CHAPTER 7

Lexington Repeated—with an
Army to Look the Enemy in the Face

A cool night wind stirred the shallow waters of Newark Bay. It was close to midnight on June 8, 1780. Clouds cut off even the feeble light provided by the stars, making the darkness almost impenetrable. For the light infantrymen of the 37th and 38th British Regiments, sitting stiffly upright on the thwart seats of their attack flatboats, the total darkness was doubly unnerving. The high planked-up sides of the boats made them disconcerting craft. Even in daylight soldiers liked to see where they were going. Now, under the double weight of darkness and danger, they felt like living men in floating coffins.¹

In the lead boats, guides with distinctively American accents gave muted directions to the sweating oarsmen. A few minutes later, to the light infantrymen’s intense relief, they heard the hissing sound of marsh grass against the sides and bottoms of the boats. Oars were shipped and poles produced to shove the boats a final few dozen yards into the salt meadows that fringed the shore of Elizabethtown, New Jersey. Finally the grunting pole wielders swore they could not move the boats another foot. The planked-up sides were lowered and the men sprang out—to find themselves up to their knees in muck. Cursing eloquently—they had been issued generous rations of rum—and holding their bayonet-tipped muskets at shoulder height to keep them dry, they followed the American guides. After some fifty floundering yards, they at last found firm earth beneath their feet.

Now Brigadier Thomas Stirling, commander of the expedition, took charge. A tough, cool professional who had spent fifteen of the twenty previous years soldiering in America, he had been the first man out of the lead flatboat. Swiftly he sent one company of light infantrymen to probe a nearby orchard. Another company moved cautiously down a long, narrow pasture to the nearest road. If challenged, they had orders to use only their bayonets.²

Brigadier Stirling did not expect to encounter anyone. British raiding parties from Staten Island had so demoralized the Americans that they had practically abandoned posting sentries along the shore. Stirling waited until runners returned with reports that there was no sign of rebel Americans anywhere in their vicinity. He sent an aide mucking back across the salt marsh to summon the rest of the 37th and 38th Regiments, waiting offshore in forty flatboats. With them came Stirling’s batman, leading his horse.

As soon as the flatboats had landed their human cargo, they pulled away for the Staten Island shore again. A half hour later they were back with the rest of Brigadier Stirling’s division—two regiments of green-coated soldiers from the Duchy of Hesse-Cassel, led by Colonel Ludwig Johann Adolph von Wurmb, one of the toughest, cleverest young officers in the war.³

Faced with the American fondness for Indian-style skirmishing, von Wurmb had organized the light infantry companies of the German regiments into a separate corps and trained them to fight the Americans in their own manner. Two companies of these sharpshooters were with von Wurmb as he came ashore. By now Stirling had over 1,300 men in Elizabethtown, more than a match for anything the Americans had in the area.

Colonel von Wurmb was in high spirits; he looked forward to daybreak, when the full four-hundred-man Jaeger Corps would join him to fight for the first time in America under a German commander in chief. Lieutenant General Wilhelm von Knyphausen had issued the orders that sent Stirling and von Wurmb to this midnight rendezvous in Elizabethtown’s marshes. Before the night was over, General von Knyphausen was to join them with another 4,500 troops. Their destination was Morristown, where, spies told them, the American army under George Washington had dwindled to a mere 3,500 sullen, mutinous men.

Destruction of Washington’s army would provide an almost perfect complement to the news of Charleston’s surrender. The rebellion would evaporate in New Jersey and in nearby states, just as it was withering in the south. Waiting in New York was the most famous loyalist in America, William Franklin, son of Benjamin Franklin, eager to resume his duties as royal governor of the Garden State. With the king’s authority restored in this cockpit colony at the center of the rebellious thirteen, the rest of the revolution would soon fragment into diehard pockets that the British could mop up at leisure. General von Knyphausen would sail home as the conqueror of America.⁴

Brigadier Stirling did not share Colonel von Wurmb’s enthusiasm for this scenario. He had no desire to make a hero out of “Old Knyp,” as the British (and Americans) called the trim, erect Hessian martinet. Stirling considered the expedition a dangerous, pointless adventure. As the commandant of Staten Island, he knew more about the dwindling rebellion than any other officer in the British army. Loyalists on his intelligence payroll rowed back and forth across the narrow waters of Arthur Kill constantly, bringing him the latest news. Their reports convinced Stirling the rebellion would collapse from bankruptcy and internal discord in a few months.⁵ Why waste men, money, and horses to destroy an army that was about to fall apart?

In fact, Stirling feared that attacking Washington’s regulars might revive their fighting spirit. The same principle applied to the amateur soldiers of New Jersey—the militia—which, on paper, amounted to 16,000 part-time troops. But Stirling had swallowed his doubts and opinions and was obeying Knyphausen’s orders. By sunrise he was supposed to be seven miles northwest of Elizabethtown in firm possession of both the town of Springfield and Hobart Gap, a crucial pass that ran through the heart of the Watchung Mountains—better known even then as the Short Hills. Hobart Gap was the doorway to Morristown, eleven miles away across flat terrain, made to order for the steamroller tactics that the British army executed so well.

THE REPORTS of imminent American disintegration brought by loyalists to Stirling and Knyphausen were not exaggerated. Thirteen days before Stirling and von Wurmb landed on the Elizabethtown shore, the entire Connecticut Continental brigade had mutinied at Morristown and attempted to march home to the Nutmeg State. Only the leveled muskets of regiments from other states had stopped them.⁶

For months George Washington had been warning his supporters in the Continental Congress that his army was on the point of dissolution. He told one congressman that his men were eating “every kind of horse food but hay.” For days at a time the men lived on a sickening compound of buckwheat, rye, and Indian corn, which they pounded into “firecakes” and heated on their crude stoves. Clothing was in equally short supply. One captain wrote a friend, “Many a good lad has nothing to cover him from his hips to his toes save his blanket.”⁷

Shortages of food and clothing were not new in the Continental Army. The country’s apparent indifference to their plight, however, enraged the soldiers and depressed Washington and his officers. Quartermaster General Nathanael Greene looked out his window at the snowbound army on January 4, 1780, and exclaimed, “Poor fellows… more than half naked and two thirds starved. A country overflowing with plenty are now suffering an army employed for the defence of everything that is dear and valuable to perish for want of food.”⁸

To compound Washington’s woes, the 1779–1780 winter was the coldest in living memory. The Hudson River froze so solidly that cannons weighing a ton or more were towed across it. For a full week the temperature hovered at or below zero. Frostbite disabled dozens of men on sentry duty. Many of the soldiers began trying to desert the starving army legally. They swore they had enlisted for three years and their time was up. A number of men in New Jersey’s regiments demanded hearings with the chief justice of the state. He passed the buck to the New Jersey legislature. An alarmed Washington warned New Jersey’s governor, William Livingston, that if they went ahead with the proposed hearings, the military system “would be nearly unhinged.”

