The First American Army (23 page)

Some of the enlisted men dawdled in Trenton, to the dismay of the American generals. One was White, proud that he and his comrades had taken the disabled Hessian cannon. They insisted on fixing the axle and pulling it all the way back on snow-covered roads to Pennsylvania, which they did despite an exasperated Henry Knox constantly haranguing for them to hurry up. White was so exhausted when the men, with their prize, reached the crossing point at the Delaware River that he laid down in the snow and took what he considered a well-deserved nap as the troops began to pile into the boats for the return crossing.
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Others spent much of their time remarking on how ordinary the much-feared and highly publicized Hessians, “the greatest soldiers in the world,” actually appeared. They were not supermen after all. One enlisted man noted that they were “moderate in stature, limbs not of equal proportion, and their hair cued as tight to the head as possible, sticking straight back like the handle of an iron skillet.”
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Greenwood found much humor in the way the Americans treated the once vaunted Hessians. Many men had taken the ornate brass helmets from slain Hessians and placed them on to their heads, smiling at each other as they did so. He noted, “With these brass caps on, it was laughable to see how they would strut, fellows with their elbows out and some without a collar to their half-shirt, and no shoes.”

With at least a few days to think, Washington decided that his army was in just as precarious a position as it had been before. Now pride and revenge would be added to the usual reasons for the British to cross the river and attack him. To thwart them, he boldly crossed the river into New Jersey again. He did so for another reason, too. The general was afraid that the lone victory at Trenton might be seen as a fluke, but a second victory, this time over a large army of British regulars led by William Howe, not hired German mercenaries, would show the world that the Americans could win the war. It would also encourage the militiamen who were at home to join the fight and increase support for the rebellion throughout the colonies.

There was still one more reason, a more ominous one. Many enlistments were up on December 31 and many of his men—cold, sick, weary, and clothed in tattered uniforms—told their officers they could not wait to go home. They admired Washington and embraced the cause, but they were weary. Their departure, with no replacements in sight, would mean the end of the Revolution. Washington had to move fast. The commander in chief had decided to establish a one month emergency service enlistment. Those who remained for the emergency period of four weeks would be given a $10 bonus, more than a month’s pay.

The second crossing of the Delaware took place as planned on December 30, when most of the army crossed with Washington. Another wing had crossed three days earlier with General Cadwalader. That night, Washington sat on his horse in front of an assemblage of several hundred troops in formation in Maidenhead, now Lawrenceville, just north of Trenton, New Jersey. He made a plea for the men to stay for thirty days, with a $10 bonus, and then waited for what he hoped would be mass agreement. Washington moved to the side of the field, expecting the men to step forward. No one moved. Crestfallen, Washington, who despised speaking in public, reined in his horse and walked him forward a few yards and again addressed the troops lined up in front of him.

“My brave fellows,” he began in that deep, steady voice of his. “You have done all I have asked you to do and more than could be reasonably expected. But your country is at stake; your wives, your houses, and all that you hold dear. You have worn yourself out with fatigues and hardships but we know not how to spare you. If you will consent to stay but one month longer you will render that service to the cause of liberty and to your country which you probably never can do under any other circumstances. The present is emphatically the crisis which is to decide our destiny.”
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For several moments that seemed like hours, no one took a step toward the general. Then a soldier in his forties shrugged, turned to the man next to him, and said that he would stay. He walked toward the general. Then, singly and in small groups, others walked toward the commander, too. Within a few minutes, the great majority of the men in front of him accepted his offer for just one more month in the army. Washington leaned forward in his saddle as he watched the men coming forward. He felt a great sense of relief.

Other generals issued the same plea to their men, some in front of dozens of local townspeople from nearby villages who had turned out in the freezing weather for the speeches; their appeals had the same thankful results. Private John Smith remembered that the appeal he heard was far more direct. Smith wrote simply that his general “begged them to tarry one month longer.”
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Few of the generals delivered very powerful speeches, either. White called the plea of General Knox “pathetic.” To the surprise of the soldiers, the area residents in attendance burst into sustained applause when the men agreed to continue fighting.

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.

T
he 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”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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