Patriots (61 page)

Picking his way to shelter in the church, Rall found one of his lieutenants lying near a house. Rall asked whether the lieutenant was wounded. Yes, the man said. “
I pity you,” Rall said.

The surviving Hessian officers were divided over their next move. Some wanted to try to escape across a shallow spot in Assunpink Creek. Others wanted to surrender. A corporal tied a white handkerchief to a spontoon and led a badly wounded major to John Sullivan to give up his sword. Officers of a six-gun American battery at the head of Queen Street called to the two Hessian regiments trapped there to throw down their weapons or be shot to death.

Rall’s adjutant had been learning English, and he interpreted the ultimatum for the others. The American line had moved within sixty feet of the Germans. A Hessian lieutenant colonel called out that they would surrender, and the Germans lowered their arms and their battle standards. Their officers put their hats on the points of their swords and held them aloft. The Hessians who were against surrendering threw their guns toward the woods instead of laying them down in front of them. Some managed to escape across the stream, but three were caught in the current and drowned.

When the commander of the third German regiment tried to hold out, Brigadier General Arthur St. Clair sent a message to him: “If you do not surrender immediately,
I will blow you to pieces.” The German captain asked that his officers be allowed to keep their swords and baggage, and he and St. Clair shook hands on it.

George Washington had been notified that the first two regiments had surrendered. Now St. Clair informed him that the last regiment had also given up. His messenger was Major James Wilkinson, the aide who had conveyed Horatio Gates’s regrets to General Washington before the battle. Washington was in better spirits than he had been earlier, and he greeted Wilkinson with almost the same words that Samuel Adams had used in welcoming the sound of gunfire at Lexington. Pressing him by the hand, Washington said, “
This is a glorious day for our country, Major Wilkinson.”

Two of his generals were also exultant. John Sullivan and Lord Stirling had captured the same Hessian soldiers who had taken them prisoner during the battle for Long Island.

—

Colonel Rall was dying. He had been carried on a church bench back to his headquarters on King Street. As men cut away his clothes to treat his wounds, they found the note from the loyalist
who had tried to warn him a few hours earlier. Rall looked over the message and said, “
Hätte ich dies zu Herrn Hunt gelesen, so wäre ich jezt nicht hier.
” If I had read this at Mr. Hunt’s, I would not be here.

Washington and Nathanael Greene sought out Colonel Rall at his headquarters and spoke briefly with him through an interpreter. Rall pleaded with the American commander to treat his men kindly, and Washington promised that he would. Colonel Rall endured another thirty hours of pain and died.

Rall was the highest-ranking casualty, but twenty-two other Hessian officers and men had been killed during the ninety-minute battle. Survivors hid in the houses of sympathetic Tories; most were soon discovered. By December 29, George Washington estimated that he had taken one thousand Hessians prisoner. Another four hundred had escaped because Washington’s strategy had once again been overly ambitious. John Cadwalader had not been able to get his artillery across the rushing Delaware and had called back the infantrymen who had managed to make the crossing. James Ewing hadn’t been able to launch a single boat.

Even so, the extent of Washington’s success was evident in the small number of American losses—two officers wounded, along with two privates. Another two Americans may have frozen to death as they waited at the ferry for the last of the boats, but Washington’s report to the Congress made no mention of them.

The American spoils included forty horses, six brass cannon, a thousand weapons, four wagons of baggage, three wagons of ammunition, and twelve drums. There were also twenty-one wagonloads of goods the Germans had looted from American homes. Washington invited the residents of Trenton to come and recover their property, but many civilians found that their mahogany furniture was missing because Rall had let his men heat their quarters by burning chairs and tables rather than tire them with cutting wood.

As word of the surrender spread through Trenton, American soldiers danced and yelled and threw their hats in the air. Some turned away sadly from the sight of Germans dead and dying. Others rifled the Hessian corpses; German swords were the most popular souvenirs. The Americans also discovered forty hogsheads of rum that the Germans had abandoned and were warming and rewarding themselves liberally before General Washington could stop them. Nathanael Greene and Henry Knox recommended chasing
the Germans who had escaped, but when Washington convened his council of war the majority voted to return to Pennsylvania. Theirs had been a brilliant stroke, but Cadwalader and Ewing were still across the river, the enemy was strong both below Trenton and above it, the weather remained severe and the American army was drunk.

George Washington at left, General Hugh Mercer at right

Battle of Princeton, by George Washington Parke Custis.

DIETRICH BROTHERS AMERICANA CORPORATION

D
URING THE
trip back to George Washington’s headquarters on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware, the German prisoners cowered in the boats. Had they shared a language with their captors, they would have discovered that their backgrounds were not so different. In Germany, until their princes sold them into this distant war, they had been weavers and tailors, shoemakers and carpenters, butchers and bakers, masons and plasterers. To charge them up for
battle, British commanders had warned them that the American rebels were cannibals who would skin a Hessian with their tomahawks to make a cover for their drums or would roast his body on a spit and eat him like pork.

When they saw the Americans taking boyish pleasure in the brass caps they had plucked from Hessian corpses, the prisoners pulled off their own caps and began giving them away. One American
guard smiled as he watched his friends, many shoeless and with the elbows out of their shirts, jamming the caps over their wet hair and capering and strutting on the way to camp.