Still, Washington refused to abandon the tough discipline of a regular army. On the day after the near mutiny of the Connecticut brigade, fifty men from each regiment mustered at the grand parade ground in Morristown. Soon eleven condemned deserters appeared, with drummers and fifers playing the dead march before them. After letting them shiver in expectation of doom for a few minutes, Washington pardoned all but one, convicted of forging discharges that enabled at least one hundred men to desert without fear of retaliation when they reached home.⁹

The next day, Colonel Elias Dayton, commander of the 3rd New Jersey Regiment, stationed in Elizabethtown, sent Washington a copy of James Rivington’s Royal Gazette, which featured the news of Charleston’s surrender. Dayton added a note hoping the story was a fake. A glum Washington replied that it bore “too many marks of authenticity” and urged Dayton to be on his guard. There was a good chance that the British, looking to build on the momentum of this victory, would “make an attempt on you.”¹⁰

Dayton could do little to act on Washington’s warning. American security in Elizabethtown had all but collapsed. Every second man seemed to have drifted toward some sort of accommodation with the British. Dayton had withdrawn his regiment to the town of Springfield, twenty miles inland. James Caldwell, the outspoken pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Elizabethtown, had retreated with his family to the nearby village of Connecticut Farms. But Dayton himself, with a handful of soldiers to give him a semblance of protection, continued to spend most of his days and nights in Elizabethtown.

On the night of June 6, Dayton was in his house when a furtive figure came to his front door and handed him a note. The message, from an American spy on Staten Island, warned that the British had massed 5,000 troops near the New Jersey shore. Dayton summoned nineteen-year-old Moses Ogden, an ensign (second lieutenant) in the 4th New Jersey Regiment, and ordered him to take twelve men to the crossroads where two main roads from the shore met. If he saw any British, he was to give them one “fire” and retreat.

Dayton and the men of his 3rd New Jersey Regiment would wait for Ogden in the center of Elizabethtown, where he hoped to make a stand on some high ground known as Jelf’s Hill. Ogden marched his men on the double to the crossroads and deployed them in a pasture on the left side of the road. For an hour they heard nothing but wind sighing through the marsh grass.

Suddenly everyone recognized the tramp of marching feet. A large black blur that could only be a man on a horse emerged from the darkness. Beside him walked guides carrying dark lanterns that shed no light ahead—only behind. Their glow illuminated gleaming belt buckles, white crossbands, and shiny muskets by the dozen. Ensign Ogden told his men to aim at the man on horseback. “Fire,” he growled.

Twelve muskets erupted simultaneously with a blast of flame and a great gush of white smoke. Ogden and his men whirled and ran. Behind them they could hear excited shouts and cries and a barked order followed by repeated volleys of musketry. Not a ball came close to them. In ten minutes they came panting into the center of Elizabethtown to be challenged by Colonel Dayton’s sentries. Ogden told Dayton he had just seen the 5,000-man army reported in the spy’s letter.¹¹

Colonel Dayton ordered his son, Captain Jonathan Dayton, to rush a note to General Washington in Morristown. Minutes later the horseman was on the road. The message read,

Sir:

I am directed by Colo. Dayton to inform your excellency that the enemy landed this night at 12 o’clock, from the best intellegence four or five thousand men and twelve field pieces, & it is his conjecture they intend to penetrate into the country.¹²

BACK AT the crossroads, the front ranks of the British column milled around Brigadier General Thomas Stirling in wild confusion. A musket ball had smashed the general’s thigh. He lay on his back in the road, almost delirious with pain, while the surgeons of the 37th and 38th Regiments worked on him. A tourniquet stopped the bleeding, but the general was clearly out of action, probably for the rest of the war.

Colonel von Wurmb, marching with the German troops, joined the disorganized crowd at the crossroads to murmur his sympathy. Through teeth clenched with pain, Stirling handed the command over to him. The brigadier was lifted onto an improvised litter and carried down the road to Elizabethtown Point, where the rest of the army was supposed to land.

Stirling’s fate shook von Wurmb. He decided not to move another step into Elizabethtown until daylight gave him something to shoot at. He knew how easily soldiers could panic when attacked in the darkness. Up in the acrid gun smoke from Moses Ogden’s muskets went the plan to seize Hobart Gap before dawn.

On Jelf’s Hill in Elizabethtown, Colonel Dayton prepared for a desperate defense. He knew it was madness to make a stand in the center of the town. Not only would he and his handful of men probably be wiped out, but much of Elizabethtown might be destroyed. Yet he was ready to make the sacrifice to give Washington time to move the main army from Morristown to the Short Hills.

A huge horseman came pounding down the road from Newark to solve Dayton’s problem. Major Aaron Ogden, uncle of Ensign Moses Ogden, was aide de camp to General William Maxwell, commander of the New Jersey brigade. He had been asleep beside Maxwell in brigade headquarters in Bound Brook when he heard the gunfire of his nephew’s patrol. Major Ogden had been on his horse within minutes, riding toward the sound of the guns.¹³

“Scotch Willie” Maxwell had probably called a warning after him. The last time this big, reckless son of Elizabethtown had ridden toward a British raid, he had cantered alone down a road into the marshes and found himself surrounded by an enemy patrol. Ignoring their demand to surrender, he had wheeled his horse and dashed for freedom. He made it—but not before a British bayonet sank deep into his chest.

