The First American Army (24 page)

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 return 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.

The foot soldiers did not yet know, or comprehend, what they had accomplished in their two brutal battles at Trenton and Princeton within that brief ten-day span. They had soundly defeated the best troops of the British Empire, killing over three hundred and taking over twelve hundred prisoners. They had freed most of the state of New Jersey of the main British army and prevented the occupation of Philadelphia. The Continental Congress was now free to return to the city of brotherly love and reconfigure the national government and the New Jersey state legislature was able to meet again.

Foreign powers, especially France and Spain, now believed that it was entirely possible that the Americans might win the war and began to think seriously of coming into the conflict as allies; the French even ordered four ships stocked with gunpowder and muskets to set sail for America. The British government was rocked by the dual defeats. Lord George Germain, head of the colonial office and director of the war effort, realized that the conflict would last much longer than he and his generals had anticipated. Many Americans who had been either sympathetic to the Crown or neutral about the war now changed their mind and embraced the Revolution. The American press, split on its support for the Revolution at the start of the conflict, now sided with the rebels and, in effect, became propaganda sheets for Washington and the army. None explained it better than a doctor traveling with the army, who wrote home that the double victories “have given new life and spirits to the cause.”
¹³

There was much praise for George Washington, but there was also substantial praise for the common soldiers in the American army. British historian George Trevelyan wrote of them, “It may be doubted whether so small a number of men ever employed so short a space of time with greater and more lasting effects upon the history of the world.” And the proud editor of the
Freeman’s Journal,
an American newspaper, wrote of the troops that “the men behaved with the utmost bravery.”
¹⁴
George Washington, riding at the head of the column trudging northward to Morristown, may have thought of all the consequences of the dual triumphs, but Sergeant Joe White had neither the time or the inclination to do so. As he walked along the highway north toward Morristown he devoted his attention to pulling from his knapsack one of the cakes that woman in Princeton had baked for him and thinking about how pretty her daughters were.