The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [78]
“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