Everyone assumed the wound was mortal. But the twenty-four-year-old giant had been tenderly nursed by the women of Elizabethtown—so tenderly by one of them, pretty Elizabeth Chetwood, that they had fallen in love and were now engaged.

The commander of the 4th New Jersey Regiment, Colonel Oliver Spencer, some of whose men had rallied with Dayton’s soldiers on Jelf’s Hill, joined Ogden and Dayton for a tense conference. Could the rest of the brigade join them here? Not without an exhausting march, Ogden pointed out. Moreover, even if they arrived in time, they would still be little more than 600 men, counting sergeants, corporals, and commissioned officers; 205 of the brigade’s 741 men were sick or on detached duty. Better to fall back and obey two prime military maxims: concentrate your force and seize the high ground.

The nearest high ground was in the village of Connecticut Farms, where a branch of the Elizabeth River had dug a long, narrow ravine. The two regiments with General Maxwell in Bound Brook could easily join them there.¹⁴ Colonel Dayton was not convinced. He hated to abandon Elizabethtown, where he had a handsome house to lose to British torches. But he decided to get his men off Jelf’s Hill and fall back to the edge of town, near Governor William Livingston’s mansion, Liberty Hall.

There, about an hour later, Scotch Willie himself joined him. The brigadier had already made up his mind. Defending Elizabethtown made no sense militarily. The men of the 1st and 2nd New Jersey Regiments were on the march to Connecticut Farms. He told Dayton and Spencer to join them there.

It was not an easy decision for Maxwell to make. He was abandoning Liberty Hall, the house of his good friend, Governor William Livingston, to the enemy. As Dayton’s men filed down the road toward Connecticut Farms, the crusty Scot rode into the yard of Liberty Hall and awoke the Livingston family. As usual, the governor was not at home. He had not slept in this house for several years. Maxwell suggested that Mrs. Livingston and her two daughters, Susan and Kitty, depart for the interior of the state. But they decided to stay, hoping to preserve the house from random burning and looting. Only the governor’s son, William, knowing the British fondness for carting male rebels off to New York prisons, decided he would be safer with Maxwell.¹⁵

As the young man and the old soldier rode into the night, Scotch Willie’s usually dour face was extraordinarily grim. How could 600 men make a stand against 5,000? The American army had only one hope for survival: the New Jersey militia.

Maxwell barked an order, and a horseman raced for Hobart Mountain in Springfield. On this highest hump of the Short Hills stood a wooden pyramid, some eighteen feet square at the bottom and twenty feet high, the center filled with dry brush. Beside it stood a squat mortar, affectionately known as “the Old Sow.”¹⁶

The men guarding this equipment were awakened in their nearby houses and told what to do. As soon as they saw the British and Germans emerge from the northwestern outskirts of Elizabethtown—it would be easy enough to spot the red and blue column winding through the green fields—they were to ignite the fire signal and put the Old Sow to work. But they were not to alarm the countryside until they had unmistakable proof that the British were moving inland.

General Maxwell knew his militiamen. It was a mistake to summon them unnecessarily. The next time, when the emergency was real, they would not come. Scotch Willie no doubt wondered how the militia would react to this call after a winter of having their farms stripped by Continental Army commissary officers who gave them nothing more valuable than a certificate, payable at some future date, for their cattle, grain, and forage. Even more important was the question of whether the militia would stand and fight a full-scale invasion. Would they—could they—face 5,000 trained regulars?

Under laws passed by the thirteen state governments, militia companies were supposed to meet regularly and learn the essentials of soldiering. Above all, they were supposed to practice the difficult art of loading and firing a musket swiftly. But it was hard to get politicians to pass laws that guaranteed regular performance of this training duty. Washington and his generals repeatedly begged for a New Jersey law with teeth, but Governor Livingston could never persuade the legislature to pass one.

The legislators’ timidity disgusted the acerbic Livingston. Earlier in the war, he had told his son-in-law, John Jay, that the New Jersey Assembly, “after having spent as much time in framing a militia bill as Alexander would have required to subdue Persia, will at last make such a ridiculous business of it, as not to oblige a single man to turn out who can only bring him[self] to consume three gallons of… Toddy per annum less than he does at present.” The governor was referring to the small fine the legislature imposed on the militiamen who refused to report for duty.¹⁷ Even these fines were seldom collected. The failure to pass a tough militia law was one more illustration of the precarious condition of the Revolution in New Jersey.

Largely thanks to Livingston the New Jersey militia had, on paper at least, an effective organization. When the legislature failed to pass a decent law, Livingston and his thirteen-man executive council took charge of the situation. The council met at least once a month, and in times of emergency much more often. During the first six months of 1780, it had met forty-seven times.¹⁸

In May 1780, it issued a two-page document, “Alarm Posts and Places of Rendezvous of the Militia of New Jersey,” which carefully spelled out where the regiments were to gather when an alarm sounded. The colonels north of the Raritan River were to assemble at the Short Hills. If the enemy advanced into the country, they were to “endeavour to keep on one or both flanks and as near their front as possible and to keep up a constant Fire with small Parties in different places.” If the enemy pushed toward the mountains and seemed inclined to penetrate them, the colonel in command was to possess himself of the gap they moved toward and give them all the annoyance and obstruction in his power.

Note the realistic nature of these instructions. There is no exhortation to fight the British army to a standstill or drive them into Raritan Bay. They were obviously written after consultation with that veteran student of how to use militia in concert with a regular army, the governor’s good friend General Washington.

When the British retreated from Philadelphia in 1778, Washington had put Maxwell in charge of the New Jersey militia. They had done a good job of harrying the enemy’s line of march until the pursuing Continentals caught up with them at Monmouth Court House. There, on June 28, 1778, the Continentals proved they could equal and even best the British in a toe-to-toe slugfest. But Washington’s army had numbered 13,503 officers and men at Monmouth. Now, two long, discouraging years later, it numbered 3,760.¹⁹ As Elias Dayton and Scotch Willie Maxwell fell back toward Connecticut Farms, both knew that the militia and Washington’s thin line of Continentals were about to face a supreme test.

