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

by Rick Atkinson

reached General Lee’s ear in Westchester, “he was in a towering passion, and said it was a splendid affair for Mr. Howe … to have his sores licked by us,” an artillery lieutenant reported. To Washington, Lee wrote on November 19, “Oh, General, why would you be over-persuaded by men of inferior judgment to your own? It was a cursed affair.” Rumors spread that Washington would be sacked, a prospect not displeasing to Lee, for whom the misfortune of others increasingly served as a whetstone to sharpen his ambition. Concealing his own support for reinforcing Fort Washington, he wrote Benjamin Rush in Philadelphia: I foresaw, predicted all that has happened.… Let these few lines be thrown into the fire, and in your conversations only acquit me of any share of the misfortune. For my last words to the General were: draw off the garrison, or they will be lost.

General Howe was determined to keep the Americans reeling. At nine p.m. on Tuesday, November 19, Hessian grenadiers, Jäger, and five regular brigades struck their tents and marched for the Hudson, the force split between Spuyten Duyvil Creek and Nepperhan Creek in Yonkers.

More than a hundred skulking rebels were captured in the nearby woods, many of them dead drunk on pilfered rum.

Howe’s reckoning, since landing at Frog’s Neck six weeks earlier, his army had seized 148 guns and mortars, almost 12,000 shot and shell, and 400,000 musket cartridges. If some had once questioned Howe’s determination to destroy his enemy, no one doubted that he now had the rebels on the run.

The New York campaign had ended, miserably, and New Jersey’s miseries had begun. Washington and his generals had nearly lost the war several times in the past three months, through miscalculation, misfortune, imprudence, and deficient military skills. “I am surprised,” a congressman from Maryland observed, “… that we should be so often surprised in Long Island, York Island, White Plains, Fort Washington, and now Fort Lee.”

Yet for those who had come this far and endured this much, sardonic humor and stubborn defiance would get them through the night, and the next day, and the day following. The British, after all, had to win the war; the Americans only had to avoid losing it.

“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.”

Howe would return to New York for the winter and Cornwallis to England. “The chain, I own, is rather too extensive,” Howe wrote Lord Germain. “But … I conclude the troops will be in perfect security.”

Howe had hoped that his royal legions would be welcomed in the middle colonies as liberators rather than as conquerors. But the invading force was rife with what one loyalist called “fire-and-sword men.” Even before returning to New York, Howe decreed that flour and salt provisions exceeding a family’s need should be considered “a rebel store, [to] be seized for the Crown.” Confiscation hardly stopped with flour. “They have taken hogs, sheep, horses, and cows, everywhere,” Lieutenant Peale told his journal. “Even children have been stripped of their clothes,

A Presbyterian pastor wrote that Newark “looked more like a scene of ruin than a pleasant, well-cultivated village.… Their plundering is so universal, and their robberies so atrocious, that I cannot fully describe their conduct.” The rampage, he added, targeted “fences, barns, stables, and other outhouses, the breaking of chests, drawers, desks, tables, and other furniture.”

Princeton had been insulted by predatory American troops in recent months, but the king’s men pillaged with a methodical vengeance, felling apple and pear trees for firewood, burning gristmills, butchering sheep and milk cows, stealing horseshoes from farriers and leather from tanning vats. Nassau Hall at the College of New Jersey was ransacked—the stone cellar became a dungeon—and rare books from Leipzig and Birmingham vanished. “Our army when we lay there spoiled and plundered a good library,” a sergeant in the 49th Foot acknowledged. Farmers in nearby villages were beaten and robbed.

Soon after retreating across the Delaware, Washington also began to get reports of rape by British and Hessian soldiers, especially in a rural area north of Trenton. A magistrate, Jared Sexton, took sworn testimony that proved horrifying: the widow Mary Phillips reported being gang-raped, as did Mary Campbell, five months pregnant, and Elizabeth Cain, age fifteen. Rebekhah Christopher reported being raped by two men. Abigail Palmer, age thirteen, said she was raped by soldiers who threatened to blind her with bayonets if she screamed.

