The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [76]
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.”2
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.”3
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.”4
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.5
The men were not only pleased that they had