DOWN AT Elizabethtown Point, the rest of Lieutenant General Knyphausen’s army was coming ashore in five “divisions,” each about 1,300 men. Colonel von Wurmb’s four regiments, still hesitating at the crossroads, made up the 1st Division. Major General Edward Mathew, who had led a devastatingly successful raid against Portsmouth, Virginia, in the late spring of 1779, commanded the 2nd Division. In his charge were two more veteran British regiments, the 22nd and the 57th. With them came two regiments whose troops did not wear red coats and white cross belts; their coats were green, and they fought under an American commander, William Franklin’s close friend Brigadier Cortlandt Skinner, former attorney general of New Jersey. They were the 1st and 4th New Jersey Volunteers—“Skinner’s Greens”²⁰—every man a loyalist fighting to regain property he had forfeited in the cockpit state because of his devotion to the king.

Other regiments coming ashore with Knyphausen included the 43rd, which had fought at Quebec under James Wolfe and at Bunker Hill under General William Howe, as well as a battalion each of the Scots Guards and the Coldstream Guards. These were elite troops.

General von Knyphausen arrived with the 3rd Division. He grew alarmed as the night slipped away and fully half his army was still on Staten Island. As the tide ran out, the men found themselves sinking up to their thighs in marsh mud. The engineers had to build two bridges down to the water’s edge. It soon became obvious that the 4th and 5th Divisions, mostly German troops and a regiment of British cavalry, the 17th Light Dragoons, would not get over before daybreak.²¹

The trim, stiffly erect German general had another worry on his mind. He had been reluctant to launch this expedition without orders from the British commander in chief, Sir Henry Clinton. Only strenuous persuasion from New York’s loyalists, who fanned his envy of Clinton, had persuaded him to take the gamble. At 3:00 P.M. the previous day, Clinton’s shadow had suddenly intruded on the operation—in the person of his aide-de-camp, Major William Crosbie.²²

With shaky fingers, Major William Beckwith, Knyphausen’s aide, who had been instrumental in talking him into the expedition, ripped open Sir Henry’s dispatches. As he read them, he relaxed. They contained no orders. Beckwith swiftly summarized them for Knyphausen, who neither read nor spoke a word of English. Sir Henry was telling them what they already knew: he had captured Charleston at very small cost.

Among the generals, irritation replaced alarm. As usual, Clinton was telling them nothing of his plans. Everyone turned on Crosbie, testily asking about Sir Henry’s intentions. Was he returning to New York with the Carolina army? Was he planning a strike into the Chesapeake? What sort of summer campaign did he have in mind?

Major Crosbie was nonplused. He was on the stickiest wicket that any aide-de-camp ever encountered in the history of warfare. Sir Henry had indeed told him his plans—but enjoined him to strictest secrecy. Crosbie would give Knyphausen only “hints.”²³

In fact, Sir Henry had a very good plan for ending the war within a few days after his return from Charleston. Clinton was a gifted military planner and thinker. If the British had taken his advice at Bunker Hill, the Revolution might have ended on June 17, 1775. He had suggested to Sir William Howe the flanking movement that enabled the British to thrash Washington at the battle of Brooklyn on August 27, 1776. In 1777, Sir Henry had urged Howe not to abandon General John Burgoyne and his army in northern New York, advice that, if followed, would have averted disaster and might have turned those three sevens into gibbets as loyalist believers in the Year of the Hangman hoped.

In his memoirs of the war, Clinton revealed the plan the agonized Crosbie had in his head. The moment the fleet from Charleston arrived at Sandy Hook—it was already en route—Clinton intended to land the 4,000 men he had with him at Perth Amboy. Knyphausen was to land at Elizabethtown Point with 6,000 men. “The two corps,” Clinton wrote, “marching immediately in concert… might have a fair chance of reducing the enemy’s general to the hazardous dilemma of either moving out against one or the other, or exposing himself to the united attacks of both by staying in his camp.”

The Americans would have faced two armies, each stronger than their half-starved, desertion-riddled brigades. Moreover, the geography of New Jersey improved Clinton’s plan’s likelihood of success. From Amboy the road to Morristown ran through Mordecai’s Gap, an opening in the mountains at least as large and inviting as Hobart Gap. The chances were very good that Clinton could seize one or both of these doorways and descend on Morristown, where the American army’s artillery and stores sat marooned because General Washington had neither horses nor the forage to feed them.

Fortunately for the Americans, Sir Henry Clinton had a fatal flaw as a general: a pathological, neurotic suspicion of his fellow generals. This was why he seldom committed a plan to writing. If anything went wrong, he would bear responsibility for the failure. So he preferred oral plans and orders that he called “hints.”

This policy now left Crosbie in an impossible position. He had been told to reveal the plan only to those he thought “proper.”²⁴ But he had no time to sort out the numerous generals now demanding to know the truth. Crosbie floundered and flapped and finally blurted out something vague. From it Knyphausen and company gathered that Sir Henry was going to raid the Chesapeake, leaving them on their own in New Jersey. The relieved Knyphausen invited Crosbie to join the expedition. Before the night was over, Crosbie found himself splashing through the marshes on Staten Island to board a New Jersey–bound flatboat.²⁵

MEANWHILE, COLONEL von Wurmb and the men of the 1st Division were moving through the silent, empty streets of Elizabethtown toward its northwestern outskirts. They passed the charred hulks of the courthouse and the Presbyterian church, burnt by earlier raiders, and swung west across a stone bridge over the narrow, muddy Elizabeth River. There they headed north on Galloping Hill Road toward Connecticut Farms.

At about 6:00 A.M. the head of the column approached Liberty Hall, Governor Livingston’s mansion. Alone before the front door stood a solitary figure in white, the governor’s daughter Susan. Colonel von Wurmb, who had a reputation for being as gallant in love as he was courageous in battle, cantered up the driveway to doff his hat and exchange a few words with her. She begged him not to destroy Liberty Hall. Von Wurmb was an easy target for Susan’s tear-filled eyes and plaintive voice. He not only vowed he had no intention of burning the house but said he would post a guard at the door to make sure no one looted it.

