The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy Book 1)

by Rick Atkinson

“The approach of winter putting a stop to any further progress,” Howe announced, “the troops will immediately march into quarters.” Of 14,000 royalist soldiers in New Jersey, more than 10,000 would bivouac south of the Raritan, including 4,000 in New Brunswick, 3,000 in Princeton, and 3,000 Hessians—nine regiments, with sixteen guns—in Trenton and nearby Bordentown, where the Delaware took a wide bend to the southwest. Rebel skirmishers and row galleys proved such a nuisance along the river that the 42nd Highlanders and a Hessian grenadier regiment moved inland from vulnerable Burlington to Blackhorse, several miles east. But already Jersey children were learning to say “Wie geht’s?”—How do you do?—to their German occupiers. Given the heavily armed chain of seventeen posts stretching for seventy miles down the spine of New Jersey, Cornwallis later said, “I apprehended no danger.”