SMALL BATTLES WON: NEW JERSEY AND THE PATRIOT REVIVAL OF 1776
Mark Edward Lender (2002)

While the December 26, 1776, Battle of Trenton is regarded as one of the turning points of the Revolution, few historians pay sufficient attention to the importance of a series of small battles won by New Jersey militias earlier that month at places like Two Bridges, Bordentown and Hobart’s Gap. These battles, Kean University historian Mark Lender argues, established New Jersey as a rebel stronghold and enabled Washington to make the state his winter headquarters not only that year, but also in 1778-9 and 1779-80.

In late 1776, two related events changed the course of the War for Independence. Both are familiar. The first came on 13 December, when General Sir William Howe ordered the British army into winter quarters. Over the previous campaign season, his troops had humiliated the rebel army; the forces of the Crown had driven the regiments of General Washington reeling from New York City and its environs, across New Jersey, and into Pennsylvania. Then Howe stopped. Rather than force the Delaware River and finish Washington in a winter campaign, he considered that he had done enough. If cold and demoralization failed to finish the rebels, the general foresaw no trouble in cleaning up any patriot remnants in the spring. As it was, Howe thought that his order, which placed his men in a string of winter garrisons across central New Jersey, marked the end of a very successful campaign. As we know, he was wrong.

Howe's decision to go into winter quarters, of course, led directly to the second event in question. This was Washington's counterattack at Trenton on 26 December. This action, with the subsequent engagements at Second Trenton and Princeton, and the ultimate escape of the patriot army to safe haven at Morristown, represented a stunning reversal of military fortunes. The so-called “Christmas Campaign” had done nothing less than alter the course of the Revolution; it stands as was one of the seminal events in American history.

Most accounts of the campaign of late 1776 and early 1777, scholarly and otherwise, have framed their narratives in similar terms, albeit with varying degrees of drama and subtlety. The elements of the story have remained consistent: the desperate Washington devising a brilliant plan, an over-confident Howe underestimating his enemy and making a questionable winter deployment, the clashes at Trenton and Princeton, and the military balance seemingly shifting at a stroke. Such renditions are helpful to a point-they are generally accurate, for example, from a strictly operational perspective-but a closer look suggests a significant problem with such traditional accounts.

In fact, there is a very fundamental question here. The actions at Trenton and Princeton, however dramatic, were small affairs as battles went, even for the War for Independence. Trenton was a raid against a relatively isolated garrison that cost Washington only five casualties, and involved serious fighting of perhaps forty-five minutes. Princeton was an unplanned engagement with an under-strength enemy brigade; it saw some bitter combat, but the matter was settled in well under half an hour. In neither case did Washington engage a heavy British unit, nor did he try to hold terrain; rather, he prudently moved on to avoid counterattack or, as at Princeton, actual hot pursuit. In operational terms, the rebels still were no match for Howe's army, or even any major part of it, in an open fight. Despite his victories, the best Washington could do was to remain at Morristown as "a force in being"-enough of a threat to keep the British guessing about his real strength and intentions-but without any pretensions to the initiative. Thus, in strictly military terms, Trenton and Princeton should not have altered the strategic equation to any decisive extent. Yet by early January 1777, the patriot cause, seemingly on the brink of extinction barely a month earlier, was very much alive, if not well, with the British frustrated and embarrassed. So the question is, “Why?” And if the impact of two small battles in central New Jersey cannot explain the matter, what can?

Military Revival: The Patriot Resurgence

The answers, I think, lay in a nexus of developments that was at once more complex and, in the long run, as important as the Trenton-Princeton campaign. In fact, the situation amounted to a patriot military revival in New Jersey, a development that formed a context for Washington's larger victories. The British could absorb two minor defeats as isolated events-but not as part of a wider resurgence of rebel activity. This was particularly the case inasmuch as this activity involved not only the troops under Washington's direct command, but also a reanimated state militia. In early December, the British considered New Jersey all but pacified; by early January, however, Howe's lieutenants found trouble in every direction.