Colonel von Wurmb asked Susan if she could give him a small token of her esteem. She pointed to a trellis of bright red “blaze roses” beside the porch. The German colonel plucked one of these flowers, which still bloom in profusion in New Jersey, and put it in his hat. Softly, Susan told him she could not, as a good American, wish him victory, but she hoped that the flower would protect him from the bullets.²⁶

Ahead of von Wurmb as he resumed the advance was a well-tilled countryside that more than justified New Jersey’s nickname, the Garden of America. Flax and oats were eight inches high in the fields. Every farm had at least one sizable orchard of apple or cherry trees. Beside them were green and glowing stretches of lush pasture. Many of the farmhouses were built of red brick, testifying to the wealth derived from this fruitful soil.²⁷

Sunlight filled the balmy June morning. Birds called sleepily from the fruit trees. The fertile fields stood empty and still. But not for long. A musket cracked, and a soldier stumbled out of Colonel von Wurmb’s column, clutching his arm. A barefoot figure in loose, flapping clothes sprang from behind a haystack in a nearby pasture and bolted for the horizon. Cursing, the colonel ordered the flank companies of the 37th and 38th Regiments into the fields on either side of the column. One of the loyalist American guides trudging beside von Wurmb pointed up the road, where more figures in loose homespun were running toward an orchard. Before von Wurmb could decide what to do about them, a great echoing boom drifted across the green countryside. It was the Old Sow on Hobart Mountain, sounding the alarm and signaling the militia to report for duty.

Twice more the big mortar boomed. A moment later von Wurmb saw a huge blaze begin to glow on the mountaintop. The loyalist guide pointed to the northwest. There, atop the angular ridge known as Newark Mountain, another stupendous blaze leapt skyward. Yet another sprang up to the south, in the neighborhood of Mordecai’s Gap. Colonel von Wurmb must have wondered where General von Knyphausen got the idea that these Americans were ready to surrender.²⁸

IN MORRISTOWN, the American army came to life with alacrity. George Washington had been writing a letter to his younger brother, Jack, when Colonel Dayton’s message arrived sometime after midnight. He was advising Jack not to sell his land because the country’s paper money was worthless. He condemned Congress, speculators, and the “disaffected” (loyalists) as contributors to this malaise.²⁹ The news of the British invasion put an abrupt end to the general’s diatribe. He shrugged on his dark blue coat with its buff lapels and plain gilt buttons and began giving orders.

Alexander Hamilton and other aides tumbled from their beds. Drums rolled to awaken the 156 men of the Life Guards, who protected the commander in chief. In a moment the officer of the day and his staff were racing to Jockey Hollow, three miles away, where the army was encamped. Soon regimental drummers were thumping an early reveille. By 4:00 A.M. marching orders were written. Two days’ provisions were issued with orders to cook them immediately.³⁰ Each man got forty rounds of ammunition—twenty fewer than the British allowance. But Americans were trained to aim and fire more carefully.

Aides feverishly scratched out letters. One of the first went to a man who shared Scotch Willie Maxwell’s talent for leading militia: Major General William Alexander, better known as Lord Stirling, thanks to his claim to a Scottish title. Washington’s letter made clear that he too understood how to use militia. He told Stirling he did not yet know whether this was a foraging raid or an attempt to assault “our camp.” In either case, the major general was to “collect the militia to give them all the opposition in our power.” He told Stirling to sound the alarm as extensively as he could in his vicinity and to march the men he gathered to skirmish on the British left flank. Other letters went to commanders of Continental detachments in Paramus and elsewhere, ordering them to gather militia and march them to the battle zone, along with their regulars.

On his well-tilled farm in Morris County, Sylvanus Seeley, colonel of the eastern Morris County militia regiment, saddled his mare and rode for the rendezvous assigned to them, the town of Chatham, at the western foot of the Short Hills.³¹ Frederick Freylinghuysen of nearby Somerset County started rounding up his regiment. In the little village of Lyons Farms, schoolmaster Darling Beach was preparing his morning lessons when he heard the alarm guns. He tacked a scribbled note, “School closed for the day,” on the door of his schoolhouse and joined a half dozen other men racing for Elizabethtown.³²

From Newark came another group of militiamen eager to avenge themselves for numerous British raids in the winter of 1780. They were led by Major Samuel Hayes, whom the militia called “Old Bark Knife.” In their ranks was a husky black man, known only as Cudjo, formerly owned by a Newarker named Coe. Cudjo had entered the militia as a substitute for his master. He had fought so well at the battle of Monmouth that Coe gave him his freedom and an acre of farmland.

Inside Elizabethtown, the guns awakened other young men who were equally eager to fight. One of these was Jonathan Crane, the twenty-six-year-old son of Mayor Stephen Crane. His older brother William was a major in the New Jersey brigade. He had been badly wounded in the assault on Quebec in 1775.³³

An unlikely combatant was Captain Nathaniel FitzRandolph of Woodbridge. He had just been released from a British prison where the sadistic provost marshal, William Cunningham, had starved and beaten him. Despite his physical weakness, FitzRandolph mustered his company and marched toward the sound of the guns.³⁴

Elsewhere in Morris County, eighteen-year-old Ashbel Green seized his musket and rushed to the muster site. Although his father was a minister of the gospel, Green was wholly converted to the martial spirit. In the months before his sixteenth birthday, when he would be able to join his local militia company, he had spent hours drilling with a wooden gun.

About sixty militiamen gathered in an orchard up the Galloping Hill Road from Governor Livingston’s mansion. These were the men Colonel von Wurmb spotted as he returned from his tête-à-tête with Susan Livingston. Among them was Jonathan Crane, the mayor’s son. His house was only a few hundred yards away on the outskirts of Elizabethtown.

Muskets boomed in the morning sunshine, and deadly one-ounce balls whined through the summery air. Several militia bullets hit home. Red-coated figures toppled and lay still in the wet grass. Others stumbled to the rear, clutching shattered arms or legs. Not many men could stay in a fight after being hit by a musket bullet. But the rest of the light infantry companies kept coming, firing as they advanced.

