot the Scotsman’s fiery words that proved most prophetic in the end: “For my part, I have but one object in view, and that is, the success of the cause; and God can witness how cheerfully I would lay down my life to secure it.”70

  The high sacrifice of so many of Washington’s leading officers at Princeton was unprecedented. Besides Mercer and Haslet, some of Washington’s most promising leaders were fatally cut down: Captain Daniel Neil, who commanded the East Company, New Jersey State Artillery with distinction at the battle of Trenton; twenty-two-year-old “heroic” Captain John Fleming, the promising Henrico County, Virginia, commander of the First Virginia Continental Regiment and descendant of Jamestown settlers, who fell “at the head of his company in defence [sic] of American freedom” in leading the counterattack; Lieutenant Bartholomew Yeates and Ensign Anthony Morris, Jr., who were both killed on the field; and Lieutenant John Read, Fourth Virginia Continental Regiment, who was mortally wounded, dying on January 25, 1777. Along with so many other promising officers, Major John Armstrong, Jr., Mercer’s faithful aide-de-camp at Trenton, also fell wounded in Princeton’s close-range combat. Ironically, not only the son of the Kittanning Expedition’s daring commander but also one of the experienced Pennsylvania officers of that audacious September 1756 raid over the Allegheny Mountains, Ireland-born Colonel James Potter, was also cut down in the bloodletting at Princeton.71

  After having refused to run unlike so many other soldiers and getting off a final shot from his three-pounder before the onrushing redcoats descended upon him with bayonets, Captain Neil’s final resting place has remained at an unknown location on the Princeton battlefield. Tradition has it that Neil’s body was brought back to his wife Eliza and his two children in the enemy-occupied Passaic River country, but such was not the case. In regard to the tragic death of one of Trenton’s heroes and one of his best artillery officers of Sullivan’s First Division in the December 26 victory that gave new life to the infant nation, General Greene lamented how: “The enemy [had] refused him quarter after he was wounded [and] He has left behind a grieving widow overwhelmed with grief. . . .”72

  Washington’s improbable dual successes at Trenton and Princeton accomplished the impossible, turning the tide of the revolution and saving the young republic from an early death. While General Mercer died ingloriously at the Thomas Clark house at Princeton, where young Major Armstrong had carried him in tears, the leading capitals across Europe were abuzz with the unbelievable news of Washington’s twin New Jersey successes when least expected by one and all. Europe’s rulers and leaders were dazzled by the audacity of Washington’s crossing of the Delaware and unexpected attack in wintertime, when no one else waged war. Frederick the Great, whose own veterans, like Major Dechow who led the Knyphausen Regiment at Trenton and paid for the success of Washington’s daring battle plan with his life, had served in Rall’s brigade, wrote how the remarkable “achievements of Washington and his little band of compatriots . . . were the most brilliant of any recorded in the history of military achievements.”73

  While Washington was acknowledged around the world as a gifted commander when in the most severe crisis situation, Mercer’s body lay in his final resting place in Philadelphia far from his Fredericksburg home and his five children—Anna, John, William, George, and Hugh, Jr. Fortunately, Mercer’s orphans were later cared for by Mercer’s brother-in-law, Colonel George Weedon, who led the Third Virginia Continental Regiment with distinction at Trenton. However, the aristocratic kings, princes, and upper-class generals of Europe could hardly have imaged that an immigrant, transplanted Scotsman, and former Jacobite rebel, who had been only an obscure Fredericksburg physician at the revolution’s beginning, was in fact a primary tactical architect of the battle plan that resulted in the war’s most surprising victory.74

  In total and in an unprecedented feat, Washington’s homespun revolutionaries captured fifteen Hessian flags at Trenton, five from each of the three regiments of the now non-existent brigade. Symbolically, at least two of Trenton’s revered trophies was proudly hung in the main meeting hall of the Continental Congress which was located not far from the fifty-two-year-old Scotsman’s final resting place, where General Mercer’s remains were honored: the bluish green silk flag of Rall’s elite grenadier regiment and the beautiful white silk banner, with its majestic House of Hesse eagle emblem, of the von Lossberg Regiment. These bullet-shredded trophies had been carried to Congress by Washington’s Virginia friend and aide Lieutenant Colonel Baylor on a fast horse.75

  As penned by a Continental Army surgeon, Dr. Jonathan Potts, with obvious pride in what Washington had accomplished against the odds to surprise the world and infuse new life into a dying resistance effort across America, the Hessians “were drubbed and out-generaled in every respect” at the little town of Trenton.76 All in all, Washington’s victory at Trenton upset a host of traditional beliefs and
assumptions, sending shock waves reverberating around the world. When America’s armed citizen soldiers dared to first take up arms in a popular uprising to confront a monarchy’s almost limitless might and Europe’s best professional leaders and soldiers, they boldly challenged the preeminent military establishment and the traditional order of the eighteenth-century world.

