Washington: A Life (55 page)

Washington worried that his men might be encircled by the superior British force—they were cooped up like a flock of chickens, in Henry Knox’s colorful phrase—and knew that any retreat across a Delaware River chock-full of ice floes could be costly. Convening his generals on this frosty night, he stated that the loss of the corps he commanded “might be fatal to the country,” and, under these circumstances, he asked for advice.
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Once again a single misstep could be devastating. The war council decided to have the army slip away during the night, much as it had disappeared across the East River. Still better, it would convert a defensive move into an offensive measure, circling around the left flank of Cornwallis’s army and heading north along unfrequented back roads to confront the British at Princeton. Washington again hid a political strategy behind his military strategy. “One thing I was sure of,” he remarked afterward, was “that it would avoid the appearance of a retreat, which was of consequence.”
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This supremely risky strategy meant penetrating deep into enemy territory and possibly being entrapped. Nevertheless, Washington and his generals, who now operated with exceptional cohesion, embraced the course unanimously.

To camouflage the nighttime retreat, which would start after midnight, Washington reprised the same repertoire of tricks he had applied on Long Island. The wheels of the artillery were wrapped in rags to deaden sounds. Campfires were kept burning to foster the illusion of an army settled in for the night. Loud noises were broadcast with entrenching tools, as if the Americans were digging in for violent reprisals the next day. Again the troops were kept unaware of their destination. In fact, Washington stole away with such artful stealth, wrote one officer, that “the rear guard and many of his own sentinels never missed him.”
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In marching twelve miles through the night toward Princeton, Washington pushed his long-suffering men almost beyond human endurance. It was a long, harrowing march down dark country lanes congealed with ice. The weary men, wrapped in a numb trance, some barely awake, padded against stinging winds; many fell asleep standing up whenever the column halted.

The troops arrived at the college town later than scheduled, shortly after an exceptionally clear, beautiful dawn that James Wilkinson remembered as “bright, serene, and extremely cold, with a hoarfrost that bespangled every object.”
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The men rapidly repaired a bridge over Stony Brook, south of town, before the army divided into two groups: Sullivan’s division veered northeast while Greene’s moved due north. The first spirited fighting erupted unexpectedly. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Mawhood was about to rush two British regiments to Trenton to aid Cornwallis when, to his infinite surprise, he encountered American forces under General Hugh Mercer in a broad, rolling meadow. “I believe they were as much astonished as if an army had dropped perpendicularly upon them,” declared Knox.
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Mawhood ordered a ferocious bayonet charge that staggered Mercer’s men. Mercer himself was knocked off his horse and given a merciless drubbing as he lay on the ground. In capturing the dapper, handsome Mercer—a physician from Fredericksburg and a friend of Washington’s—the British imagined they had taken the commander in chief himself. “Call for quarters, you damned rebel,” they taunted him. To which Mercer retorted, “I am no rebel,” and slashed at them with his sword.
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The British mauled him repeatedly with their bayonets, carving seven gashes, until he lay near death. For Washington, it was a disturbing preview of the fate awaiting him if ever he were captured.

The Battle of Princeton gave Washington another chance to show that he was the army’s chief warrior in the antique sense. The eighteenth-century battlefield was a compact space, its cramped contours defined by the short range of muskets and bayonet charges, giving generals a chance to inspire by their immediate presence. When Mercer’s men began to retreat, harried by redcoats flashing bayonets, General Greene directed Pennsylvania militia into the fray, only to have them collide with Mercer’s fleeing men amid “a shower of grapeshot.”
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The American panic was stemmed by Washington himself, who suddenly circled into view and exhorted his rattled men to stand and fight. “Parade with us, my brave fellows!” he exclaimed, waving his hat. “There is but a handful of the enemy, and we will have them directly.”
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According to his aide-de-camp Colonel John Fitzgerald, Washington rallied the men with an act of unbelievable bravery: he reined in his horse, faced the enemy directly, and simply froze. Yet again the intrepid Washington acted as if he were protected by an invisible aura.