As soon as their commanding officer saw they were fighting militia, he bellowed, “Fix bayonets.” With a flash of burnished steel the sixteen-inch blades clicked into position on the sockets at the end of the forty-four-inch musket barrels. “Charge!” roared the captain.

Howling ferociously, the light infantrymen raced across the grass toward the orchard. Most of the militiamen ran for their lives. The British yell was as terrifying in its own way as an Indian war whoop. A few who had reloaded their muskets stayed to fire one more shot and then ran. A handful stood their ground. One of these was Jonathan Crane. As he frantically tried to reload for a third shot, a light infantryman sank his bayonet to the hilt into his chest. Two or three other militiamen died in the same swift, brutal way. If anyone tried to surrender, he met the same fate. At this point in the war, the British loathed militiamen far more than Continentals. The amateurs’ fondness for sneak attacks and ambushes led the Royal Army to classify them as murderers.

The column resumed its march, with the flank companies sweeping the fields on both sides. In another quarter mile the British encountered New Jersey’s Continentals. There were no more heroics of the sort that had ended in tragedy for Jonathan Crane and his militia company. The Continentals would fire a volley and immediately break and run for the next natural obstacle—an orchard or thicket or thorny hedge. The regulars knew how to manage a fighting retreat. A few men always held their fire when they fell back. They waited behind trees and fences while their friends ran past them. While the others reloaded, the first group blazed away at the oncoming redcoats.

But the red and blue column, its flankers spread through the fields ahead of it like the antennae of a huge insect, came steadily forward. The green slopes of the Short Hills grew closer. Just beyond them was Hobart Gap, the door to Morristown.

IN THE village of Connecticut Farms, Scotch Willie Maxwell and the New Jersey brigade prepared for action. Halfway between the Short Hills and Elizabethtown, “the Farms,” as it was called, was a pleasant place of about twenty-five houses scattered among pastures and orchards for over two miles on both sides of Galloping Hill Road. At the eastern border of the town was a ravine full of bushes and thickets. Scotch Willie posted some of his regulars in the center of this “defile,” as he called it, and stationed militiamen on their flanks.³⁵

While the fighting men checked their flints and cartridges, most of the Farms’ civilians piled belongings into wagons and prepared to flee. Among these fugitives was the Reverend James Caldwell. As the “Rebel High Priest” of New Jersey, famed for his defiant sermons, he was near the top of the British wanted list. But he could not persuade his wife, Hannah, to join him. A cousin of the Ogdens in the New Jersey brigade and a fervent patriot, she insisted on staying, à la Susan Livingston, to prevent the British from burning their house. She had recently given birth to a child and feared that hours in a jouncing wagon might dry up her milk.³⁶ She assured her husband that God would protect her.

Unable to argue against such determination and faith, Caldwell left her and their younger children behind and rode west to rally the militia in Morris County.³⁷ As he departed, the firing on Galloping Hill Road grew closer. Soon the panting Continentals and militia who had been fighting the delaying action joined the men waiting in the ravine. It was about 8:00 A.M. Militiamen coming from the west side of the Short Hills reported that Washington’s army had not yet left Morristown. That meant they could not reach the battlefield before noon. If they were going to stop the British short of Hobart Gap, it was up to the New Jersey Continentals and militia to do the job.³⁸

The American position had one alarming defect. The Vauxhall Road forked from Galloping Hill Road and looped around the left flank of the American position, exposing the defenders to encirclement. Maxwell detached several companies to block this route. Meanwhile he assigned Major Aaron Ogden to work with the militia to harass the enemy’s flanks along the Galloping Hill Road. The mixture of woods and orchards in the village gave them better cover than they had had in the open country beyond Elizabethtown.

More than a few militiamen dodged into empty houses and began firing from their windows. The British blasted back, and soon flying lead and shattered glass filled the air. A bullet struck one of the few civilians who stayed behind, a man named Ball, in the head as he watched the British come up the road. A few minutes later, the two British and two German regiments opened ranks and went up the hill to the defile in battle formation. There, Colonel von Wurmb sent his flankers and his two Jaeger companies swarming into the defile.³⁹

A ferocious firefight erupted, swaying back and forth in the ravine, which soon became shrouded in gun smoke. In the eighteenth century, these shifts in momentum were called “drives.” As attackers saw comrades falling around them, they tended to run out of steam. Similarly, defenders would melt toward the rear when their casualties rose. The action really consisted of a series of small combats between companies and platoons and even individuals.

For the next three hours the battle raged back and forth, with von Wurmb feeding in more and more men. He apparently thought he was only fighting militia and that applying pressure would eventually clear the road. It seems never to have occurred to him to send a regiment driving up the Vauxhall Road to threaten Maxwell’s rear. Soon the whole four-hundred-man Jaeger corps had reached the scene, and von Wurmb fed them into the fight.

Toward the end of the morning, the Americans surged forward, militia and Continentals blending, to drive the British and Germans out of the ravine and back down Galloping Hill Road, where they met General Mathew and the 2nd Division of the army. In a few minutes the king’s men surged forward again. This time Mathew led a flank attack up the Vauxhall Road, while the rest poured into the ravine. Soon their numbers and momentum had cleared this obstacle course of Americans. Among the dead left by the Jerseymen was young Moses Ogden, the ensign whose men had blasted General Stirling off his horse and wrecked the British timetable.

Now the Americans turned the rest of Connecticut Farms into a battleground, fighting from house to house. But the pressure from the oncoming British was soon impossible to withstand. The 3rd Division, containing the elite British Guards, arrived to join the fight, along with several German regiments. They were in a nasty mood. One of the German officers later wrote that they had had “two engagements” en route to Connecticut Farms. The militia were swarming up from Rahway River and down from Newark to harass their line of march.

