Washington's General

by Terry Golway

  By the time Greene’s column neared the town, morning had broken. Hessian pickets deployed in a cooper’s house about a half mile outside Trenton spotted the Americans, and both sides opened fire. The Germans retreated and shouted alarms: “Der Feind!” The enemy!

  Greene’s men raced toward the pickets, overcame them, and moved into position, bringing their artillery into action as the stunned Hessians stumbled out of their barracks and into withering fire. Washington and Greene heard drums and a bugle to the south, near the river; Sullivan’s men had arrived on cue. The plan had worked. The Hessians would be squeezed between the two American columns.

  The Hessian commander, Colonel Johann Rail, was asleep when the Americans attacked. Still groggy, he ordered his troops to move against Knox’s artillery at the head of Queen and King streets, near Greene’s position at the north end of town. The cannons put a bloody end to that attempted advance. Sullivan’s men were advancing from the south, and a detachment from Greene’s column was squeezing in from the west. As the Hessians tried to regroup amid the roar of the cannon and the staccato crack of musket fire, their unit’s band struck up martial music to inspire resistance. Rail, in a blue uniform and on horseback, tried to rally his men but was cut down by American fire. A couple of soldiers scurried to his aid, but his wounds were mortal. The Hessians put down their weapons and surrendered.

  The Americans, their cause seemingly hopeless only days before, had won an astonishing victory and showed the world and their countrymen that they were not finished. A happy Nathanael Greene accompanied Washington to a church on Queen Street, where Colonel Rail was dying. The two Americans offered some polite, comforting words through an interpreter and then assured Rail that his men, now prisoners, would be treated fairly. Rail was in terrible pain, struck twice in the side, and knew he had not long to live. (He died less than two days later.) After a few minutes, Greene and Washington left Rail to his fate.

  It was a glorious day for the country, Washington said. But what next? As the Americans celebrated in the streets of Trenton, Greene urged Washington to pursue the Hessians who had managed to escape and were fleeing toward another enemy garrison some eighteen miles to the south, in Mount Holly. The Americans had emerged from Trenton with barely a scratch, just four wounded (including the commander’s cousin, William Washington). Why not strike again?

  Washington wisely decided against Greene and in favor of caution. Greene’s enthusiasm and inexperience blinded him to the condition of his victorious troops. Many were drunk or feeling no pain (for a change) after relieving the Hessians of their rum. They also were exhausted after hours of hard marching in terrible conditions.

  The clinching argument against pursuit was less tangible but critical all the same, for it would provide Greene with an invaluable lesson in strategy. Washington understood that he had won a notable victory, and in a single, bold stroke he had improved the morale of his men and the country. He risked that victory if he pushed too hard.

  So the Americans withdrew from Trenton, marched back to McKon-key’s Ferry, and crossed the Delaware again. But they had only two days to rest, for they soon were on the march again, crossing the Delaware for a third time on December 30, returning to Trenton to await another chance to attack the enemy. Conditions during this third crossing were even worse than on Christmas Day, but in one respect, the journey was easier, for there were fewer troops to move. Hundreds were leaving as their enlistments expired.

  Greene was both apprehensive and optimistic as he faced, for the second time, the possibility that the army might dissolve. After joining Washington in New Jersey, Greene took time to write to Caty. “This is an important period to America, big with great events. God only knows what will be the issue of this Campaign, but everything wears a much bigger prospect than they have for some weeks past.”

  Another issue, however, weighed heavily on his mind. Caty would soon give birth, and although her letters to him have not been preserved, it’s not hard to see that she was troubled. Her husband was at war, and she was about to have their second child. She was completely dependent on her husband’s family in Rhode Island, and relations between Caty and some members of the Greene family were less than ideal. Greene did his best to provide his wife with some comfort, based on an unrealistic prospect. “Should we get possession of the Jerseys perhaps I may get liberty to come and see you. I pity your situation exceedingly. Your distress and anxiety must be very great. ... By the blessing of God I hope to meet again in the pleasures of wedlock.”

