The Old Fox: Assunpink Creek and the Night Escape

A week after the first Battle of Trenton, the British came back. This time they came with about fifty-five hundred men under Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis, a serious force intent on avenging the Hessian defeat.

January second, seventeen seventy-seven. Washington had brought six thousand Americans of his own to the south side of the Assunpink Creek, a narrow waterway that cuts through Trenton before emptying into the Delaware. He posted artillery on the ridge above it. When Cornwallis drove his advance through Trenton and reached the creek, American riflemen had been slowing him all day on the road from Princeton. By the time the British reached the bridge over the Assunpink, the light was failing.

Cornwallis ordered three assaults on the bridge. All three were repulsed. A British officer later wrote that the bridge ran red with their fallen. Cornwallis, convinced he had Washington pinned against the river with nowhere to go, decided to wait until morning. He reportedly told his officers: we have the old fox safe now. We will bag him in the morning.

He had miscalculated badly. That night, Washington did something quietly audacious. He wrapped his artillery wheels in rags to muffle the sound, left five hundred men behind to keep campfires burning and make noise, and slipped his entire army down a little-known Quaker road toward Princeton.

By the time Cornwallis realized what had happened, Washington was fighting a third engagement, at Princeton, and winning that one too. The British withdrew from southern New Jersey entirely. The fox had been safe all along.