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

by Rick Atkinson

“This infamous business [is] the most unlucky affair which has happened to us in America,” wrote General Grant. “I am quite miserable about it … yet I cannot impute any blame to General Howe or myself.” Opposition newspapers in England would blame Lord Germain, who blamed Howe, who blamed the Hessians. In dispatches to London, Howe insisted that the two senior German generals—Heister and Knyphausen—“are much too infirm for this war.” It was said that when Howe asked how the Hessian brigades in New Jersey could be so outfoxed, Heister replied, “Sir, if you will tell me why you would not make an end of the war at the White Plains, I will then give you an answer.” The old war horse was soon recalled to Germany, where he died a month after arriving home. Colonel Rall, already conveniently dead, drew most of the opprobrium. “Rall’s defeat has put us much out of our way. His misconduct is amazing,”

loyalist in Virginia told his diary, “The minds of the people are much altered. A few days ago they had given up the cause for lost.… Now they are all liberty-mad again.… Damn them all!” Many in the Continental ranks were liberty-mad enough to favor driving Howe’s legions from New Jersey, if not New York. “Never were men in higher spirits than our whole army is,” Captain Rodney wrote his brother in late December. “All are determined to extirpate them from the Jerseys.” Washington was determined, too. Victory at Trenton revived his reputation and enhanced his stature. Odes would be penned in his honor, with such immortal couplets as “Washington, though least expected near, / Opened fire upon the Hessians’ rear.” As Dr. Rush had urged, in late December Congress granted the commanding general autocratic powers for six months to pay enlistment bounties, raise additional regiments, appoint all officers below the rank of general, confiscate provisions, and arrest those who refused Continental currency or “are otherwise disaffected to the American cause.” Rodney told his diary, “Gen’l. Washington is dictator.” As if reassuring itself, Congress declared that the commander in chief “can safely be entrusted with the most unlimited power.” “The country,” one biographer would write, “awakened to the belief that its general was a genius.” If that judgment proved premature, victory made a bold, resolute man bolder and even more hell-bent. Washington, a Hessian conceded, was without doub...

Simply traversing the Delaware from Pennsylvania a second time had proved brutal: several inches of snow had fallen, and the river ice was thick enough to impede boats but too weak to bear the weight of guns and horses. Rowers and ferrymen would struggle for two days to again shuttle brigades to the far shore. Heartened by his triumph on Christmas night, the commanding general had chosen to stay on the offensive. Several considerations led to his decision. Soon the Delaware would freeze solid, exposing Philadelphia to attack at a time and place of General Howe’s choosing.

Along farm lanes and in remote hamlets, red rags recently nailed to front doors as emblems of loyalty to the Crown vanished when the rebel troops reappeared; loyalties were shifting again. The enemy seemed to be unmanned, Cadwalader wrote Washington, and “a pursuit would keep up the panic.” He added, “I hope to fall on their rear.”

But other appeals had greater success. General Thomas Mifflin, a Philadelphia merchant and politician, crossed the Delaware at Bristol with another fifteen hundred militiamen drawn from more than two dozen Pennsylvania units. At Crosswicks, eight miles south of Trenton, he appeared on horseback on Tuesday afternoon before five weary New England

By morning, the army in Trenton would number 3,335 men fit for duty. As additional militia and Continental troops arrived, the number would double to nearly seven thousand, more than half of them Pennsylvanians. “God Almighty inclined their hearts to listen,” Greene wrote. “They engaged anew.”

Washington had listened, too. He had traveled far since those early months in Cambridge, when he had decried the stupidity of his officers and the unkempt indiscipline of his privates. Together he and the army had been annealed by defeat, death, sorrow, and occasional success. That mystical bond between leader and led had strengthened almost imperceptibly, the consequence of mutual respect and shared faith in a brighter future. He spoke to them affectionately, not as military underlings and social inferiors but as fellow republicans. “Here was a new idea of a gentleman, a moral condition rather than a social rank,” the historian David Hackett Fischer would write. “It was also a new idea of honor, which was not defined by rank or status or gender, but by a principle of human dignity and decency.”