General Washington had chosen a farmhouse five miles from the Delaware for his new headquarters. On the evening of December 28, he entertained twenty-eight Hessian officers, all in their dark-blue uniforms. The talk had to be conducted through interpreters, but as the evening wore on a frankness emerged between the fellow soldiers. Washington spoke with Lieutenant Andreas Wiederhold, who had been stationed at the guardhouse, and praised his conduct under fire. That emboldened Wiederhold to tell Washington how he would have conducted the battle if he had been in Rall’s position. He claimed afterward that General Washington had commented favorably on his acumen, and Wiederhold decided that the American commander in chief was a fine, polite man. He hadn’t said much, though, as he listened to Wiederhold outlining his strategy, and at times the lieutenant thought that Washington was looking rather sly.

—

George Washington usually communicated with his men through written orders read aloud to the ranks. But with less than forty-eight hours until their enlistments expired, he had the men lined up so that he could address them in person. The army was back in Trenton. After two days of rest and sobriety, time to wash and sleep, they had put on clean rags and been ferried once more across the Delaware. The second crossing had been worse than the first. Intense cold had frozen even more ice in the river, and moving the boats with poles and oars was exhausting.

When they reached the battle site, the Americans found that all was quiet. The British and the Germans had ceded the town and retreated—perhaps to Princeton, where General Howe kept large stores of munitions and supplies. This time, John Cadwalader had got his men across the river and was urging Washington to take advantage of the enemy’s disarray and strike again. But the New England regiments were due to go home, and even with hundreds of militia volunteers coming from Philadelphia, Washington couldn’t launch another attack without battle-tried veterans.

When the New England regiments were in place and ready to
hear him, General Washington rode to the center of their ranks and asked the men to give him six more weeks. Never again could they do more for their country, he said, than they could do now. Washington had cast off his normal austerity, and one sergeant found his tone warm, even affectionate. But Washington knew better than to trust to sentiment. He had sent an urgent note to Robert Morris, a Philadelphia banker, asking to borrow enough money to pay a ten-dollar bonus to each soldier who would extend his enlistment for six weeks. “Every lover of his country must strain his credit,” Washington wrote. “No time, my dear sir, is to be lost.”

To avoid any denial or delay, Washington told Morris to send the money back with the man who had brought his message. Morris met the challenge. Since the troops wanted hard money, not the Continental paper issued by the Congress, he filled two canvas bags with four hundred and ten Spanish silver dollars, along with a French half crown and ten and a half English shillings. Morris told Washington he would borrow the rest in silver, promise repayment in gold and then try to raise the gold as best he could. The banker had heard that Washington was low on wine and sent along a quarter cask of a good vintage.

In addition to those funds from Philadelphia, Washington had received copies of recent resolutions by the Congress in Baltimore that gave him sweeping emergency powers. Even Samuel Adams had agreed that the commander in chief must be entrusted with those powers, though they could make him a dictator. When Adams wrote home to Boston, he underlined that the authority had been granted for a limited time, no more than six months. Washington himself seemed disturbed that he might be accused of conniving for power and wrote reassuringly to the Congress that the sword, which was the last resort in preserving liberties, ought to be laid aside once those liberties were firmly established.

Now, as Washington finished his appeal to the New England regiments, their officers stepped forward to explain the terms of the bounty Robert Morris was providing. Next came a drum roll as volunteers were asked to step forward. No one moved. For weeks they had fixed their hearts on returning to their families. Only hours away from escape, they would not give up their dreams. Washington spoke a second time. Throughout his life he had nurtured his pride, but now he begged. My brave fellows, Washington
said, you have done all I asked you to do and more than could reasonably be expected. But your country is at stake—your wives, your houses and all that you hold dear.

Again he asked that they give him a little longer, one more month. The drums beat again. Possibly because they had heard the general’s pain, men were looking around at one another. Voices in the ranks said, We cannot go home now. Men told their friends,
I will remain if you will.

They started to step forward until their numbers passed two hundred. Only men too weak to fight stayed behind. The officers asked whether they should sign up each man for his extended service.

No! said Washington. Men who volunteered at a time like this didn’t need a piece of paper to hold them to their duty.

—

When the pleas and the bribes were over, between twelve and fourteen hundred men had agreed to stay with Washington for an extra six weeks—and an extra ten dollars. He also had the Pennsylvania militia to draw upon, its strength estimated from eighteen hundred men to twice that number. At the upper limits, the Americans would be pitting five thousand troops, most of them poorly trained, against an estimated eight thousand British and German professionals. Major James Wilkinson wrote bleakly,
“How dreadful the odds.”

To prevent those odds from getting worse, Washington had made the Hessian officers in his custody sign an oath that they would stay where he sent them and would not pass information to the British. The Hessians were then marched to Philadelphia and put on display to hearten the beleaguered residents. The Germans looked hearty and well dressed beside their barefoot American guards, and onlookers who didn’t understand that the Hessians had been sold to the British were puzzled by their expression. They seemed, one elderly spectator remarked, satisfied.

The Hessians thought Philadelphia was big and beautiful, but once inside the town they found a mixed reception. Some sympathetic Americans approached them with bread and liquor, until clusters of old women stopped them and screamed that the Germans should be hanged for coming to America to deprive them of their freedom. Many spectators were hostile, but the old women
were the most vengeful. Without protection from their American guards, the prisoners would have been killed. At the height of the furor, the American officer in charge said, “Dear Hessians, we will go to the barracks,” and hurried them away. Once they were safe, General Washington issued a proclamation to be posted all over Philadelphia: The Hessians, who had been forced into this war, were blameless and should be treated not as enemies of the American people but as friends.