The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77

The winter of 1776 was the American Revolution's darkest hour. Washington's army, beaten and demoralized, streamed across New Jersey in retreat while the Continental Congress fled Philadelphia. British General Cornwallis had the Continentals cornered, their cause seemingly finished. Then came the impossible: a Christmas night crossing of the Delaware River, a desperate march through snow and darkness, and a dawn assault on Hessian mercenaries sleeping off their holiday wine in Trenton. Samuel Adams Drake's 1874 account captures this reversal with the granular detail only a nineteenth-century historian could muster, drawing on letters, orders, and firsthand accounts now lost to time. The book follows Washington from the depths of despair at Mount Holly through the audacious gambit at Trenton and the follow-up victory at Princeton that restored American hope. Drake paints the human drama: frozen feet, ammunition running low, officers questioning their commander's judgment, and the sheer audacity that transformed a defeated rabble into an army that believed it could win. This is military history written before the antiseptic distance of modern scholarship, still carrying the conviction that what happened at Trenton mattered enormously.