• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 25691 0

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.51 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. 52 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.”53 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.” 54 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!”55 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.”56

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!”57 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.”58 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