  There was no chance that Greene would receive liberty to return to Caty anytime soon. The bulk of the Continental army had but a few hours of service remaining. Men without shoes, whose bloody feet had traced a red trail through the snows of New Jersey, had had enough of war and sacrifice. One soldier recalled that the troops “had their hearts fixed on home and the comforts of the domestic circle.”

  George Washington, ordinarily reserved and distant, appointed himself to the position of the Continental army’s chief recruiting officer. After asking for volunteers to stay past their expiration date and finding few takers, he chose to make a speech–a sure sign of his desperation, for he avoided such demonstrations. On horseback, where he displayed such an impressive sense of command, he spoke personally to several regiments whose men were about to go home. They gathered in the snow they had become all too familiar with, men in ragged, pathetic clothing, men who were dreaming of a warm fireside, civilian clothes, and the comfort of friends and family. Continued service promised more deprivation, more violence, more suffering. They could hardly be blamed for staying put when a drumroll summoned volunteers.

  Washington’s voice now broke the silence. The men, most of them anyway, had never witnessed this side of their legendary commander; indeed, few armies in the world would have heard their commander in chief address them as fellow countrymen, as equals. “My brave fellows,” he said to a unit from Pennsylvania, “you have done all I asked you to do, and more than could be reasonably expected; but your country is at stake. . . . You have worn yourselves out with fatigues and hardships, but we know not how to spare you.”

  With the new powers Congress had given him just days before, Washington unilaterally offered soldiers who reenlisted a bounty of ten dollars–almost double their monthly pay of six dollars. His eloquence or his generosity, or both, had the intended effect. “God Almighty [inclined] their hearts to listen to the proposal and they engaged anew; happy for America,” Greene wrote. More than three thousand troops remained with the army, while just over twenty-five hundred left. Troops from New England were conspicuous among the volunteers, which gladdened Greene’s heart. “This is the greatest evidence of NE virtue I ever saw,” he told Rhode Island governor Nicholas Cooke. “Let it be remembered to their eternal honor.”

  The crisis was averted.

  In Washington’s new Continental army, Greene was given command of a division consisting of about fourteen hundred soldiers in four brigades. But many of those units were far below their fighting strength. Lord Stirling’s brigade, for example, had no more than a few dozen men. Militia units, emboldened by the daring assault on Trenton, helped fill in some of the gaps.

  On January 1, this new army bade farewell to departing comrades, some ill and some simply sick of war, and took up defensive positions outside Trenton. That very day, young Lord Cornwallis arrived in Princeton, just twelve miles from the American position. He had been scheduled to sail home from New York to attend to his ailing wife, but General Howe canceled his leave after the unexpected American victory at Trenton. Cornwallis was given eight thousand men and the assignment of crushing the Americans on the banks of the Delaware. Greene had some inkling that the British were eager to make amends for Trenton. On New Year’s Day, he delivered a warning to the head of the Pennsylvania militia, John Cadwalader: “[We] have great reason to Apprehend the Enemy are in motion, and I Apprehend they are meditating an attack.”

  They were more than mediating. Leavin
g behind some twelve hundred men to guard Princeton, Cornwallis led a force of seven thousand troops out of the small college town before dawn on a dreary, wet January 2. Their progress was slow as they slogged through mud, and they did not move in secret. Washington had placed skirmishers along the road leading from Princeton to Trenton. When word reached the American camp that Cornwallis was advancing, Greene quickly moved up to reinforce the forward defenses. As a unit from Rhode Island marched to meet the enemy, Greene shouted: “Push on, boys! Push on!” The skirmishers successfully delayed Cornwallis’s arrival until sunset.

  More than five thousand Americans were deployed south of the city on ridges along the banks of Assunpink Creek, with Greene’s division on the left. They had no line of retreat, for behind them was the Delaware River. The British were just across the creek, a few hundred yards from the American lines. With a purposeful march and bold action, Lord Cornwallis had Washington trapped, and he knew it. So did some of the American troops, who understood that they were in an untenable position. “It appeared to me that our army was in the most desperate situation I had ever known it,” wrote one soldier. If the Americans were defeated, nothing would stop Cornwallis from marching on Philadelphia.