With the British entrenched beyond a hillside fence, Washington lengthened and strengthened the patriot line, instructing his men not to fire until told to do so. He exhibited exceptional sangfroid as he rode along the line. Then he personally led the charge up the hill, halting only when they had pushed within thirty yards of their adversaries. As he issued the command to fire, Washington, on his white charger, was such a conspicuous target that Fitzgerald clapped his hat over his eyes because he couldn’t bear to see him shot. When the fusillade of bullets ended and the enemy scattered, Fitzgerald finally peeked and saw Washington, untouched, sitting proudly atop his horse, wreathed by eddying smoke. “Thank God, your Excellency is safe!” Fitzgerald said to him, almost weeping with relief. Washington, unfazed, took his hand fondly. “Away, my dear colonel, and bring up the troops. The day is our own!”
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Fitzgerald wasn’t the only one bowled over by Washington’s coolness. “I shall never forget what I felt … when I saw him brave all the dangers of the field and his important life hanging as it were by a single hair with a thousand deaths flying around him,” wrote a young Philadelphia officer. “Believe me, I thought not of myself.”
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Washington spurred his horse after the retreating enemy, for once giving way to pure exhilaration. Perhaps repaying the old insult from the Battle of Harlem Heights, he shouted to his men, “It’s a fine fox chase, my boys!”
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Whatever joy he felt, however, was tempered by the horrifying spectacle of a snowy battlefield stained with American blood. One officer lay “rolling and writhing in his blood, unconscious of anything around him.”
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An adolescent lieutenant had a bullet hole in his chest and a skull smashed in by a bayonet. And so on.

In the battle’s concluding chapter, two hundred British troops sought asylum in the principal college building, Nassau Hall. According to legend, Alexander Hamilton deployed his artillery against the building and decapitated a portrait of King George II with a cannonball. By the time a white flag of surrender popped from a window, the victorious Americans had inflicted more than five hundred casualties and taken between two hundred and three hundred prisoners; only about three dozen Americans were killed in the one-sided battle. To Washington’s dismay, his soldiers, avid for booty, ransacked Nassau Hall and dragged out food, clothing, furniture, and even paintings. They also fleeced uniforms from British corpses on the battlefield. To stop this plunder, Washington had the field cordoned off by sentries. He also accompanied two wounded redcoats to private homes, where American surgeons treated them and performed amputations. In his humane treatment of prisoners, Washington wanted to make a major statement, telling one officer that British captives should “have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren.”
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The consecutive victories at Trenton and Princeton resurrected American spirits, especially since the Continental Army had scored an undisputed victory over British regulars. The psychology of the war was dramatically reversed, with the once-dominant British presence in New Jersey “reduced to the compass of a very few miles,” in Washington’s view.
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By rolling back British gains, he undercut the Crown’s new strategy of securing territory and handing out pardons. Nathanael Greene estimated that the Americans had killed or captured up to three thousand enemy soldiers in a two-week stretch. Although Washington wanted to proceed to New Brunswick and raid a major storehouse of British supplies, his men hadn’t slept for two days, and he didn’t believe he could press them further.

The back-to-back victories had also changed the calculus of the war. Henceforth the British would have to conquer the colonists, not simply cow them into submission. The Americans, having bounced back from near despair, now showed an irrepressible esprit de corps. “A few days ago, they had given up the cause for lost,” scoffed the Loyalist Nicholas Cresswell. “Their late successes have turned the scale and now they are all liberty mad again.”
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“Four weeks ago, we expected to end the war with the capture of Philadelphia,” said the Hessian captain Johann Ewald, “and now we had to render Washington the honor of thinking about our defense.”
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The consecutive battles exalted George Washington to a new pinnacle of renown. He had taken the demoralized men who shuffled wearily across New Jersey and shaped them into valiant heroes. Through the many newspaper accounts, these events passed directly into American legend. “Had he lived in the days of idolatry,” said a rhapsodic piece in the
Pennsylvania Journal,
Washington would have “been worshiped as a god.”
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The battle’s repercussions were worldwide, overturning the presumption that amateur volunteers could never defeat a well-trained European army. Even Frederick the Great added his congratulations: “The achievements of Washington and his little band of compatriots between the 25th of December and the 4th of January, a space of 10 days, were the most brilliant of any recorded in the annals of military achievements.”
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For all the many virtues he had shown in his life, nothing quite foreshadowed the wisdom, courage, fortitude, and resolution that George Washington had just exhibited. Adversity had brought his best traits to the surface and even ennobled him. Sensing it, Abigail Adams told her friend Mercy Otis Warren, “I am apt to think that our later misfortunes have called out the hidden excellencies of our commander-in-chief.” She quoted a line from the English poet Edward Young: “ ‘Affliction is the good man’s shining time.’”
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One consistent thread from his earlier life had prefigured these events: Washington’s tenacity of purpose, his singular ability to stalk a goal with all the resources at his disposal.

