The First American Army (22 page)

He and others waited on the eastern banks of the river until just before 4 a.m., when the last boats carrying men and cannon crossed. By that time, the temperature had dropped to about twenty degrees, the snow fell even harder, and a biting wind from the northwest whipped through the countryside. Sergeant Joe White, who had been with him in Boston, called it “a violent snowstorm.” The army was now two hours late. It would not be able to reach Trenton at dawn, as planned. If the men were able to move quickly, marching through more than four inches of snow, they might make it by 8 a.m., when it was light, but risk losing the element of surprise that Washington had counted upon. What the soldiers did not know was that the other half of the army, under General John Cadwalader and General James Ewing, could not make it across the Delaware River further south, as planned, in order to trap the Hessians in a vice, leaving Greenwood and the others on their own north of Trenton.
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The eight-mile march took place amid a ferocious sleet storm. Greenwood and others could barely see in front of them as the snow fell heavily and the wind blinded them. Newspapers later recorded the storm, which first struck in Virginia and quickly moved its way up the Atlantic seaboard, as one of the worst in years. Two feet of snow fell on Virginia and snowfalls between a foot and six inches were recorded in Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York as the storm moved north by northeast. About four inches fell on the Delaware River basin.
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The officers walked and rode next to the men, moving them along. Every half hour or so Washington himself passed Greenwood and his regiment and quietly, but firmly, urged the soldiers to speed up the pace. “Keep up with your officers,” he said in a deep voice. He warned them not to stop because they might freeze to death, as two men had done just after they crossed the river.
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Greenwood had not been surprised at that news when he learned it later. He wrote that the men “were nearly half dead from cold for the want of clothing . . . many of our soldiers had not a shoe to their feet and their clothes were ragged as those of a beggar.”

And Greenwood might have died, too, if it was not for the sharp eyes of Sergeant Madden. “At one time when we were halted on the road, I sat down on the stump of a tree and was so benumbed with cold that I wanted to go to sleep. Had I been passed unnoticed, I should have frozen to death without knowing it. But as good luck always attended me, Sergeant Madden came and, rousing me up, made me walk about. We then began to march again, just in the old slow way.”

As men who saw him wrote later, Washington, more determined than ever, realized that while he might lose the early darkness for his attack, he would be able to approach Trenton unseen, because his entire army was cloaked in a blanket of snow. The gale would also drive the snow into the face of the Hessian soldiers. They would face northwest, right into the wind, as they fought.

Greenwood and the army trudged southward on Bear Tavern Road for four long hours, their feet getting colder and their faces nearly numb from the wind and snow. The army was divided along the way, with Washington taking half of the men down on Princeton Road and John Sullivan taking Greenwood’s regiment and the rest southward on River Road. The men grumbled about the slow pace of the march. “We began a circuitous march, not advancing faster than a child ten years old could walk, and stopping frequently, though for what purpose I know not,” Greenwood complained.

Just before 8 a.m., the American forces approached the outskirts of Trenton. Every man was ready for the battle, despite the sleepless night, snowstorm, and wearying eight-mile march.

The men told each other that the general had been right. No one was waiting for them. Colonel Rall had not sent out night patrols because of the storm and the early morning sentries who normally walked down the roads north of town remained inside their quarters, unwilling to emerge into the teeth of a bad snowstorm. The first single shot of the engagement was fired just north of town when Lt. Andreas Wiederhold, a Hessian picket, saw men coming across a field. He walked out of the guardhouse to greet them, thinking they were his early morning sentries. They ran toward him, muskets raised, and he realized, he wrote later, that it was not a few German sentries, but “the enemy vanguard.”

Wiederhold ran back into the house, yelled for his seventeen men to awake and grab their arms. They stumbled outside and were greeted with three successive volleys from the Americans. The Hessian said that he ordered his men to fire but in the process was “passed by several battalions” of Americans. He knew right away that they were the victims of a sneak attack and, with his men, fled into the town with the Americans firing after them.