Other testimonials accumulated as county justices, clergymen, and the governors of New Jersey and New York investigated further, identifying victims as young as ten and as old as seventy in what the historian David Hackett Fischer described as “an epidemic of rape.” “God made these men,” a Quaker said of the assailants, “but I am sure the devil governs them.” General Greene told the governor of Rhode Island in mid-December that enemy “ravages in the Jerseys exceeds all description. Men slaughtered, women ravished, and houses plundered. Little girls not ten years old ravished. Mothers and daughters ravished in the presence of their husbands and sons.”

Captain Francis Lord Rawdon, now commanding a company in the 63rd Foot, wrote in a private letter from New York that “we should, whenever we get further into the country, give free liberty to the soldiers to ravage at will,” so that “these infatuated wretches … may feel what a calamity war is.”

Major Charles Stuart wrote his father, a former prime minister, that even loyalists were treated like rebels, with “neither their clothing or property spared, but in the most inhuman and barbarous manner torn from them.” Soldiers, he added, disregarded repeated orders “against this barbarity.”

Just so: New Jersey militiamen who had been reluctant to join Washington now assailed their oppressors with raids and ambushes. New Jersey, like Westchester County, soon became a dark borderland of uncertain, shifting loyalties and spasmodic violence. Howe’s staff estimated that rebel bandits by mid-December had rustled seven hundred oxen and almost a thousand sheep and hogs from British foragers. Patrols were bushwhacked, couriers seized, and eight British baggage wagons captured. Six hundred raiders struck Hackensack while the redcoats were campaigning downstate, seizing fifty Tories. As Howe prepared to return to New York, Captain Münchhausen wrote, “It is now very unsafe for us to travel in Jersey. The rascal peasants meet our men alone or in small unarmed groups.… They shoot them in the head, then quickly hide their rifles and pretend they know nothing.”

Their departure “struck a damp on ye feelings of many,” a cavalry captain noted, although some Philadelphians left behind were pleased to hear members complain that Baltimore was a “dirty, infamous, extravagant hole” and the “worst of all terrestrial places.”

Before scurrying away, Congress ordered Philadelphia defended “to the last extremity,” and Washington sent General Putnam to command the town.

By mid-December, one officer wrote, the elegant Chippendale town resembled “a dark and silent wilderness of houses.” At least half of Philadelphia’s thirty thousand residents had fled, although many Quaker families remained, having no argument with the British.

“Our people knew not the hardships & calamities of war when they so boldly dared Britain to arms,” Robert Morris added in his letter to the Paris commissioners. “Dejection of spirits is an epidemical disease, and unless some fortunate event or other gives a turn to the disorder, in time it may prevail.” It was rumored, for instance, that unless Charles Lee landed a decisive stroke against Howe’s rear, Congress would authorize Washington to accept the best surrender terms he could get from the British.

At last, at long last, General Lee had indeed found his way into New Jersey. With 2,700 Continentals, joined by 1,300 militiamen, he reached Morristown on December 8, lingering there for three days in a vain hope of finding shoes and blankets for his ill-shod, ill-clad legion. On Thursday, December

None of this pleased Lee, who grumbled about both incompetent officers—“Washington and his puppies” among them—and a country that seemed unaware that “your liberties stand on the verge of perdition,” as he told one correspondent. He had planned to harass Howe from behind, “to unnest ’em even in the dead of winter” and force the British garrisons back to New

“Cannot I do you more service by attacking their rear?” he had asked Washington on December 8. But the commanding general would have none of it. Over the past three weeks, Washington had sent eight increasingly frantic pleas, first suggesting, then entreating, and finally ordering Lee to put on speed. Not only was the army along the Delaware badly outnumbered, but militia regiments simply would not fight without being stiffened by ample Continental troops. Plea number seven, sent on Tuesday, December 10, directed, “March and join me with all your force.… Do come on.” A day later, plea number eight demanded, “Push on with every possible succor you can bring.” On Thursday afternoon,

After peeling off his uniform and donning a nightshirt, he sat at a table and scratched a querulous note to his old friend Horatio Gates, who was headed for Pennsylvania from Ticonderoga with six hundred Northern Army soldiers. After once again complaining about the loss of Fort Washington, Lee turned his pen on the commanding general: Entre nous, a certain great man is most damnably deficient. He has thrown me into a situation where I have my choice of difficulties. If I stay in the province, I risk myself and army, and if I do not stay the province is lost forever. I have neither guides, cavalry, medicines, money, shoes, or stockings.… Tories are in my front, rear, and on my flanks. The mass of people is strangely contaminated.… Adieu, my dear friend. God bless you. As Alexander Hamilton would later observe, Charles Lee had the preposterous notion that he was a great man.

had served the patriot cause creditably by demanding discipline in the ranks and lauding the combat prowess of American soldiers against their British enemies. But he was fickle, disloyal, intemperate, and incautious—and now these defects brought him low.

