The First American Army

by Bruce Chadwick

  Sgt. Joe White, whose original enlistment ran until March 1, 1777, was happy to remain in the military, but there were those who were tired of the war. John Greenwood, whose time was up, was one of them. His superiors begged him to stay in the army, but he was finished. “I was determined to quit as soon as my time was out,” he said. “I told my lieutenant I was going home.” “My God!” cried the lieutenant, stunned at the decision of a teenager who had started the war at Bunker Hill in a fife and drum unit, traveled to Canada, braved the smallpox epidemic there, and become one of the best soldiers in the army. “You are not going to leave us, for you are the life and soul of us.”

  Greenwood could not be swayed. He had recently turned sixteen. The lieutenant then began to promise him promotions. “I would not stay to be a colonel,” Greenwood said and, with others, began the long march north to Boston the following morning, New Year’s Eve, as the army moved south toward a confrontation with the Redcoats. He and the others did not feel that they had abandoned the army or let down the United States. They had served their time and fought hard for independence and their country. Now it was time for new recruits to fight. Greenwood had, in fact, served two consecutive enlistments. He had done his share and it was time to go home.

  But he would be back.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE VICTORY THAT SAVED THE REVOLUTION

  The Redcoats that the Americans were looking for were not under the command of Howe but rather Lord Cornwallis, considered by some to be a better general than Howe. Cornwallis had split his force into two armies, leaving one with about twelve hundred men in Princeton. He took the other, with some fifty-five hundred men, south toward Trenton to engage the Americans. They did not expect Cornwallis to close in on them. This time, they left their boats at the Delaware and had no escape route over the river this far south. Cornwallis, arriving on January 2, 1777, had maneuvered adroitly, boxing the Americans in against the river with his much larger and better equipped army arrayed in front of them. The weather, which had helped them in their first attack on Trenton, was of no benefit this time. The temperature climbed to a very unseasonable fifty-one degrees on New Year’s Day and the warm weather, plus a low-pressure system that moved into the region, turned the fields and roads throughout the region to muck. The Americans were unable to move their cannon or march with much speed. By the time Cornwallis arrived, the entire American army was immobilized in a sea of mud.

  The expected British attack came outside of Maidenhead, a village of just a few buildings, on the afternoon of January 2. The overwhelming British infantry, backed up by an enormous barrage of cannon fire, forced the Americans back across Assunpink Creek, their first defensive line, following a four-hour battle. There was only one bridge over the creek and as he scampered toward it, musket in hand, Sgt. White saw General Washington anchored in front of the bridge, a reassuring figure for the men as they rushed across the bridge to safety on the other side. White and the others were amazed that Washington, unflinching, was not hit by any of the hundreds of musket balls that whizzed through the afternoon air.

  After the men had crossed the bridge, with Washington following the last of them, the British reached it. The Continental artillerists then peppered the bridge and the land beyond it, filled with the advancing British troops, with a long, loud, and devastating cannon fire. Joseph White, one of the artillery gunners, said that the Americans remained steady in the face a British column of troops that extended for nearly one mile and filled the horizon. Sgt. White wrote, “We loaded with canister shot and let them come nearer. We fired all together again and such destruction it made you cannot conceive. The bridge looked red as blood, with their killed and wounded and their red coats.”

  Inexplicably, Cornwallis did not order his men to cross the creek and chase the Americans, despite superior numbers and more cannon. As he called off an assault late in the afternoon, he told his officers that he had no fear of destroying the Americans, whom he had trapped, the next day. Referring to Washington, Cornwallis said his men would “bag the old fox in the morning”1

  No one doubted that he could. The Americans were immobilized, hopelessly outnumbered, and had their backs to the river. The morning attack would bring about hundreds of casualties for the Americans and would end the war. White and the other soldiers firmly believed that would happen. Massachusetts’s Sam Shaw wrote that “Even the most sanguine among us could not flatter ourselves into thinking with any hope of victory.”2

  To a lieutenant sitting next to him, Captain Stephen Olney of New York outlined all of the obstacles in the way of the men surviving the anticipated British onslaught in the morning. When he finished, the lieutenant shrugged his shoulders, stared at him, and said, “I don’t know; the Lord must help us.”3

  White and the others were awakened from their sleep shortly after midnight with startling news; the army was going to evacuate the area. They realized that something had changed dramatically since they laid down on the fields to sleep. It was much colder and the ground was hard.