  Before December 26, the humiliating defeats suffered by Washington’s Army in disastrous 1776 had seemingly verified to the world that a common people’s revolt—as long demonstrated with tragic results for fiery Celtic rebels during the course of hundreds of years in Ireland and Scotland—against this Old World power structure and professional army was an absolute impossibility. To everyone’s surprise, a resilient Washington had demonstrated that success could be achieved against the odds and an established military system by innovative tactical thinking, audacity, and bold action. Even more, Washington’s dramatic victory at Trenton proved that the old, entrenched military system was unable to demonstrate the necessary flexibility or adjust sufficiently to cope with new challenges of an asymmetrical nature to decisively defeat highly motivated soldiers of a revolutionary army, when it utilized a new American way of waging war.

  By overpowering an entire Hessian brigade of crack warriors on December 26, Washington first demonstrated this new realization by way of a masterful blending of the best tactical lessons of traditional European warfare—especially amassing artillery and the ever-elusive double envelopment—with the more innovative and successful New World tactical lessons—especially the guerrilla-like raid and surprise attack at first light learned from battling Native Americans. Washington’s surprising victory at Trenton was the first demonstration of the symbiotic and synergetic fusion of the most successful unconventional military lessons—a surprise attack near dawn combined with massive artillery firepower and a reliance upon tactical flexibility, mobility, speed, stealth, and hard-hitting shock in the Napoleonic tradition of the next century—from both sides of the Atlantic, serving as a harbinger of a new day to come in modern warfare.

  In overall strategic terms, Washington’s remarkable success at Trenton provided the first concrete example that Great Britain, in fighting a limited war of attrition far from home with its small professional army, would be unable to develop a workable military solution to thwart a popular uprising among a politically motivated and religiously inspired people, who were well armed, waging more of a total war than their opponents, and inhabiting an expansive land: insurmountable moral and physical barriers to conquest. Indeed, Washington had convincingly demonstrated that a sprawling country and a people’s rebellion could not be quickly, easily, or completely overwhelmed, even after large cities, such as New York, were lost to the conquerors.

  The most insightful British officers and leaders now began to understand what had been once unthinkable just before Washington’s shocking victory at Trenton: that this strange, new kind of war in faraway America—so unlike the traditional conflicts in Europe and even in regard to people’s rebellions in Ireland and Scotland—simply could not be won against a highly politicized and mobilized people, mere lowly peasants in European eyes, who had been galvanized and radicalized by Age of Enlightenment ideology and a popular uprising. With Washington’s most improbable of successes at Trenton, even King George’s mercenary policy had been now exposed as folly by the defeat of an entire Hessian brigade that had been considered invincible by one and all.77

  Revealing the emergence of this new equation for waging war in America in a letter, Richard Henry Lee, a respected member of the Virginia planter class who was educated in England, was correct in his prophetic estimation how even if Philadelphia was eventually captured, then “the loss of ten such cities would not ruin the American cause [because] at the beginning of this quarrel we told our enemies that we knew they could take our cities and our sea coast, but that still enough would be left to secure American freedom.”78

  As never before, the stiff challenges and trials, especially crossing the turbulent Delaware, united Washington’s soldiers, cementing divergent parts and molding them into a more cohesive fighting force that emerged into something that was more national than sectional by the morning of December 26 and just in time for America’s fortunes. More than lofty Age of Enlightenment rhetoric, the Declaration of Independence, or even Tom Paine’s Common Sense or The American Crisis, the bonds of comradeship of Washington’s soldiers were solidly forged by the sufferings, fires, and sacrifices by the Trenton challenge, uniting divergent soldiers from across America and creating a nationalistic bond that rose to the fore during the overwhelming of a Hessian brigade.