A mile from Basking Ridge, perhaps alerted to Lee’s presence by loyalist informants, Harcourt sent half a dozen scouts ahead under a young firebrand officer named Banastre Tarleton, the son of a prosperous slave trader who had served as the mayor of Liverpool. Tarleton spotted two rebel sentries, captured them without gunplay, and soon learned that Lee was in a nearby hostelry with paltry security. Colonel Harcourt quickly sketched a plan, and at ten a.m. dragoons edged through the orchard and woodlot bracketing Widow White’s tavern. Inside Lee had dressed, finished his correspondence, and ordered his horse saddled for the short ride to rejoin his corps. Major James Wilkinson, who had arrived in the small hours with dispatches from General Gates, had just eaten a late breakfast when he peered from the window to see redcoats thundering down the front lane. “Here, sir, are the British cavalry!” he yelled. Lee leaped to his feet. “Where? Where is the guard?” he demanded. “Damn the guard, why don’t they fire?” Garbled shouts, whinnying horses, and sporadic gunshots could be heard through the walls. Tarleton clattered up to the front entrance—“making all the noise I could,” he later reported—then fired into the door, bellowing, “I know General Lee is in the house!” Sixty or seventy British bullets riddled the tavern. Lee paced upstairs, brusquely dismissing a suggestion that he hide in his bed. “If the General does not surrender in five minutes,” Tarleton shouted, “I will set f...

He was confounded to realize that his captors were from the same dragoon regiment with which he had fought valiantly on the king’s behalf in Portugal fourteen years earlier. He expected, a witness heard him say, to be treated “as a gentleman.” Regulars hoisted him onto a horse, pinioned his arms, lashed his legs to the stirrups, and galloped south as a bugler let blare a few triumphant notes.

Washington publicly mourned the loss, but privately he voiced ambivalence about a rival who had become a thorn in his side. “Unhappy man!” he wrote Lund Washington, his Mount Vernon overseer, on December 17. “Taken by his own imprudence, going three or four miles from his own camp to lodge.” Later in the month, Washington wrote directly to Lee, enclosing a draft for £116 to ease the discomfort of captivity. “I hope,” he added, “you are as happy as a person under your circumstances can possibly be.”

Where are the rebels now? By Joshua Loring’s precise count, at least 4,430 of them occupied vile British jail cells around New York. That number had been captured from Long Island to Fort Lee, with hundreds more bagged in the Jersey chase and other actions.

New York soon became known as the city of prisons, to the everlasting infamy of the Howes and their empire. By January, several hundred rebel officers would be paroled to Gravesend, Flatbush, and other Long Island villages, paying two dollars a week to room in Dutch farm attics and barns, fending off starvation with oysters and eels, and whiling away their captivity by wrestling, playing fives (a sort of hand tennis), and throwing long bullets (an Irish game that involved tossing heavy stones). “We thus lived in want and perfect idleness for years,” an officer captured at Fort Washington later recalled. Among those paroled on Long Island was Ethan Allen, the conqueror of Ticonderoga, who had been shipped back to America after harsh imprisonment in Cornwall.

and rodents. “Cold and famine were now our destiny,” a survivor wrote. “Old shoes were bought and eaten with as much relish as a pig or a turkey.” One sugar house prisoner reportedly gnawed the flesh from his arms to ward off starvation; another died while trying to eat a brick. The lucky ones could build a fire every three days. Many cell blocks lacked hearths or wood. Vermin infested the bedding straw. “It was bad in every sense of the word,” wrote a surgeon’s mate captured in August, “a dirty place, the prisoners wallowing in their own filth.” A British captain acknowledged, “If once they are taken sick, they seldom recover.”

chamber on the Provost’s second floor, sardonically called Congress Hall, grew so crowded with officers that while sleeping on the floor they reportedly had to turn over simultaneously on command. One inmate described the Provost as “that engine for breaking hearts.” The transport vessel Whitby, anchored in Wallabout Bay, on the East River, foreshadowed greater horrors to come, as many American inmates would be transferred to prison ships in the coming year.