  Though his aides advised him to press forward immediately, Cornwallis decided that he had exhibited enough boldness for one day. Washington had nowhere to go; victory could wait until morning. Then, Cornwallis promised, the “old fox” would be his.

  Across the creek, Greene joined other officers for a conference with Washington. Their choices were gloomy indeed. They could make a run for it south along the Delaware River, but that would expose Philadelphia to an attack. Somebody–accounts disagree on precisely who it was–suggested an audacious alternative: a quick march along a little-used road to Princeton, which, based on the size of Cornwallis’s assault force, was likely to be lightly defended. From there, the Americans could march on the vital British supply center at New Brunswick, adding glories to glory.

  The Americans seized on the bold–and only–alternative to disaster. Orders went out in the dark of night: prepare to march.

  Amid whispered commands and muffled grumbling, the Americans moved out after midnight, with good fortune as their escort. The afternoon had been mild and rainy, which had stymied Cornwallis as he marched along the main road. Now, as the Americans made the opposite journey along the less-traveled Quaker Road in much colder weather, the mud froze, making the march somewhat easier than Cornwallis’s ordeal. But only somewhat. Ice and frozen earth made the journey treacherous in spots, causing soldiers and animals to slip and fall. The column stopped and started for no apparent reason, like a particularly obstreperous mule. And when the march ground to a halt, already exhausted soldiers fell asleep standing up.

  Greene and Washington marched through the darkness with the main American force. When they were just two miles outside of town, a small detachment under General Mercer moved to the left to secure the main road. Greene veered slightly to the right, onto the back road to Princeton. The march took him past a Quaker meetinghouse, near a stand of trees and overlooking a brook. Did the sight of the austere meetinghouse inspire a memory, however fleeting, of his Rhode Island childhood, and the long Sundays spent on wooden benches, listening to his father’s stern admonitions? It’s impossible to know. But his letters made clear his frustrations with the Quakers he encountered on both sides of the Delaware. He complained that most Quakers were, in essence, Tories by another name, in part because they refused to accept the Continental dollar as currency. “This line of conduct,” he wrote, “cannot fail of drawing down the resentment of the People upon them.”

  Washington and Greene were marching near the rear of the American column at about eight o’clock when a British unit marching toward Trenton spotted the rebel columns. Mercer’s detachment moved toward the British, who had assumed defensive positions; after furious fighting during which Mercer was fatally wounded, the Americans began falling back. Falling back, that is, until Greene and Washington charged forward with the bulk of the army. The Americans re-formed and moved toward the enemy; a volley rang out from both sides, with Washington in the middle. An American officer, Edward Fitzgerald, covered his eyes. Finally, he looked up to find the commander in chief still in the saddle, still urging his men on. “The day,” Washington said, “is our own.”

  The Americans resumed their march on Princeton, where the British force was severely outnumbered. Many fled as the Americans approached, but a few hundred sought refuge in Nassau Hall. They gave up when a young officer named Alexander Hamilton began shelling the building.

  The audacious gamble at Trenton had been matched by an equally daring victory at Princeton. Though he was and would remain a stern critic of the militia, Greene singled them out for praise. “Great credit is due to the Philadelphia Militia . . . who behaved exceeding well considering they were never in action before,” he wrote. News of the rebel triumphs spread throughout the capitals of Europe, where princes and field marshals spoke in glowing, astonished tones of the rebel American army. “The achievements of Washington and his little band of compatriots between the 25th of December and the 4th of January, a space of 10 days, were the most brilliant of any recorded in the history of military achievements,” wrote Frederick the Great, the Prussian military leader whose earlier writings had inspired a young Quaker boy named Nathanael Greene to put on a soldier’s uniform.