Had General Howe been looking, he would have noticed a disturbing trend as he drew his campaign to a close. The fact is that as his men prepared for winter quarters, the pace of action did not slacken; rather, it accelerated. The record of combat over late November and December told the tale. It was true that between 20 November, when Lord Cornwallis over-ran Fort Lee and began the invasion of New Jersey, and early December, the situation seemed well in hand. The New Jersey militia generally had not stood and fought, hundreds of state residents had accepted Royal amnesty, and the rebels seemed all but dazed. By 13 December, when Howe ordered the line of winter outposts, the pursuit of Washington's army and its immediate aftermath had led to only ten reported skirmishes or other actions, including Fort Lee, and the British had initiated most of them. They could be excused for concluding that the Americans were not keen for more fighting. The second half of December, however, was another matter entirely. Between 13 December and Christmas-that is, until the day before the attack on Trenton-there were seventeen incidents, most of them initiated by patriot commands or by British units responding to perceived patriot threats or troop concentrations. Clearly, the final weeks of 1776 had witnessed a revival of the rebel military effort.

It would be a mistake to attribute the patriot recovery entirely to British miscalculations. Certainly the rebels acted to help themselves, and we will consider several instances in this regard shortly. But the British decision not to wage a winter campaign did present the rebels with a priceless gift of time. Given a respite, competent leadership, and even minimal re-supply, a defeated army can heal. So can a wounded civil structure. Unlike Howe, the rebels never went into winter quarters; instead, they used the respite to reorganize, reinforce, and to renew the fight.

The state of the patriot army was a case in point. Recent scholarship has helped add a new dimension to our understanding of Washington's force at this critical juncture. Without for a moment slighting the difficulties it faced and the perilous nature of its condition, before the Trenton operation, the fact is that the rebel army remained operational. If there were shortages of almost everything, and if losses on the retreat across New Jersey had been severe, it was still a force to reckon with. Recruiting and logistics operations continued to function through the worst of the crisis, even if only barely, and enough men and materiel got through to keep the troops in the field. In fact, once he had reached New Brunswick on 1 December, Washington starting looking for an opportunity to counterattack. On 8 December, while the rest of his men were crossing into Pennsylvania from Trenton, he actually took part of his command back toward Princeton looking for a fight. The rebel commander pulled back only when it became clear that the British were coming in overwhelming strength. In Pennsylvania, however, left alone by Howe, patriot efforts to reinforce paid off by the end of the month. Washington was able to assemble some 9,000 men and to maintain regular communications with patriot forces in New Jersey. The outlook remained grim, but not hopeless.

Had Washington's main force collapsed or melted away, surely the Revolution in New Jersey would have followed. With the rebel army still in the field, however, and with Washington clearly still in charge, there was still a point to resistance, and rebel authorities at the state and local level were able to maintain regional military operations. They did so despite the early impact of the invasion, which had sent the state legislature packing and much of the militia hastening out of harm's way. But if Howe had failed to finish the rebel army, he had also called a halt before crushing local rebel civil and militia authorities. In areas not under immediate occupation, including large sections of northern and southern New Jersey, much of the shock of the initial blow had worn off. Indeed, the depredations of the invading troops had incensed many civilians, which only increased support for local whigs. Much of the countryside, then, simply followed Washington's lead and went on with the war. This war was a conflict of small battles and skirmishes, but as it gathered momentum in late December 1776, it began to test the wisdom of General Howe's decision to call off major operations until the spring.

Some Small Battles Won

Most of these local engagements were harassment operations against enemy patrols or outposts, and sometimes they hardly involved more than a few shots. Some of the actions, however, were fairly significant, and in aggregate they clearly affected both British and American perceptions of the state of military affairs. In fact, as the tempo of small-scale actions and alarms increased, it gradually occurred to some British officers that Howe's optimistic assessment of the military situation was mistaken. A few examples illustrate the point.

On 8 December, even before the end of the British campaign, there was a noteworthy clash at Two Bridges in Hunterdon County. Acting on detailed local intelligence, Readington Township militia intercepted a party of tories on their way to join the British in New Brunswick. The resulting skirmish reportedly created a “terrible uproar among the Tories as well as in the enemy's little camp,” as historian David C. Munn noted. The militia took one prisoner at the cost of one of their own men wounded, while the rest of the tories fled to enemy lines. This was not a large affair, but there were lessons in it. Clearly, unless redcoats were on the spot, there was little safety for those who would join His Majesty's forces. British hopes of organized tory support in New Jersey had seemed promising early in the campaign. But Two Bridges, and similar actions across the state, demonstrated that rebel authorities generally knew what was going on in their neighborhoods, and, significantly, that they had effective local military assets to employ against counter-revolution. Loyalists revealed themselves only at their peril. Thus, if Two Bridges was not much of a fight, it indicated that if Howe wanted to control the interior of the state, he would have to use his own men to do it-and he simply did not have that many men.