Other bodies were simply tossed into the East River with a shout of, “There goes another damned Yankee rebel!” For years these remains lay scattered and bleaching along the Brooklyn shoreline, the human spoor of inhumanity, speaking bone to bone about how easy it had become to hate thine enemy.

can hardly believe that Washington would venture at this season of the year to pass the Delaware.” No more than “a corporal’s guard” was needed to keep the peace in Jersey. Do not, he urged, make “more of the rebels than they deserve.” To Rall he wrote: I am sorry to hear your brigade has been fatigued or alarmed. You may be assured that the rebel army in Pennsylvania … does not exceed eight thousand men who have neither shoes nor stockings, are in fact almost naked, dying of cold, without blankets, and very ill-supplied with provisions.

“there are no rebel troops in the Jerseys.” But, apparently tipped off by a spy in the American camp, he advised: Washington has been informed that our troops have marched into winter quarters and has been told that we are weak at Trenton and Princeton.… Lord Stirling expressed a wish to make an attack upon these two places. I don’t believe he will attempt it.

Three forces positioned along a twenty-six-mile stretch of the Delaware would cross the river simultaneously before converging on Trenton with five thousand troops. The largest detachment—twenty-four hundred men with eighteen guns—would mass under Washington’s direct command on Christmas night eight miles upstream from the village, descending on the Hessian garrison from the north an hour before dawn on Thursday, December 26.

Moreover, each brigade included an artillery company to provide firepower when muskets inevitably grew wet, as they had during Montgomery’s attack at Quebec. Instead of the two or three field guns per thousand infantrymen typical in eighteenth-century armies, Washington would take nearly nine per thousand—massed artillery emboldened foot soldiers. Colonel Knox’s epic trek from Ticonderoga a year earlier had persuaded him that guns not only could keep pace with infantry regiments moving cross-country in foul weather but, in fact, could lead them without forfeiting mobility. Powder chests would be wrapped in oilcloth, and charges were encased in starched, tallowed cloth to repel the damp. Knox also designated a small unit to carry spikes and hammers to wreck captured enemy field guns if they could not be carried off.

Clouds thickened on Christmas Day, and the wind shifted from west to northeast. Temperatures remained below freezing. “It is fearfully cold and raw,” an officer told his diary. “It will be a terrible night for the soldiers who have no shoes.” The sun, mostly unseen during the day, set at 4:42 p.m. The moon, a night past full, rose just over an hour later, orange and monstrous behind a shroud of high clouds. Some men would not see another sunrise, including Captain James Moore, a New Yorker who died of camp fever on Christmas in the millhouse where General Stirling also was quartered. The captain was buried in hard ground at the edge of a timber stand above Pidcock’s Creek. He was twenty-four. Others rallied from their sickbeds: young Captain Hamilton dragged himself into the ranks from a Pennsylvania farm where he had convalesced after what he called a “long and severe” illness.

Many historians would subsequently assert that late in the afternoon, officers gathered their men a mile from the river and, at Washington’s direction, read aloud from a new pamphlet by the writer known to soldiers as “Common Sense.” Little evidence supports such group readings, although Thomas Paine’s febrile essay, published a week earlier in Philadelphia and now circulating through the ranks, captured the spirit of the army with which he had recently marched across New Jersey. Paine again condemned both loyalists (“servile, slavish, self-interested”) and the king (“a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man).” Yet American Crisis No. 1 also reached higher, to “bring reason to your ears” and to claim the high ground for those adhering to the American cause:

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country. But he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

Whenever the march stalled momentarily, as night marches inevitably did, men fell asleep on their feet and had to be forcibly roused. Sergeants prodded the sick and lame who lingered by the roadside, but at least two soldiers fell behind and froze to death on the tableland that night.

