What happened
The week began with a failure nobody remembers. On the night Washington crossed the Delaware, two other crossings were planned to the south and "the two planned crossings to the south were complete failures." Cadwalader moved his division out of Bristol toward Neshaminy Ferry, "Major Nicholas' Marines accompanied the militia," and the river was choked with ice.
They shifted downstream to Dunk's Ferry and got part of the force over. A rifle battalion crossed and landed "with great difficulty, having traversed about 150 yards of ice before reaching the river bank," then two battalions of Philadelphia Associators followed.
As the last of them landed the storm rose, the ice thickened, and Cadwalader would not risk his artillery on it. He ordered everyone back to the Pennsylvania side.
The Marines therefore spent the victory at Trenton on the wrong bank. Washington won without them, recrossed, and the British came for him.
The retaliation was a force of 8,000. At dawn on New Year's Day Major General Grant moved a brigade, dragoons and Hessian grenadiers out of Brunswick, and six hours later his vanguard entered Princeton.
That evening Cornwallis arrived from New York, called his officers together, and announced he would march on Trenton the following morning. Everything that happened at the bridge the next afternoon was set in motion by that meeting, and nobody on the American side was in it.
Cadwalader's men marched at one in the morning on 2 January. The roads were muddy and the march tedious, and by sunrise the bulk of the force had reached Trenton. Quarters were assigned and a meal was started.
Then the call to arms sounded. The brigades assembled without delay and moved to prepared positions on the southern bank of Assunpink Creek, with Mercer's brigade about two miles up at Phillip's Ford and Cadwalader's command below him.
The fight came to the bridge in stages, and each stage was decided faster than a commander could see it. Washington sent Hitchcock's brigade across the creek to cover a retreat, and Hitchcock's men were hit in front by Hessian grenadiers and on the right by British light infantry, broke ranks, and "raced back to the bridge."
While the New Englanders were still spilling across, Washington saw British light infantry moving toward the creek below the bridge as if to cross there. He ordered Hitchcock's brigade reassembled and sent down to meet them, and before that could matter, "American artillery intervened and drove the enemy infantry back."
That is when the grenadiers came at the bridge itself. "The Hessian grenadiers then attempted to force the bridge and Cadwalader's light troops, Nicholas' Marines among them, were ordered 'to fly to the support of that important post.' Again the enemy was repulsed."
The artillery duel ran on until mid-evening and both camps settled for an uneasy night. Two miles northeast, Cornwallis decided to make his main attack at Phillip's Ford in the morning, upstream of the bridge the Marines had just held.
In the American camp Washington called a hasty council of war and put the question: continue the fight at Trenton, or withdraw to the south. The answer, arrived at that night, was neither.
What is less known
The unit that held the bridge had failed eight days earlier at the same kind of task, on the same river, under the same commander.
That is not a criticism of Cadwalader. The record is clear that he got men across at Dunk's Ferry and turned back rather than put his fieldpieces on new ice, which is a judgment call about equipment and a rising storm, not a loss of nerve. But the practical result was that Nicholas' Marines spent the most famous night of the war on the wrong bank.
Eight days later they were the troops sent at a run to the decisive point. The record does not say whether the December failure was weighed at all, and it does not say who chose them.
The other thing the record makes plain is how little of that afternoon anyone controlled. A brigade broke and ran, the artillery saved a crossing its own commander had not yet reacted to, and the reserve went in on nine words of urgency. The bridge held, and almost none of the reasons why were visible from any one place on the field.
The reading
You commit the reserve on the word of someone who can see less than they think.
The price of that is paid in advance: the reserve has to be ready to move before anyone knows where, which means holding good Marines out of the fight while it goes badly in front of them. Cadwalader's light troops spent the afternoon watching a brigade break and being held back anyway.
I have never sent anyone to a bridge. I have held a section back from a task that was going wrong in front of them, and it is the hardest thing to ask of people who are good at their jobs. Everything in a competent Marine says to go help, and the value of a reserve is entirely in the discipline of not going until called.
The order itself is the part worth studying. "To fly to the support of that important post" contains no scheme of maneuver and no picture of the enemy. It names a place, an urgency, and a task, and it trusts the people receiving it to work out the rest when they get there.
That kind of order only works if it was earned earlier, in the boring months. Whoever wrote it was betting that light troops who had failed a river crossing eight days before would arrive at a run, on a bridge they had not seen, and do the right thing without further instruction.
The bet paid. It is worth being honest that the record does not say why, and that a bet like this one pays or does not for reasons that have very little to do with the person who placed it.
What a leader controls is narrower. You control whether the reserve exists at all, whether the people in it know they are the reserve and why, and whether the last order you gave them was specific enough to act on and short enough to hear.
The December failure is the other half of the same lesson. A unit that has just come up short is not disqualified from the decisive task, and treating it as though it were is a decision most people make quietly, by picking somebody else.
Cadwalader did not pick somebody else. Eight days after the ice turned his division around, he sent the same men to the one place the army could not afford to lose.
The question
Look at the one task on this week's schedule that is most likely to go wrong. Before it starts, which of your Marines will you deliberately hold back from it, and what is the signal that sends them in?
Sources
- Smith, Charles R. Marines in the Revolution: A History of the Continental Marines in the American Revolution, 1775-1783. History and Museums Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1975. Chapter V, "The Trenton-Princeton Campaign," sections "Cadwalader Fails" and "Assunpink." Read at archive.org
- A Chronology of the United States Marine Corps, 1775-1934, Volume I. Historical Branch, G-3 Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1965. Entry for the Second Battle of Trenton. Read at archive.org
Corrections
None.