  General Washington was an amateur meteorologist as a planter in Virginia. A working knowledge of weather patterns helped him to grow and, at times, save crops. He had watched the sky all day as the temperature held at 39 degrees and began to drop as a northwest wind began to build. He told his aides that these were all signs of a cold front and a frost headed their way. If so, the ground might freeze hard enough for the men—and artillery—to travel on it. Time would tell.

  He was right. By midnight, the ground had frozen enough to support heavy cannon caissons. Ever the trickster, Washington then concocted an elaborate ruse to fool the British. He ordered the men to slowly evacuate, regiment by regiment, as quietly as possible, while sentries remained on duty and others continued to stoke the campfires to make it appear that the entire army was sleeping. Men carefully wrapped the wagon wheels of the cannon caissons in rags to muffle the ordinary creaking sound they made as they were pulled quietly away from the camp. Collections of rags and blankets covered the wheels of supply wagons that were sent south to avoid slowing down the army as it moved north with as much speed as possible. The men were told in whispers to move out speedily but noiselessly and in an orderly fashion. The men who had fought in the series of New York disasters told others that Washington had saved the army once before with a midnight evacuation, at Brooklyn Heights, and trusted him to be successful this time, too.

  Wrote Lt. William Young later, “As soon as night fell, our people lined the woods, made large fires. As soon as I could I came to them with the wagon, with the provisions and blankets and stayed with them until twelve o’clock. Then we loaded our wagon, set out, and joined my two sons whom I left in the wood with some of our men. One o’clock. Ordered to move out with the baggage . . . such a hurry skurry among all our wagoners.”4

  By dawn, the American army of some five thousand soldiers had left the field at Lawrenceville and moved up a narrow, little-used, uneven dirt highway, Quaker Bridge Road, north toward Princeton. For several hours, many soldiers did not realize where they were headed, believing that they were traveling to Trenton and a morning attack on the British from the south. Several hundred sentries and the men who watched the campfires fled quietly and followed them just as morning arrived. As the sun rose high enough to bath the region in light, the British soldiers rose, dressed, and marched in formation toward the now-dying American campfires, wondering why there was no noise coming from the other side of the creek or the slopes beyond. They trudged over the bridge, their heads snapping from side to side. The rebels were gone.

  Miles to the north, the Continental Army was able to march quickly on the frozen dirt highway. “The road which the day before had been mud, snow, and water . . . had become hard as pavement,” said Stephen Olney.5

  The men were not only pleased that they had escaped certain annihilation at the hands of the British, but had done so with such an ingenious plan. William Thompson, of Virginia, wrote to a friend of Washington’s
tactics that “you may expect something clever will be done.”6

  On the way to Princeton, where Cornwallis had left his other army under Lt. Col. Charles Mawhood, a captain rode up to Sgt. White, who was walking with the artillery corps, and told him that he was to command one of the field pieces when the army reached its destination. The young soldier, just turned eighteen, asked why he had been put in charge and was told that General Knox had been impressed by his bravery at Trenton ten days before and wanted him to do so. “I am not capable. The responsibility is too great for me,” he told the captain. The officer said he understood, but that Knox had faith in him because he had been so brave when he led the charge against the Hessians after Monroe had been cut down. “I began to feel my pride rising,” White wrote later.