The marchers would have had a much easier time of it if the 17th Dragoons had been with them. But the British quartermaster department did not get the horses across the water to the frustrated cavalrymen until 2:00 P.M.⁴⁰ Meanwhile the Americans slowly retreated to the western end of Connecticut Farms. There, Maxwell decided he now had enough militiamen—they were pouring in from western New Jersey—to counterattack. “The whole brigade,” he later reported, “with the militia advanced to their right left and front with the greatest rapidity and drove their advance to the main body.”⁴¹

But Knyphausen, knowing he still had numbers and training in his favor, declined to panic. He threw the Jaegers into the American center, and as the rebels recoiled—their advance had been slower than that of the men on the flanks—the Jaeger flank companies wheeled and poured a deadly blast of bullets into the American right, while two light infantry and two grenadier companies joined the attack in the center.⁴²

Now it was the Americans’ turn to be driven. Perhaps at this moment Captain Isaac Reeves of the Essex County militia went down with a bullet in his chest. His grieving men carried him out of the fight and over the Short Hills to Chatham, hoping to find a Continental Army doctor there. They arrived in the town just as General George Washington and his staff cantered down the main street. Washington spoke to the wounded man and ordered an army doctor to take care of him. But in a few hours he was dead.⁴³

Many other Americans died in this British counterattack. But the militia used the heavily wooded hills around Connecticut Farms to filter back into the fight and snipe from behind houses and barns. By the time the fighting swirled around Hannah Caldwell’s home, it had rubbed British nerves raw. Every house represented a potential ambush. The king’s men had to check and clear each one as they fought past it to make sure no one would shoot them in the back.

Hannah Caldwell retreated to the rear of her house into a room with stone walls on three sides and only a single window. She realized there was a very good chance of musket bullets from either side flying wild. As she sat on the bed, her three-year-old son ran to the window to see the excitement. So did his nurse, a young girl named Abigail Lemmington.

Mrs. Caldwell urged both to get away from the window. Retreating, Abigail saw a short, squat soldier come around the back of the house and move toward the window. The light infantryman with two bullets in his musket probably caught a glimpse of Abigail as she moved away from the window. In the bright sunlight, he saw only a shadow. He didn’t need to see more. He pulled his trigger, and the two bullets crashed through the window and struck Hannah Caldwell. She fell back on the bed, dead.

The rest of the British squad rushed the front door. They came thundering through the house, bayonets ready. It was army policy to kill anyone caught sniping from ambush. They found only a wailing Abigail Lemmington, sobbing children, and Hannah Caldwell’s bleeding corpse. That did not stop them from looting and smashing up the place.⁴⁴

By this time the main battle line had reached the western edge of Connecticut Farms. Not far beyond it was a bridge over the Rahway River and the village of Springfield, which lay at the eastern base of the Short Hills. Second Lieutenant Samuel Seeley of the 1st New Jersey Regiment rallied his company to make a stand at the bridge. He stood erect, calmly pointing out targets among the oncoming Germans and British. A musket ball hit him in the shoulder. Blood soon soaked his shirt, but he refused to retreat. He continued to exhort his men to defend the bridge.⁴⁵

The sheer weight of the British advance pressed the Americans back to the banks of the Rahway. Fearful of a rout, Maxwell ordered a retreat to the west side of the river. Lieutenant Seeley and his men were among the last to obey the order. It left the British in possession of Connecticut Farms—but still a long way from Hobart Gap.

Knyphausen’s men had already paid a heavy price. The Jaegers alone had lost fifty-nine men, over 10 percent of their regiment.⁴⁶ Americans reported eighteen wagons on the road to Elizabethtown, filled with groaning wounded and silent dead. Knyphausen let his men take savage revenge on the Farms. They looted and smashed up every house, sparing not a window. They cut down no less than four hundred apple trees in one orchard and burned every house and the Presbyterian church.

The sight of the town in flames enraged the Americans on the other side of the Rahway River. Many swarmed across the bridge and began another round of savage skirmishing with Knyphausen’s advance units. Scotch Willie Maxwell let them go. Even if they got chased back across the bridge, he now had something to fall back on. A messenger had just informed him that the Continental Army was in Chatham, and the Pennsylvania and Connecticut brigades were in possession of Hobart Gap. Up and down the American line went the word: “Washington is here.” It gave the mostly militia skirmishers fresh nerve and energy.⁴⁷

As the day dwindled, Knyphausen showed no interest in fighting his way across the Rahway. He seemed content to fend off the skirmishers and reduce Connecticut Farms to rubble. One reason was the exhaustion of many of his troops. Fully half of them had been up all night and had spent a long, hot day marching and fighting. The Americans were almost as worn out. Schoolmaster Darling Beach collapsed from heat stroke and had to be carried home unconscious to his distraught parents.⁴⁸

Washington was soon conferring with Maxwell on the west side of the Rahway. The burning of Connecticut Farms angered him also. To support the militia, he sent his Life Guards,⁴⁹ picked troops, all over six feet, into action with them. They attacked the battered Jaegers just before sunset and sent them stumbling back to the main army. Knyphausen decided to retreat to high ground two and a half miles northwest of Connecticut Farms and give his men a night’s rest. The militia continued to snipe at his picket guards until darkness fell.

Meanwhile, at a house owned by a man named Whitehead, Washington conferred with Maxwell and other generals. The American commander was worried. The militia and the New Jersey Continentals had fought the British and Germans to a standstill. But what about tomorrow? If willing to pay the price, Knyphausen had the manpower to batter his way through Hobart Gap. Even more grim was the possibility that the German general was acting under orders from Sir Henry Clinton, who might well arrive from Charleston tomorrow morning with his victorious army. This would give the British overwhelming numbers of regulars.

Unaware of the jealousy and noncommunication rampant in the British high command, Washington could only assume that Knyphausen would never have made such a daring move without explicit orders from Clinton. All of this added up, in Washington’s mind, to a violent conclusion. The Americans had to attack Knyphausen at midnight and destroy him.⁵⁰ All the American generals at the table enthusiastically agreed with this decision. Orders went out to the infantry regiments and artillery. Militia regiments such as Sylvanus Seeley’s were to take up blocking positions.

On the other side of the river, General von Knyphausen was having a very tense conference with Major William Crosbie. After a day of watching the Continentals and militia demonstrate they had no overwhelming wish to desert or surrender, Major Crosbie had an attack of second thoughts about revealing Sir Henry Clinton’s plans.