Another stalwart admirer of Washington was Charles Willson Peale. In 1779 the Supreme Executive Council of Philadelphia commissioned him to execute a full-length portrait of Washington to commemorate his Princeton triumph. Washington sat for the portrait over a two-week period, and the result was an inspiring work of easy, graceful lines. A debonair Washington stands with Nassau Hall in the background and a Hessian standard unfurled at his feet. His blue jacket with gold epaulettes opens to reveal a pale blue sash curving across his paunch. He holds one arm akimbo, the other resting on the barrel of a cannon. At the height of his power, Washington stands tall and imposing in high black boots with gold-colored spurs; the left foot is elegantly drawn back, resting on its toes. The portrait breathes a manly swagger, an air of high-flown accomplishment. All traces of provincial tentativeness and uncertainty have disappeared from Washington’s personality. This was the magnetic Washington that so enthralled his contemporaries, not the stiff, craggy figure made familiar to later generations by Gilbert Stuart.

Washington didn’t pause to savor his victory at Princeton. Once Cornwallis awoke and discovered the American ruse, he rushed toward Princeton at a maddening, helter-skelter pace “in a most infernal sweat, running, puffing and blowing and swearing at being so outwitted,” laughed Henry Knox.
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The British arrived an hour after the Continental Army had deserted the town. Washington put his dazed, depleted men through the paces of another fifteen-mile march north to Somerset Court House. They arrived there after sundown and, exhausted, instantly fell asleep on any available bed of straw they could find.

FOR ALL THE ILLUSTRIOUS FEATS that Washington’s soldiers performed at Trenton and Princeton, they were weary from their epic labors, and the euphoria of their victory was short-lived. The heroism of the patriot army, though quite real, would prove sporadic throughout the war, so that Washington’s own constancy became necessary to sustain the Revolution. Notwithstanding the bounties they had pocketed, men kept vanishing into the woods every day, and Washington griped that he headed an army that was “here today, gone tomorrow, without assigning a reason or even apprising you of it.”
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To flesh out sixteen new regiments, he had to offer twenty-dollar bounties, one hundred acres of land, and a new suit of clothes to anyone older than seventeen but younger than fifty.

Washington remained frustrated with congressional reluctance to confer on him the power to appoint his own general officers. Some of the political resistance sprang from fear of arbitrary power, but it also testified to envy festering below the hero worship, a petulant undercurrent that would persist for the rest of Washington’s career. Speaking of Washington, John Adams lectured his congressional colleagues not “to idolize an image which their own hands have molten.” Adams thought Washington already had too much power: “It becomes us to attend early to the restraining [of] our army.”
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After Princeton, an exhausted Washington took his shrunken army into winter headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey, instead of retreating back into Pennsylvania. This inspired decision enabled him to harass British supply lines and to expel the enemy from many parts of New Jersey. Nonetheless the decision carried grave risks. Washington was now perilously short of men, and as he admitted years later, the British could easily have vanquished this thinly guarded camp, “if they had only thought proper to march against us.”
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A small incident shows that he didn’t wish to jinx his recent run of victories through any precipitate action. On January 8 he thanked the Pennsylvania Council of Safety for “your notice of the eclipse of the sun which is to happen tomorrow. This event, without a previous knowledge, might affect the minds of the soldiery.”
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In an age alive to portents, Washington feared that his soldiers might interpret a solar eclipse as a sign of providential displeasure.