Rall tried again to marshal his men. “Alle, was meine Grenadiers sein, vorwärts!” he hollered. All who are my grenadiers, forward! But the day was lost. American soldiers flocked through the cross streets to take firing perches in cellars, upper windows, and along the fence at Potts’s tanyard by the bark house and stone currying shop. Chipping their flints for a clean surface, picking out touchholes,

“Sir, they have struck.” So they had. Hessian officers lifted their hats on sword points. Color bearers dipped their flags in submission. Jäger and grenadiers grounded their muskets or smashed them against the trees, flinging away splintered stocks and bent barrels. Some cut the straps of their cartridge pouches. General Stirling rode forward to collect surrendered swords.

am wounded.” They, too, capitulated. A great cheer sounded through the village, echoed in the orchard, on the bridge, and along the Assunpink. Troops tossed their hats in jubilation. From the initial skirmish on Pennington Road, the battle had lasted less than two hours. “Providence,” Knox would write, “seemed to have smiled upon every part of this enterprise.”

Others stacked captured muskets, brass drums, and bayonets in wagons for removal to Pennsylvania or prodded their captives into columns. Some Hessians, having been told that Yankee rebels ate their prisoners, went glassy-eyed with fear. Washington watched, no doubt with pride and perhaps in amazement. As Rall’s sword was collected with the other booty, His Excellency told a subordinate, “This is a glorious day for our country.”

In half a morning, Howe had lost almost a thousand of his fourteen thousand men in New Jersey. Casualty estimates would vary, but the king’s losses apparently included twenty-two Hessians killed, eighty-three badly wounded, and about nine hundred captured. “Saw a room full of wounded Hessians, one of them with his nose shot off,” militia sergeant William Young wrote in his

twenty troopers from the 16th Light Dragoons who had galloped over the Assunpink bridge at the first sound of trouble. Before the bridge was sealed, at least four hundred and perhaps more than six hundred Germans had also eluded capture—musicians, drummers, doctors, camp followers, rank-and-file skedaddlers—who exploited the failure of Colonel Cadwalader and others to seal off the village from the south. Some would be found in various barns and attics, like the two fugitives rousted from a stable by a snarling dog and a farmer’s pitchfork. Scouts soon reported that Colonel Donop was so unnerved by the news from Trenton that he abandoned both his comely widow and his casualties in Mount Holly to lead his brigade—including 150 carts and carriages laden with plunder—on a forced march to Princeton. Jäger flanked “both sides of the column to prod the drivers on with blows,” according to Captain Ewald.

With thousands of enemies less than a day’s march away, Washington decided to collect his winnings and return promptly to Pennsylvania. Although his own battle casualties were minor—a dozen killed or wounded—hundreds more suffered from exhaustion, sickness, and cold weather injuries, including frostbite. “I was extremely chilled,” a chaplain wrote in his journal, “and came near perishing before I could get to a fire.” Many warmed themselves with some of the forty hogsheads of enemy rum discovered in Trenton before Washington could destroy the stocks; other troops reportedly found whiskey and sugar in a cellar, stirred them together with a fence rail in a rain barrel, and used their shoes for tankards. By midafternoon on Thursday, ferrymen began shifting the spoils of war westbound across the Delaware: wagons, brass guns, forty horses, a thousand stand of small arms, a dozen drums, a number of hautboys, and several sets of regimental colors, including

Hessian lieutenant wrote. “Nobody but the rebels would have made him a general.” Washington dined with four captured field-grade officers at his new headquarters in a small yellow house on Sycamore Street in Newtown. “His countenance is not that of a great hero,” one German sniffed. “His eyes have no fire.”

Writing to Hancock, who had remained in Baltimore with the Congress, Robert Morris remarked that the filthy prisoners looked so benign that “most people seemed very angry they should ever think of running away from such a set of vagabonds.” German officers would march on to confinement in western Virginia. The enlisted troops—former weavers, tailors, carpenters, masons, and butchers, according to a prison roster—traveled mostly to Lancaster and other German-speaking precincts of Pennsylvania. Washington had long advocated “a gentleness even to forbearance” toward prisoners, notwithstanding reciprocal British cruelty, and he now reiterated that they “be well-treated.” Soon beguiled by this new world, many Hessians eventually chose not to return home.