  The Americans again had surprise on their side when they approached the Princeton area. Lt. Col. Mawhood, accompanied as always by his two dogs, was leading two regiments of several hundred English foot soldiers out of Princeton toward Trenton. He and another officer sat on their horses watching the Continental Army move up the road toward them for a minute or more, thinking it was Cornwallis’s army, fresh from annihilating Washington to the south, as everyone expected. Mawhood must have thought the war had ended. The Continental Army was very close when Mawhood finally realized that he was facing the Americans. He had to act quickly to alert his English troops, who scrambled to fall into position.

  As the Americans raced across the fields and orchards of the Clark farm southwest of Princeton, Joseph White took charge of his artillery team and its large six-pound cannon. Shouting out orders over the noise of the battle, the eighteen-year-old yelled, “Fire!” and the cannon roared, along with others, cutting into the long line of British grenadiers and Highlanders that had formed in front of them. Their fire was answered by a burst of cannon fire from the British. White, shouting at his men, managed to get off one more shot as the Americans, led by General Hugh Mercer, ran within striking distance of the British.

  Lt. James McMichael was one of those soldiers. “We boldly marched within twenty-five yards of them and then commenced the attack which was very hot,” he said. The Americans opened up with a loud volley of musket fire that was met with a British volley. “We kept up an incessant fire,” McMichael continued. It was an eerie scene and Major James Wilkinson wrote later that “the smoke from the discharge of the two lines mingled as it rose and went up in one beautiful cloud.”7

  McMichael, constantly reloading and firing his musket, was frightened. Just to his right four men fell dead in one volley and two more died to his left in the next roar of the English muskets. He could not believe that he had not been hit as he stood right in the middle of a murderous series of volleys and “thanked the kindness of Providence” for it.

  There were three volleys and then the British, in larger numbers, came across the field, their bayonets gleaming in the early morning sun, and overwhelmed the Americans. Mercer was caught by several Redcoats who, instead of capturing him, stabbed him several times and left him for dead (he would die a few hours later).

  Mercer’s men had retreated amid the loud sounds of musketry and cannon. As they swarmed away from the enemy they met George Washington, on his horse, who rallied them. He commanded them to turn and fight and as they did Washington moved ahead of them on his horse, leading them toward the regrouped British line. Leaning forward on his horse and waving his hand at the men, he shouted, “Fire!” and the soldiers, who felt defeated just seconds ago, fired directly into the enemy, killing dozens. A second later, a raucous British volley followed. Washington had not moved from his horse and told the men to prepare to fire again. Everyone was certain the British fire would kill the commander in chief. His aide John Fitzgerald was so certain that Washington would be slain that, unable to watch his commander die, he lowered his head.

  “Come on!” they suddenly heard Washington encourage them as the fire subsided. Fitzgerald and the others saw that he had not been hit. The men loaded and fired again. Washington then waved his sword and led them across the field. The enemy, watching the American commander and his men coming right at them, panicked, turned, and ran. Washington led the pursuit on his horse. “It’s a fine fox chase, boys!” he yelled and the men, shouting as loud as they could, chased the enemy across the orchard fields.8

  “His personal bravery, and the desire he has of animating his troops by example, make him fearless of any danger,” wrote Sam Shaw. Another soldier wrote that the men were all proud of “our brave general.”9 Lieutenant Charles Wilson Peale, the artist, led his men in three assaults that morning. He said of the enlisted men there that they “stood the fire, without regarding the balls, which whistled their thousand notes around our heads.”10 One soldier described the musket volleys from the British “as thick as hail” and reported that three balls had grazed him, one hitting his hat, a second tearing off the sole of his shoe, and the third ripping through the sleeve of his coat and hitting the musket of the man standing behind him.11

  In another part of Princeton, General John Sullivan’s men defeated the English fifty-fifth regiment. Alexander Hamilton’s artillery battery set up several cannon in a wide yard opposite Nassau Hall, the two-story, main stone building of the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton University, and began blasting it. One ball ironically smashed into a painting of King George I that hung on a wall. The more than two hundred British soldiers holed up inside Nassau Hall soon waved the white flag of surrender outside a window.