  Indeed, the bidding ties of nationhood and brotherhood were permanently forged among America’s soldiers and larger numbers of people across the land with Washington’s twin wintertime victories in New Jersey. The wide regional, class, and cultural differences between soldiers from east and west, and especially those men from north and south, finally began to be erased by the formidable Trenton challenge when complete unity was necessary for victory: a forgotten, but vital, ingredient for the development of a true American national identity, character, and army with Washington at its head, that led to the real—rather than theoretical because independence could only be won on the battlefield and not by Founding Fathers simply issuing a lofty declaration—creation of an authentic American nation and people.

  The rough-and-tumble, Scotch-Irish fighter from the backwoods of New Hampshire, John Sullivan, understood the nature of this silent evolution in hearts and minds and the more thorough Americanization process among the ranks, after having seen so many young men and boys from both the North and South, or the “Yankee” and the “Buck-Skin,” respectively, fighting side-by-side and celebrating their sparkling success at Trenton together as one. Overcoming their own considerable personal and regional prejudices and gaping sectional differences, soldiers from across America gained a new healthy respect for each other during the recent trials, forging a greater sense of unity and a tighter bond that was truly nationalistic.

  As General Sullivan in a letter described this most timely Trenton synthesis in which New Englanders and Virginians fought united as one and as a highly effective team to reap the most dramatic of victories: “I have been much pleased to See a Day approaching to try the Difference between yankee Cowardice & Southern valor [and] The Day has or Rather the Days have arrived and all The General officers allowed & do allow that the yankee Cowardice assumes the shape of True valor in the field & The Southern valor appears to be a Composition of Boasting & Conceit.”79

  At the same time that these regional and sectional differences diminished with shared hardship, suffering, and the sweet taste of success at Trenton, another synthesis had occurred when Washington relied upon a masterful blend of the most successful Native American, frontier, and European tactics, mixing conventional with asymmetrical ways of waging war. This timely tactical synthesis had brought much more than victory at Trenton, having a profound, far-reaching impact, because now “the British saw their comfortable plan for winning the war utterly shattered.”80

  At long last and most importantly, Washington had broken the long winning streak of a seemingly invincible opponent while also infusing the young Continental Army and infant nation with a new vibrant energy and sense of determination to keep the once-dying embers of revolution alive, which had seemed about to be extinguished for all time. After the twin winter setbacks in western New Jersey, Howe’s lengthy defensive line, that pointed straight at Philadelphia like a dagger, was rolled all the way back to New Brunswick: a most symbolic retreat and admission that attested to the fact that America could not be conquered by conventional and traditional means as long as Washington’s army remained a mobile, unpredictable fighting force in the field.

  In overall strategic terms and boding well for America’s prospects in a lengthy war of attrition, what was most convincingly demonstrated by Washington’s victory at Trenton was that the British and Hessians we
re simply far too few numbers to successfully combat the irregular, or guerrilla, tactics of insurgency warfare over a wide expanse of North America with conventional tactics. Indeed, the land’s vastness—a thousand miles in length and several hundred miles in width—and the multitudes of Americans, including patriot pioneers west of the mountains, could not be subjugated by a relatively small standing army (without England relying on conscription despite global commitments), especially a “foreign” one, far from home and with a government divided in sentiment.

  These true realizations—first verified with Washington’s victory at Trenton—in regard to the true strategic situation in America only belatedly enlightened British political and military leaders of an undeniable new and harsh reality.81 When Lord George Germain, the powerful Secretary of State for the Colonies since November 1775, first learned of Washington’s success at Trenton in February 1777, he lamented how: “All our hopes were blasted by the unhappy affair at Trenton.”82 And in a December 31, 1776 letter to Lord Germain, a stunned William Tryon, New York’s royal governor, was equally disconsolate: “The Rebels carrying off the Hessian Brigade under Coll. Rall at Trenton, has given me more real chagrin than any other circumstance [of] this war.”83

  In Trenton’s wake, the British press, military, and political leaders condemned the formerly invincible Hessians, who became scapegoats like Rall for the Germans. The Hessians were now widely denounced as “the worst troops,” receiving the entire blame for the Trenton debacle instead of top British leadership. Therefore, Howe, Cornwallis, and Grant, who was most of all responsible for the Trenton fiasco, were not blamed or widely condemned. Clearly, Sir Howe had been knighted by the king as a prestigious Companion of the Bath far too soon before the crushing of Washington’s Army had been completed, thanks to London’s assumption that he had all but ended the war by late December 1776, and until that fateful late December morning when everything changed forever with Washington’s surprise attack that so suddenly emerged out of a blinding snowstorm from two directions.84