What happened
The morning began with a mistake. General Hugh Mercer, whose vanguard was moving toward the bridge, took the enemy in front of him for a small scouting party sent out from Princeton and pushed up the hill to his right hoping to cut off their retreat.
They were not a scouting party. As Mercer's troops crested the hill and came down through the orchard, Mawhood's men, entrenched behind a bank, "rose and fired."
An American sergeant remembered where those first shots went. They "passed over our heads, cutting the limbs of the trees under which we were marching."
Then the British came on with bayonets. They overpowered Mercer's men, mortally wounded Mercer himself, and the remainder of his brigade "fled in disorder."
Cadwalader had halted his column some distance off. He heard the firing and marched toward it without delay, which is the last uncomplicated decision anyone made that morning.
He moved his troops onto high ground, saw Mercer's brigade in full retreat, and ordered the column to form into divisions from the right. Morgan's battalion took the left flank. Matlack's riflemen and Nicholas' Marines took the right.
That is the whole of what a Marine did at Princeton that the record will support. Nicholas' Marines were placed on the right of a line formed by a commander working from what he could see from a hilltop, against an enemy that had just broken the brigade ahead of them.
He directed them to advance in formation and fire at will. Their first rounds were loosed at such a distance that they had no effect on the enemy at all.
Seeing it, Cadwalader ordered the divisions to double up and reload as they advanced. The correction was right and it was too late.
His troops closed to within fifty yards of the British line, and the British raked them with several devastating volleys. Cadwalader was driven back forty yards and had to abandon one artillery piece.
About a hundred yards from the enemy, he tried to regroup his men and failed.
This is the part of the morning worth sitting with. At that point Washington appeared and attempted to rally the troops, and the official history gives the result without ceremony: to no avail.
The commander in chief of the Continental Army was there, and his being there did not re-form the line.
What was still working was less visible. Meanwhile, in the official history's own word, Captain Joseph Moulder's two-gun battery atop the hill continued to pound the British 17th Regiment.
The situation was resolved by the arrival of reinforcements from Sullivan's division. Not by the rally.
Only then, gradually, were the scattered American forces re-formed and ordered forward again. Colonel Hand's riflemen went in against Mawhood's left while troops under Cadwalader and Major Israel Angell pressed the center, and under that renewed attack the British line gave way.
Cadwalader is in that sentence too. The same officer whose command had been driven back forty yards was pressing the center when the British finally broke, which is worth noting before anyone reads the morning as a story about a bad commander.
The Marine Corps chronology records the participation plainly, without drama: a Marine battalion under Major Nicholas, plus other Marine companies, took part in the Battle of Princeton as part of Washington's forces.
What is less known
The famous version of Princeton is Washington riding between the lines and turning the battle by his presence. The official Marine history describes him trying exactly that and records that it did not work.
Both things are in the same paragraph. He appeared, he attempted to rally the troops, and it was to no avail. The line was put back together by the arrival of Sullivan's division.
That is not a debunking of Washington, and this entry is not interested in making one. He was there at the worst moment of the morning, which is the thing a commander is for, and the record does not say what the men who saw him did with it afterward.
It is a correction to how the story is usually told. What the record credits with resolving the situation is the arrival of Sullivan's division, and what it shows firing meanwhile is Moulder's battery.
Neither of those is a story anyone tells at a birthday ball, which is most of the reason the other version travels so well. A gun crew doing its job and a division arriving on time do not make a painting.
The reading
Discipline is what is still running when your presence stops working.
The cost of believing that is that it takes the most flattering tool out of your hand. If the rally is what saves the day, then being impressive at the right moment is a leadership skill worth cultivating. If it is not, then everything that matters had to be built before the morning, by people who will not be credited for it, in months where nothing happened.
Moulder's crew is the whole entry. Somebody trained that gun crew, sited them on the hill, and gave them a task specific enough that they kept working it while a brigade came apart in front of them and the commander in chief tried to fix it and could not.
I have been the person whose presence was supposed to fix something. It works more often than it should, which is the trap. Marines will pick themselves up because you showed up, once, and then you start to think that is a plan.
It is not a plan. It is a bonus you get on top of a plan, and it stops working precisely when you need it most, because the situations bad enough to require it are the situations loud enough to drown it out.
What I try to hold onto from a morning like this one is that the question is never whether I can rally them, because the answer to that is unknowable until the morning arrives and it is too late to change. The question is what my section would still be doing correctly if I were unavailable for the next nine minutes, and that gets answered in the boring months or it does not get answered.
There is a harder version of this I have to be honest about. Building something that runs without you is a slow way to look less necessary, and most of the recognition in a career goes to the person visibly holding things together rather than to the person who made holding unnecessary.
The record here is unusually generous about it. It says the great man tried and it did not work, and then it tells you what did.
The question
Which part of your section's routine would still run correctly if you were unreachable for a week, and which part would stop? Before Friday, name the Marine who has to carry the part that stops, and tell them that is what you are counting on.
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," section "On to Princeton," pp. 102-103. 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 Battle of Princeton. Read at archive.org
Corrections
None.