Victory or Death: The Battles of Trenton and Princeton, December 25, 1776—January 3, 1777

By Mark Maloy

An overview of the military actions and battlefields of three consecutive engagements during the “ten crucial days” of the American Revolution.

December 1776: Just six months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, George Washington and the new American Army sit on the verge of utter destruction by the banks of the Delaware River. The despondent and demoralized group of men had endured repeated defeats and now were on the edge of giving up hope. Washington feared “the game is pretty near up.”

Rather than submit to defeat, Washington and his small band of soldiers crossed the ice-choked Delaware River and attacked the Hessian garrison at Trenton, New Jersey, on the day after Christmas. He followed up the surprise attack with successful actions along the Assunpink Creek and at Princeton. In a stunning military campaign, Washington had turned the tables, and breathed life into the dying cause for liberty during the Revolutionary War.

The campaign has led many historians to deem it as one of the most significant military campaigns in American history. One British historian even declared that “it may be doubted whether so small a number of men ever employed so short a space of time with greater or more lasting results upon the history of the world.”

In Victory or Death, historian Mark Maloy not only recounts these epic events, he also takes you along to the places where they occurred. He shows where Washington stood on the banks of the Delaware and contemplated defeat, the city streets that his exhausted men charged through, and the open fields where Washington himself rode into the thick of battle. Victory or Death is a must for anyone interested in learning how George Washington and his brave soldiers grasped victory from the jaws of defeat.

“Maloy faithfully recreates the patriotic story of Washington’s crossing and brings the events of this period to life. The inclusion of the travel guide with turn-by-turn directions and photographs of what the places look like today makes the story more tangible and gives readers the ability to follow and walk in the footsteps of the Continental Army.” —Michael Britt, ON POINT Magazine

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781611213829

Book preview

The Darkest Hour

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The year 1776 is over, I am heartily glad of it and hope you nor America will ever be plagued with such another.

—Robert Morris to George Washington, January 1, 1777

The American Revolution holds a treasured place in the hearts of many Americans. The omnipresent images of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are everywhere in our lives. Their confident and wise eyes gaze down on us from statues in our courthouses, from portraits in our schools, and from the currency we carry in our pockets. They are lauded and feted as geniuses who devised a system based on the principles of liberty and equality. As such, the Founding Fathers have become demigods in wigs rather than real men who lived in an extraordinary time.

Despite the constant reminders of the Revolution in our lives today, the war, the bloodshed, the sacrifice and the fragility of the American cause in those years has mostly been forgotten. The American Revolution is thought of as an inevitable, divinely inspired event whose outcome was the result of larger forces at work and the war only merely one aspect of it. The actors of this drama are boring, old, white men in powdered wigs and stockings, appearing more likely to sit down for tea than shed blood on a battlefield.

In actuality, the war was an extremely bloody and trying struggle fought by young men, and it nearly ended in disaster. All across the country, the war ripped families apart—over the course of eight years, tens of thousands of young men fought and died, often in brutal and bloody ways. A war that started as a rebellion of American colonists escalated ultimately into a world war that engulfed most of Western Europe.

This painting by John Trumbull depicts the draft of the Declaration of Independence being presented to the Continental Congress on June 28, 1776. (yuag)

In addition to being a brutal conflict, the fragility of the movement is truly fascinating. It is very difficult to imagine how close the colonists came to defeat. By looking at the events as the participants viewed them in the moment, though, you can get a better understanding of how truly amazing and unlikely was their ultimate victory.

No place saw that fragility more than Trenton and Princeton, two small New Jersey towns in 1776 that would witness some of the most remarkable events in the entire Revolutionary War. Today, Trenton and Princeton are more likely to conjure up images of a poverty-stricken city and a college town, respectively, than battlefields of the Revolutionary War. On city streets and in small fields, the ground where men fought and died for American liberty is often traversed by people with little understanding of how hallowed is the ground they tread and how central were these places to the establishment of the American republic.

What more people will likely recognize and remember is the famous painting Washington Crossing the Delaware, by Emanuel Leutze (1851), which portrays an event that occurred just before the fighting at Trenton and Princeton in 1776. Without any context, people may view the painting as just another grand tribute to the dowdy Founding Fathers. But if they understand the crucial nature of the moment and the events that followed, they can begin to understand why Americans have lionized George Washington ever since. The painting becomes an homage not just to Washington but to American courage, valor, and perseverance. Just before that river was crossed, the very existence of a United States of America stood on the precipice.

No moment in American history has ever been darker than December 1776. Never had the independence of the United States come so close to collapse; never had Washington and his fellow generals in the Continental Army been closer to capture and execution; never had so much relied on so few men who tried to change the course of history.

In order to properly describe how dismal the country’s situation was in December of 1776, we must first look at how Washington and his army got in this situation. Ironically, just six months earlier in July of 1776, the spirit of independence and revolution had never been brighter. That spring, Gen. George Washington, commander in chief of the new Continental Army, and his army of patriots in New England had forced British General William Howe, commander of all British forces in North America, to leave the city of Boston with his army of nearly 9,000 soldiers. It was an unexpected victory for the Americans, and it catapulted Gen. Washington into the international