The Crossing: December Twenty-Sixth, Seventeen Seventy-Six

The Continental Army in December of seventeen seventy-six was in a desperate state. Washington had retreated across New Jersey after losing New York. Enlistments were expiring by the end of the month. Morale had collapsed. Thomas Paine was writing by firelight, trying to hold the cause together with words.

Washington chose to attack.

On the night of December twenty-fifth, seventeen seventy-six, twenty-four hundred soldiers assembled on the Pennsylvania bank of the Delaware River nine miles north of Trenton. The night was brutal, rain turning to sleet, ice churning in the dark river. Soldiers wrapped their feet in rags because they had no proper boots. Some left bloodstains in the snow. They crossed in flat-bottomed Durham boats, poled and rowed by experienced boatmen from Massachusetts, and they did not finish crossing until three in the morning, hours behind schedule.

They marched south through the storm. No Hessian patrols were out in weather like that. When the Continental Army hit Trenton from two directions at roughly eight in the morning, the Hessian garrison was caught completely unprepared. Their commander, Colonel Johann Rall, had reportedly been playing cards the night before. He was shot during the fighting and died of his wounds the same afternoon.

The battle lasted less than an hour. Twenty-two Hessians were killed, eighty-three wounded. Between eight hundred and nine hundred were taken prisoner. American losses from enemy fire were five men wounded. Two soldiers had died of exposure during the march.

The numbers were small compared to the battles that followed. But the effect on the war's momentum was enormous. The Continental Army had just proved that it could defeat professional European soldiers in the field. Enlistments that were about to expire were extended. The revolution, which had seemed on the verge of collapse ten days earlier, had a reason to continue.