Eight days after the victory at Trenton, Washington faced a larger British force under Lord Cornwallis closing in to retake the town. On the night of January 2, 1777, Washington left his campfires burning, slipped his army around Cornwallis's flank in darkness, and marched on the lightly defended British garrison at Princeton. The resulting battle cost the Americans one of their most respected general officers, but it drove British forces out of most of New Jersey and capped a ten-day campaign that transformed the war's momentum. Washington's own letter reporting the action to Congress, written from Morristown on January 5, survives in full at Founders Online.
Cornwallis arrived at Trenton on the afternoon of January 2 with a larger British force, intending to crush Washington's army against the Delaware River the next morning. Washington's situation, as he described it directly to Congress, left him with few good options.
Their large Picquets advanced towards Trenton, their great preparations & some intelligence I had received, added to their knowledge, that the first of January brought on a dissolution of the best part of our Army, gave me the strongest reasons to conclude, that an attack upon us was meditating. Our situation was most critical and our force small.
Rather than retreat or fight where he stood, Washington left his campfires burning to deceive British sentries, and marched his army on a back road around Cornwallis's flank under cover of darkness. The plan, in Washington's own description, was to avoid the appearance of a retreat while drawing British forces away from Trenton and giving some reputation to American arms.
Washington's army reached the outskirts of Princeton around sunrise, running roughly two hours behind schedule. Washington detached Brigadier General Hugh Mercer with about 350 men to destroy a bridge and cover the army's rear, while the main force under General Sullivan continued toward the town. Mercer's small force unexpectedly encountered British regiments under Lieutenant Colonel Charles Mawhood marching the opposite direction. In the fighting that followed, Mercer's troops, armed largely with rifles unsuited to bayonet combat, were overrun. Mercer himself was surrounded and, according to multiple accounts, mistaken by British soldiers for Washington.
Mercer refused to surrender and was bayoneted multiple times. He was carried to the nearby Thomas Clarke House, where physician Benjamin Rush attended him for nine days before he died on January 12. Washington reported Mercer's death to Congress as the most significant loss of an otherwise successful action.
This peice of good fortune is counterballanced by the loss of the brave and worthy Genl Mercer.
As Mercer's men broke, Washington personally rode forward to rally the retreating troops and reorganize the attack, an action later commemorated in period paintings. The main American force then overwhelmed the smaller British garrison. Washington's letter to Hancock gives his own count of the result.
These three Regiments, especially the Two first, made a gallant resistance and in killed wounded and Prisoners must have lost 500 Men, upwards of One hundred of them were left dead in the Feild, and with what I have with me & what were taken in the pursuit & carried across the Delaware, there are near 300 prisoners 14 of which are Officers, all British.
With Cornwallis's army maneuvering to cut off his retreat, Washington withdrew his exhausted troops to winter quarters at Morristown rather than press the advantage further. The British, alarmed by the loss of Princeton and the threat to their supply lines back to New York, abandoned most of their forward positions in New Jersey. The campaign that had begun with Washington's army on the edge of collapse in late December ended ten days later with New Jersey largely cleared of British forces and a wave of new enlistments answering the news of two consecutive victories.
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