If Knyphausen resumed his advance tomorrow, he was certain to bring on a general engagement with Washington’s entrenched army. The result might be another Bunker Hill. If so, Major Crosbie’s head would be figuratively, perhaps even literally, on the block. In a voice that no doubt strangled now and then, Crosbie revealed that Sir Henry was returning to New York with a different plan for invading New Jersey in his pocket.

Momentarily speechless, Knyphausen and everyone else in the British high command stood there, listening to the bark of muskets as their pickets exchanged fire with militiamen who still filtered through the woods to get in one last shot before darkness fell. There was no longer any reason to spend the night on this hill like sitting ducks. Why not retreat immediately?⁵¹

The strictest security was observed. Regiments were told to fall in and march one by one, lessening the chance of a deserter leaking the withdrawal to the Americans. It was, in the words of one lieutenant, “exceedingly dark.” There was no moon, and thick clouds obscured the stars. A hot wind sighed through the trees, muffling the sound of marching feet. One grenadier company of the Guards marched away, and the company next to it did not know for fifteen minutes it had gone.

Officers sent men to the pickets to make sure they joined the retreat. One squad, led by the lieutenant who disliked the pitch-black night, came back to discover the entire British army had vanished. While he hesitated, trying to decide what to do, a tremendous crash of thunder shook the ground, followed by a stupendous flash of lightning. Rain came down as if someone had opened a sluice in the sky. The agitated lieutenant and his men ran through the downpour like bewildered chickens, first north, then south. Still no army. Finally another lightning flash revealed the horses and cannons of the artillery.

But the army’s ordeal was just beginning. The storm was one of the most violent anyone in the British army had ever seen in America. Terrified horses bolted off the road. General von Knyphausen’s steed reared and flung the German commander into the mud on his back. Several times, the lightning was so bright, General Mathew said, “the whole army halted, being deprived of sight for a time.”

At Liberty Hall, the crash of glass and the crunch of wood awakened Mrs. Livingston and her daughters. About ten drenched stragglers, drunk on army rum, burst into the front hall shouting, “Let’s burn the Rebel house.” The maid locked herself in the kitchen, and the three women bolted an upstairs bedroom door. One of the soldiers began battering it with his shoulder. Susan Livingston took a lamp, coolly flung open the door, and walked into the hail. The drunken man tried to grab her arm. She sidestepped, seized him by the collar, and sent him sprawling.

The drunken intruder looked up at her. Thunder still shook the house; lightning continued to streak the sky. “Gawd it’s Mrs. Caldwell that we killed today!” he screamed. He fled downstairs. The courageous young woman followed him. She found a familiar face among his lurching companions, a loyalist who was an ex-Elizabethtown neighbor. She shamed him into ordering the rest of the men out of the house.⁵²

At about 1:00 A.M. the last of the Royal Army trudged through Elizabethtown in the downpour and settled in soggy misery on Elizabethtown Point. There were no tents for the enlisted men, and few officers could find the baggage wagons that contained shelters for them. It was a sorry ending to what was to have been a glorious day.⁵³

In the American camp, the thunderstorm caused intense frustration. It rendered an attack impossible. Eighteenth-century soldiers could not fire their muskets in the rain. Water dampened the powder in their priming pans and left them clicking fecklessly. A bayonet attack was out of the question because most militiamen did not have the weapon on their muskets. The downpour also made it all too probable that many of the militia would go home.

To Washington’s relief, at daybreak scouts informed him that the enemy had vanished. A patrol captured a British soldier named Jeremiah Sullivan who had decided to forgo marching back to Staten Island. Later in the morning scouts reported the enemy were camped on Elizabethtown Point. The scouts estimated the number to be five hundred. Knyphausen was apparently trying to maintain a bridgehead in New Jersey. Washington immediately decided to attack it.

He gave Brigadier General Edward Hand of Pennsylvania three regiments of regulars and two brigades of militia, a total of about 2,500 men. He put Major General William Alexander—Lord Stirling—in overall command. The attack began with a small, deceptive victory. Hand’s regulars captured a British picket, an officer and sixteen men of the 22nd Regiment, guarding the road from Elizabethtown. But Samuel Seeley’s militia brigade encountered a hail of artillery fire as it advanced across swampy open ground toward the British camp. Hand rode to the front of his brigade and realized they were about to assault Knyphausen’s entire army.

Hand’s expedition was in serious danger of annihilation. He rushed word to Seeley to take a defensive position in some nearby woods and boldly paraded his Continentals across the front of the British lines as if daring them to come out and fight. This convinced the British he was trying to lure them into a trap. They were sure Washington’s entire army, plus uncounted militia, awaited them in the streets of Elizabethtown.

Coolly, Hand ordered his regulars to retire and withdrew the two militia brigades in the same deliberate fashion.⁵⁴ It was a prime example of the importance of combining a regular’s professionalism with the militia’s ardor. Without him, the militiamen might have flung themselves at the British and been slaughtered.

Back in Elizabethtown, Hand regrouped and sent a swarm of skirmishers forward to harass the British from all sides. The British 22nd Regiment, which had advanced on the road to town, was soon in so much trouble it had to call on two German regiments for help. The Germans were soon in almost as much difficulty. One of their lieutenants reported “many wounded, killed and taken prisoners.” There was “an astonishing number of Rebels, nearly all in bushes.”⁵⁵

When Washington learned Knyphausen’s whole army was still on Elizabethtown Point, he rushed a letter to Lord Stirling with new orders. He was to stay on a strict defensive. Only if Knyphausen began to withdraw to Staten Island should Stirling consider an attack on his rear guard. The last thing Washington wanted was an all-out battle with Knyphausen in the open fields on Elizabethtown Point, where British superiority in artillery and bayonets could have “serious consequences.”

Washington was in Connecticut Farms with most of the regulars. There he watched a weeping James Caldwell kneel beside his wife’s body. That afternoon, after a brief service, friends, neighbors, and Continental officers walked beside the grieving minister to the open grave in the Connecticut Farms churchyard. The burnt-out ruins of the church were a more graphic sermon than anyone could have preached. After the funeral, James Caldwell took his two youngest children over the Short Hills to Chatham to leave them with his dead wife’s sister. Then he rode away to spread the news of her murder throughout New Jersey.⁵⁶