Any doubts on that score were settled nine days later. On 17 December, receiving a report of a militia concentration at Chatham, Howe dispatched a column of some eight hundred regulars under General Alexander Leslie. This was a major strike, but it ran into determined resistance outside Hobart's Gap, near Springfield, about three miles from Chatham. Morris County militia, under Colonel Jacob Ford, Jr., fought hard and held the gap until darkness ended the engagement. The patriot forces fully expected the British to renew the fight in the morning, and, with a promise of Continental reinforcements, prepared for the worst. It never came. Stung by the unexpectedly tough fight, Leslie had had enough and marched away. Casualties on both sides were light, but there was no mistaking the importance of the result. This was the first time that a New Jersey militia outfit had stopped a substantial body of redcoats in an open fight (the Continentals arrived too late to get into action). Patriots were reminded that the King's troops were not invincible, while the British learned that local militia, so recently despised, could prevent them from moving at will. They also learned that, unless they moved in overwhelming numbers, northern New Jersey was off limits for Howe's troops.

Less obvious at the time was a strategic bonus for the rebels. The stubborn defense of Hobart's Gap had prevented British occupation of Morris County or an attack on nearby Morristown. Instead, Washington was able to place Brigadier General William Maxwell in command of the area and have him use the town as a base of operations against British units active to the south. Howe's officers were aware of the development, but there was little they could do. Of even greater significance was the security of Morristown itself. Had it fallen in mid-December, or existed under eminent British threat, it would have been of little use as a refuge to the main patriot army after the Trenton and Princeton operations. Hobart's Gap (also referred to as Springfield) was a small battle won-and it paid major dividends for the rebel cause.
The situation developed along similar lines south of the zone of British occupation. Indeed, in Burlington County, virtually continuous rebel activity seriously disrupted the British effort to establish winter quarters. Howe had wanted to anchor the western end of his line on the Delaware at Burlington, but when Hessian Colonel Carl von Donop tried to occupy the town, cannon fire from the Pennsylvania navy drove him out. Donop then dispersed his sizable command in posts in and around near-by Bordentown. But even there he found little peace as rebel patrols shadowed his men and he felt compelled to maintain a high state of security.

Matters took an especially serious turn on 22 December. A strong militia detachment had skirmished with a Hessian picket post at Rancocas Bridge, near Black Horse, inflicting a few casualties before pulling back to the Mount Holly area. The next morning, Donop dispatched a strong column to Mount Holly to check on reports of a militia concentration of up to a thousand men. The operation resulted in several more wounded on both sides, but the militia, who had numbered only some two hundred, slipped away. Such ventures, if they produced no decisive results, were wearing on resources and nerves, and they were unpleasantly normal for the occupying force. The Hessian colonel's correspondence reflected a perpetual state of alarms and defensive precautions that continued through Washington's attack on Trenton.

These three examples-the fights at Twin Bridges and Hobart's Gap, and the operations in the Burlington-Bordentown area-were indicative of the New Jersey military situation generally. Patriot militia, sometimes with Continental support, patrolled aggressively into and along the edges of British-occupied areas, and generally controlled the countryside outside of the central corridor of the state that connected New York and the Delaware River. Over late December, patriot units actively gathered intelligence and clashed with enemy outposts at locations as far apart as Trenton, Bergen County, and Woodbridge. And if General Howe, who maintained his personal headquarters in New York, seemed unconcerned, subordinate commanders in New Jersey clearly understood that the supposedly pacified state was anything but. On 21 December, in a telling example of how affairs stood in the state, Colonel Johann Rall, the ill-fated commander of the Hessian garrison at Trenton, had to send an escort of a hundred men and an artillery piece to get a single letter through to the British at Princeton. To use the words of another British general, characterizing the Massachusetts countryside before Lexington and Concord, New Jersey was a province “in arms and in motion.”
Equally distressing was the knowledge that the small-scale actions were not isolated incidents. While local rebel commanders fought independently, they were in touch with senior state and Continental authorities. Even as he marshaled his forces in Pennsylvania, Washington regularly communicated with civil officials and military officers in New Jersey, and even issued orders with a direct bearing on militia field operations. Patriot command and control, the British realized, though battered, remained functional. Thus, if the growing resistance was wide-spread, it was also organized. Simply put, the Americans were becoming increasingly dangerous.