Rall, still sleeping as the Americans moved into position, never feared an attack. He had been told by his men that the Americans they saw rowing in the river over the last few weeks, or walking on the other side, looked hungry, wore tattered clothes, and seemed unable to engage in any kind of battle. His immediate superior, General James Grant, now in New Brunswick, had agreed with him, sneering that the Americans had no stockings or shoes and “were dying and cold, without blankets and very ill-supplied with provisions.”
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Besides, how could an entire army cross a major river and launch an attack without being seen? Rall had been so confident that his position was impregnable that he even ignored the advice of Cornwallis to build defensive earthworks around Trenton— just in case.

Just after the volleys fired at Wiederhold, the American muskets and cannon opened up on the western side of town. It was a few minutes after 8 a.m. As soon as the roar of the gunfire was heard, Washington ordered his men on the eastern side to fire into the village. Rall, after being summoned three times by an underling, hastily put on his clothes and ran outside into the snowfall. Throughout the town, the Hessians, grabbing what muskets they could, stumbled out into the still-raging storm, uncertain where the enemy was positioned. Rall was not able to rally his men and chaos ensued for the stunned Hessians.

Some Hessians raced into the snow-covered fields that surrounded the town’s two streets, some pulling cannon into a nearby apple orchard. Others regrouped in a churchyard but could not see the enemy clearly in the wind and snow and the smoke from the heavy and continuous musket fire. An unintended consequence of the early morning assault was that the civilian residents of the town were just as surprised at the attack as the Hessians had been. The men and women and children of Trenton ran out of their homes into the streets, yelling. Their screams drowned out the futile commands of Hessian officers, who tried desperately to organize their men into formations. They also had to shout orders above the martial music being played by the small band that Rall always brought with the regiment and had ordered to play during any battle. Rall, when he was finally dressed, managed to get on his horse and rode into the field, toward several hundred of his men, to take command. A moment later, he was shot and fell from his horse into the snow, mortally wounded.

Some Hessians reached two of their cannon, turned them northward, and fired a single shot at the American artillery but hit nothing. Knox ordered some men to fire away with their muskets at the Hessians near the cannon, but the snow and rain had rendered many of their guns useless. Knox then ordered as many men that could do so to charge the caissons and kill the Hessians manning them in any manner possible. A dozen or more infantrymen led by Lieutenant James Monroe, who would go on to become the nation’s fifth president, rushed the Germans near the cannon, waving their swords and running as fast as they could. One of the men with Monroe, Sgt. Joe White, said that “I [yelled] as loud as I could scream for the men to run for their lives right up to the pieces.”

Halfway there, the Germans manning the cannon raised their muskets and fired a volley of shots at the charging Americans. One shot hit Monroe squarely in the chest. The lieutenant fell instantly into the snow, his sword crashing to the ground next to him. He was badly wounded and bleeding profusely, his blood turning the snow around him crimson.
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Sgt. White, howling at the top of his lungs and running next to Monroe, turned and saw him fall as the crackling of the Hessian muskets filled the chilly air. White, now leading the attack, his adrenaline flowing, started to scream even louder, waving his sword wildly above his head. “I was the first to reach the [cannon]. One man was . . . tending. ‘Run, you dog!’ I yelled. He looked up and saw [sword] and ran. We put in a canister of shot and fired [at the fleeing Hessians].”
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The battle did not begin for Greenwood and his regiment, moving slowly west of Washington’s divisions, until just after 8 a.m. as their artillery group reached the northern end of town. A Hessian six-pound cannon fired wildly into the snow and a cannonball exploded just in front of Greenwood’s cannon caisson. He would recall, “The ball struck the fore horse that was dragging our only piece of artillery, a threepounder. The animal, which was near me, as I was in the second division on the left, was struck in its belly and knocked over on its back. While it lay there kicking, the cannon was stopped and I did not see it again after we had passed on.”

Everything after that seemed a blur to Greenwood. He noted, “It was dark and stormy so that we could not see very far ahead; we got within two hundred yards of about three or four hundred Hessians who were paraded two deep in a straight line with Colonel Rall, on horseback, to the right of them. They made a full fire at us, but I did not see that they killed anyone.”

