Battle of Princeton
Washington beat three British regiments at Princeton on 3 January 1777 after slipping out of a trap in the night. He had taken Trenton on 26 December and had come back across the Delaware a week later, which put an army of some 5,000 men in New Jersey with Cornwallis marching on it with 8,000. Cornwallis reached Trenton on the afternoon of 2 January, probed the American position behind Assunpink Creek three times, and decided to finish it in the morning — remarking, if the story is true, that he would bag the fox at daylight. Washington called a council and took the third option. The camp fires were built up and a few hundred men left digging noisily where the enemy could hear them, and the army marched out at one in the morning by a back road, wheels muffled with rags, on ground frozen hard enough to carry the guns. They came onto the Princeton road at dawn and met a British brigade moving the other way. The American line broke at the first volley and Washington rode into the gap between the two forces to rally it, close enough that an aide covered his own eyes. The British were driven into the college building and surrendered. Cornwallis found an empty camp and heard the guns behind him. The two victories in ten days transformed enlistments, revived the Continental cause, and drove the British out of most of New Jersey for the winter. Frederick the Great is supposed to have called the ten days between Trenton and Princeton the most brilliant of the century, which he probably did not, and the campaign is taught as a model of what a weaker army can do by moving faster than a stronger one expects.
- Year: 1777 CE
- Category: Military