  The trauma of the pitched battle was so great that some of the men that had been hit did not even know it. One man reached into the knapsack strapped over his shoulders for a piece of bread a day later. When he pulled out the loaf he found a musket ball in it. Pvt. Elisha Bostwick then helped him take off his clothes. They discovered that he had been shot in the shirt and that the ball, just missing his body, had ripped through the shirt, his coat, and the side of the knapsack before lodging inside the piece of bread.12

  The fighting at Princeton had been fierce. It had been brutal, too, and the Americans there that morning never forgave the British for bayoneting to death men they could have simply captured. The American enlisted men, from raw privates to sergeants like Joseph White, had held their own. They had withstood bayonet charges and cannon fire and had defeated some of the best regiments in the British army.

  The Americans paid a heavy price for the victory. Two homes in Princeton were commandeered for several hours as American doctors tried in vain to save General Mercer, several other badly wounded officers, and enlisted men. Among the American dead that morning were fourteen officers and thirty enlisted men. Although disheartening, American casualties were a remarkable contrast to the British losses. The English had lost some three hundred dead or wounded and three hundred captured.

  Sergeant White, who had annoyed officers nine days before at Trenton when he took a nap in the snow, remained his playful self in Princeton. Just as the battle ended he entered a building and found a rather delicious-looking breakfast of a British soldier who had been called to battle—toast, eggs, and a teapot—and, hungry from the marching and fighting, he wrote, “I sat down and helped myself.” When he finished, “highly refreshed,” he left, taking the absent officer’s coat, silk shirt, shoes, and Bible with him. The soldier then strode into a local resident’s home, musket in one hand, coat, shirt, and shoes in the other, and a wide smile on his face, and said good morning to the frightened woman who lived there. He asked her to bake him some cakes and returned a few moments later, after rummaging through a nearby house (not known if it was home to an American family or occupied by British troops), to retrieve them.

  “Do you have any daughters?” Sgt. White said, posing the most dangerous question for any mother in a war confronted by an armed soldier. “Why do you ask?” she said with great hesitation. He laughed at her, immediately sensing her fears of sexual attack. “I’m just a pious old deacon,” he said, reassuring the women, and told her that in r
eturn for the cakes he had presents for her daughters.

  Sensing that she could trust the young soldier, she asked her daughters to come down. The first, Sally, descended halfway down the stairs, saw the American soldier and halted, too scared to continue further. “Sally, come down, here is a present for you,” said the young sergeant as he walked to the bottom of the staircase and held up a fine petticoat. The mother nodded and the daughter walked down to the bottom of the stairs and accepted it. White gave the other daughter a pair of shoes. “Try them on and if they fit, keep them,” he said, smiled, thanked the mother for the cakes once more, and left, looking for his regiment.

  Again, the weary troops of the Continental Army had no time to celebrate or to rest. It had not taken Lord Cornwallis much time to figure out where the American army had gone after it vanished from the Trenton area during the night. Cornwallis and his army had marched toward Princeton as rapidly as possible after they found the American camp vacant and were within an hour of the town by noon, scouts told Washington. The commander in chief had considered moving from Princeton to New Brunswick, where the British had stores of ammunition and over two million dollars in gold, but imminent arrival of the main British army ruined that plan. Washington settled on his main plan, to move north to the tiny village of Morristown, in the middle of Morris County, twentyfive miles west of New York City, to set up winter quarters.

  And so, in the early afternoon, following two fierce battles on successive days, most of the five thousand tired American foot soldiers headed north out of Princeton toward Morristown and what they hoped would be better lodging and a bit of rest (others took prisoners to Pennsylvania). Spies soon relayed the news that Cornwallis had marched to New Brunswick. The main British army would leave New Jersey shortly and return to New York, leaving just small garrisons at New Brunswick, Elizabeth, and Perth Amboy.