The pressure on the British garrisons was building, and-while we can only speculate on this point-it is worth considering whether the military situation in the region would have reached some sort of crisis by late December or early January even if Washington had not launched his counterattack at Trenton. A series of small battles can provoke as much of a reaction as one or two larger ones, and the rebels were winning their share of the small ones. Under the circumstances, it is difficult to see how the British could have stood on the defensive through the winter. The situation cried out for a response.

Trenton and Princeton in Context: The Military "Tipping Point"

But Washington did attack, and not just once. The operations between 26 December and 3 January, which encompassed the two actions in and around Trenton as well as the Battle of Princeton, triggered a series of events every bit as sensational as traditional historical accounts have related. Across the thirteen colonies, patriot morale soared; across the Atlantic, European observers and diplomats were astonished. In New Jersey, where for the moment things mattered most, the impact was nothing short of decisive. The British pulled back to a narrow strip of territory between New Brunswick and Perth Amboy, conceding the military initiative for the rest of the winter as well as the rest of the state to patriot control. Their prestige and pride suffered, but that was the least of their problems. In Morristown, where Washington finally brought his men on 7 January, the work of rebuilding the Continental Army began almost immediately. With the British venturing no offensive from the south, the patriot commander-in-chief was left to perform one of his most impressive feats of the war. He recruited, organized, and equipped a regular American army, laying the foundation for the Continental Line that would serve for the duration of the conflict. In buying the vital time for Washington's effort at Morristown, the patriot revival of late 1776 had dealt a terrible blow to British hopes to crush the Revolution through force of arms.

It did the same for their chances of rallying loyalist support. Left to their own devices by Howe's retreat, tories were largely defenseless against a vigorous reassertion of local rebel authority. By January, except in areas vulnerable to direct enemy attack, patriot political control of the state was beyond serious challenge. It was the lesson of Two Bridges writ large: there would be no counter-revolution in New Jersey. For both the British and the Americans, then, the political consequences of late 1776 and early 1777 were as important as the reversal of military fortunes.

Yet the initial question remains: in light of what we now know of the military context of this critical period, which lasted not even a full month, how should we interpret the significance of Washington's victories? At least one frame of reference may be helpful here. Recent scholarship in the social sciences has popularized the concept of the “tipping point.” It posits that there are small, even seemingly insignificant events that, by themselves, would amount to little-but that in the context of other small events and occurring at a critical moment, can send history cascading in directions that no one would have predicted or expected. Historical tipping points can be defining moments for an entire epoch. This may just be scholarly jargon for “the straw that broke the camel's back”; nevertheless, it helps explain what happened in 1776. The Trenton-Princeton campaign was a tipping point. It crystallized and even multiplied the impact of everything that had happened over the past several weeks, and gave them meaning beyond their individual effects. It compelled the British, once and for all, to confront the fact that control of the military situation, tenuous before the Trenton attack, was now gone, and that they faced not just a canny Washington using hit-and-run tactics, but most of a state in arms against them.

It was this broader situation to which the British reacted in early January. Their withdrawal from most of the state was a response out of all proportion to the minor defeats at Trenton and Princeton. An army in command of the situation would have chased Washington to death. But that was out of the question. Given the patriot revival, the British simply did not know from which direction a new threat might come if they threw everything or most of what they had against the main rebel army. The British knew what Washington was doing in Morristown, and surely understood that his army, in the midst of reorganization, was an inviting target. But Howe and his generals never felt that they could do anything to stop him, and the location of the rebel army at Morristown was a major reason for pause. The redcoats had tried only two weeks earlier to push into Morris County, and had come to grief at Hobart's Gap. By early January, they knew that another march into the interior would be an even riskier venture. Probably wisely, Howe chose to cut his losses for the year; he would risk nothing more until he could fight on his own terms in the spring. At some level, he may have understood that he had lost the campaign-one wonders if he also knew that he probably had lost the war. The Trenton-Princeton campaign was a “tipping point” indeed.