  The Americans lost only about thirty-five men, although one of them was the much admired General Mercer. British losses were about a hundred dead and three hundred wounded or captured. Greene was ordered to take a detachment north in pursuit of British troops fleeing Princeton, but the chase was called off. Rather than move on New Brunswick, Washington decided to march his men to Morristown, a small New Jersey town of some three hundred people and a fine, English-style village green. Months before, when he was in command of Forts Lee and Washington, Greene had sent small detachments near Morristown to secure the area. Now, thanks to Greene’s foresight, Morristown and its vicinity would provide the exhausted but victorious American army with a necessary respite.

  Though he would not have predicted it as recently as November, Nathanael Greene began the new year of 1777 a happy man. His loyal and effective service at Washington’s side in the two battles, not to mention through the long march through New Jersey, had expunged the memory of the lost forts on the Hudson River. When Washington’s adjutant, Joseph Reed, left the service to pursue a political career in Pennsylvania, Greene filled in for several weeks, assisting the commander in chief with paperwork and other chores. The long winter hours they spent together in headquarters, which was a former tavern on the edge of the village green, strengthened the bond between the two men, much to Greene’s delight. His regard for Washington bordered on worshipful, and in a letter to Caty on January 20, he seemed like a schoolboy proud to have won the approval of his teacher: “I am exceeding happy in the full confidence of his Excellency General Washington, and I found [that confidence] to increase every hour, the more [difficult] and distressing our affairs grew. But thanks be to God they now are in a much better train but by no means as agreeable as I could wish.”

  His living conditions in Morristown certainly were agreeable enough. He was installed in the home of a man named Hoffman, whom he described as a “very good-natured, doubtful gentleman.” The gentleman’s doubts, as coincidence would have it, concerned religious dogma, which mortified his wife–“a great lover of the clergy”–but delighted Greene, whose own doubts were of long standing. He told Caty, “Major Clarke, one of my aides-de-camp, is eternally perplexing [Mrs. Hoffman] with doubts and difficulties, by dark hints and oblique insinuations respecting the purity of manners and principles of the Church of England.”

  Still, as pleasant as life with the Hoffmans (and with Washington) might be, Greene longed to be with his pregnant wife. She had been out of touch for some time, prompting a mild scolding. “I am unhappy in not hearing from you, not a lin
e has come to hand for months past,” he wrote. He again told Caty that he might be able to arrange a leave, if the enemy cooperated by fleeing New Jersey: “I wish to get the Enemy out of the Jerseys that I may get Liberty to come Home.”

  Reveling in the victories in Trenton and Princeton, Greene still believed the Americans could mount a winter offensive to reclaim the whole of New Jersey. He told his brother Christopher that he expected to be in battle again soon, perhaps in an attack on the British depot in New Brunswick. If successful, the assault surely would “get the Enemy out of the Jerseys,” as he told Caty. It would also further discourage the considerable loyalist community of New Jersey, whose allegiance to the Crown had softened thanks to outrages committed against civilians–Tory and patriot alike–by British soldiers and Hessian mercenaries. Furious civilians “breath nothing but revenge” against the enemy, Greene reported in early January. The enemy’s “ravages in the Jerseys exceeds all description. Many hundred women ravished,” he wrote.

  The plan to attack New Brunswick, however, soon was abandoned as Washington, Greene, and the other American generals turned their attention to rebuilding their army for the second time. Those soldiers who agreed to serve an extra six weeks after the Battle of Trenton now were marking time until they could go home, and some of them had no intention of waiting for the magical day. They deserted in droves–the British estimated that three thousand Americans deserted in the first few months of 1777. That figure probably was too high, but there was no denying that the American army was in the midst of yet another manpower crisis. Only about three thousand soldiers remained in camp; even worse, there were but a thousand regular Continental soldiers–the rest were militia. And those lonely soldiers suffered through shortages of food and other supplies, and soon a far worse affliction, disease. In late February, Greene and the division he commanded moved from Morristown to Basking Ridge, some ten miles south of Washington’s headquarters. There, he told Washington, he found that “Small Pox prevails amongst the Troops.” Greene urged the risky but necessary step of a mass innoculation of the army, and Washington agreed. The innoculations worked wonders, annihiliating the disease within a matter of months. The army’s recruiting efforts, however, were not nearly as successful.