Greenwood moved toward the Hessians, proud that he was brave and forlorn that he was risking the loss of a perfectly good suit and brand new shirt, with lacy ruffles on the shirt, folded up in his backpack (the men never retrieved the packs). He was also distressed that the snow and rain had rendered their muskets useless; none were able to fire. As he contemplated the loss of his shirt and soaked musket, Sherburne ordered them to rush the Hessians in front of them and to use their bayonets for weapons.

“And rush we did,” said a grim Greenwood, noting that only one in five men had bayonets. The rest waved their swords and simply ran and yelled as loud as they could. “Within pistol shot, they fired point blank at us; we dodged and they did not hit a man, while before they had time to reload we were within three feet of them,” he wrote. The Hessians, with the howling Americans right in their faces, turned and stumbled backwards. “They broke in an instant and ran like so many frightened devils into the town. We went after them pell-mell,” Greenwood added.

Some of the Hessians had given up and were herded inside a building by the Americans. Others had been cornered in a home and seemed about to surrender. Greenwood kept moving toward the sounds of the battle with others. “I passed two of their cannons, brass six-pounders, by the side of which lay seven dead Hessians and a brass drum. This latter article was, I remember, a great curiosity to me and I stopped to look at it, but it was quickly taken possession of by one of our drummers, who threw away his own.”

Greenwood bent over and pulled a sword out of the sheath of one of the dead Hessians. As he rose he saw George Washington, on his horse, moving slowly down the street. “March on, my brave fellows, after me,” the commander in chief told the men, apparently looking right at Greenwood. Greenwood described how his regiment moved down the street in remarkably calm order for men in a heated battle. They saw five hundred Hessians on their right and, in columns of two, marched down the road and turned to face them, just a few yards away. The men raised their guns and prepared to fire directly at the Hessians. Suddenly, Greenwood said, as the muskets were lifted, someone yelled out, “They have no guns! They have no guns!” Others shouted the same warning.

Greenwood and the others lowered their weapons and realized that the men in front of them had already surrendered. They had piled up their weapons on the ground and stepped back some fifteen feet. The Americans, in the snowfall, had by chance marched right between the prisoners and the pile of guns, looking to the right and not the left. Initially, the snow prevented them from realizing that the Germans had dropped their muskets. An accidental massacre was averted because several infantrymen noticed that the men were unarmed.

The attack had been a surprise, as the men hoped, and the vaunted Hessian army never had time to organize and fight back. The battle ended less than an hour after it commenced. The Americans had killed about thirty Hessians and captured nine hundred twenty. The Continental Army also confiscated six cannon and one thousand muskets, plus, the soldiers delighted in telling friends later, all of the instruments from the German band that Rall had loved so dearly. In fact, on the Fourth of July, 1777, the captured Hessian musicians used those instruments to serenade a Philadelphia crowd celebrating the first anniversary of independence.
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The soldiers were pleased. Captain John Polhemus wrote, “We whipped them terrible.”
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The snow-covered village of Trenton was a somber scene. “I took a walk over the field of battle and my blood chilled to see such horror and distress, blood mingling together—the dying groans and garments rolled in blood,” said Sgt. White, who took an elegant sword from a slain Hessian officer lying in the snow as a souvenir of the fight. It was one of the few times that General Washington expressed some joy and broke his usual calm demeanor. “It is a great day for our country,” he said to some of the enlisted men as he rode through the fields around the village.
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He later wrote to General Cadwalader that “the officers and men who were engaged in the enterprise behaved with great firmness, poise, and . . . bravery.”
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Greenwood was as relieved as White, McCarty, Bostwick, and the others but they had little time to savor the victory. The inability of Cadwalader and Ewing to transport their men across the Delaware meant that the three hundred Hessians who escaped southward would soon reach the British outpost at Burlington and riders from there would bring the news to Lord Cornwallis twenty miles away in New Brunswick. The British would soon be in hot pursuit of the Americans. Following his original plan, Washington led the army up the Delaware, with the nine hundred prisoners of war, and marched into Pennsylvania, again crossing the icy river, this time with boatloads of prisoners as well as his own soldiers.