Dec. 29, 2025
America's story--Washington's Christmas Miracle of 1776
FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message A nation doesn’t survive on slogans; it survives on choices made when every option looks bad. We step into December 1776, when Washington’s army bled across New Jersey, Congress fled, and the British believed the rebellion would expire by New Year’s. What followed wasn’t a miracle of myth so much as a masterpiece of grit: a night crossing through a nor’easter, intelligence and deception that dulled Hessian caution, and a blunt reso...
FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message
A nation doesn’t survive on slogans; it survives on choices made when every option looks bad. We step into December 1776, when Washington’s army bled across New Jersey, Congress fled, and the British believed the rebellion would expire by New Year’s. What followed wasn’t a miracle of myth so much as a masterpiece of grit: a night crossing through a nor’easter, intelligence and deception that dulled Hessian caution, and a blunt resolve summed up by a single password—Victory or Death.
This is the short story of Washington Christmas Miracle of 1776.
For more resources and exclusive content, visit us at our website, www.teammojoacademy.com
00:05 - Despair On The Delaware
02:31 - Framing The Legend And The Stakes
04:52 - Painting Myths Versus Harsh Reality
09:14 - Collapse Across New Jersey
12:35 - Thomas Paine Lights The Fire
15:50 - Victory Or Death: The Plan
19:39 - The Storm Crossing Begins
24:38 - Delay, Doubt, And A Hard Choice
27:40 - The March And Bayonets
30:41 - Trenton Attacked From Two Sides
34:00 - Surrender And Shockwaves
37:24 - From Trenton To Princeton
41:00 - Meaning, Myth, And Morale
44:00 - Reflections, Faith, And Modern Parallels
48:23 - The Nine Days’ Turn And Aftermath
WEBVTT
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The game was nearly up.
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It was December seventeen seventy-six.
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The euphoria of independence had curdled into defeat and doubt.
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Just months earlier, Americans had cheered the bold words of the Declaration of Independence, but now, now the dream of liberty seemed to be bleeding out in the snow.
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The British war machine, oh, let me remind you, the British War Machine, the world's greatest army and navy at the time, had shattered Washington's defenses in New York, chased his ragged army across New Jersey, and driven them to the edge of collapse.
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On the eastern bank of the Delaware River, red coated sentries stood watch, confident that the rebellion would die within the new year.
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Across the icy river, Washington's army huddled, cold, hungry, their enlistments expiring by the week.
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In makeshift huts they wrapped themselves in rags, their muskets rusting in the damp.
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The commander himself, gaunt from fatigue, wrote to his cousin, admitting that he feared the game was pretty near up.
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The revolution, barely half a year old, had reached its lowest ebb.
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The cause of liberty born in fire and rhetoric now flickered like a dying candle in the wind.
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There was only one man who could turn this around.
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The indispensable man.
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Yet history would remember this winter not as an ending, but as a moment when George Washington dared one last throw of the dice and turned despair into defiance.
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This is a story of America rising like a phoenix from the ashes.
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This is the short story of Washington's crossing of the Delaware and the Christmas miracle of 1776.
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Welcome to a special edition of the Theory to Action Podcast.
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This series, America's Story, takes you on a journey through the pivotal moments of liberty, remarkable events of hope, and incredible cast of characters, good and bad, who have shaped our nation.
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Together, we'll explore the stories that built the country we know today and uncover what they still mean for us now and can teach us for our future.
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So with that, here's America's story.
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To begin to tell this tale, we should begin where most people start on this quest.
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The river is frozen.
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The night black as ink.
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Ice grinds against the hulls of rowboats, pushing through the Delaware's bitter current.
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Breath turns to frost, muskets clatter in nervous hands, and in the center of it all one figure stands still.
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George Washington, tall, silent, unflinching against the brutal wind.
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His coat whips behind him, his gaze fixed on the far shore, not just for Trenton, not even for victory, but on the fragile idea of America itself.
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Around him are farmers, shopkeepers, boys barely old enough to shave, all risking everything for a cause that days before seemed lost.
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The painter, Emmanuel Luza, imagined this moment decades later.
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But his brush captured more than a crossing, it captured a turning point of spirit.
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Washington illuminated by the cold dawn, is not triumphant yet.
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He is determined.
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The flag flutters defiantly against storm and shadow, a symbol of hope held high amid chaos.
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There was no grand armada, no professional army.
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It was a desperate gamble.
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Christmas night seventeen seventy six.
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And yet through the storm and uncertainty they rode on, and that fragile boat across those lethal waters, the revolution itself crossed from collapse to survival.
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Indeed, the revolution that night, Christmas night of seventeen seventy six, rose like a phoenix from the ashes.
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You see, the boat was too small, the ice too tall, the dawn too bright.
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Looking closely at the painting of Washington's crossing of the Delaware by Edward Lutza and the cracks in the legend start to show.
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The painter gives us a narrow, overloaded skiff, its gun whales kissing the water, as if a dozen men, muskets, and a general could balance there without sinking.
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The real crossing used big, deep durum boats and sturdy ferries, workhorses of the river, not fragile props for a heroic tableau.
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The ice itself towers like jagged cliffs, frozen sculptures rising from the black water.
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In truth, the Delaware River was choked with flatter, broken sheets of ice, treacherous and grinding, not the Arctic wilderness the paintings suggest.
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In light in Lutz's world, the scene glows with an early morning heroism, the horizon pulling Washington's forward, pulling Washington forward into glory.
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The actual crossing happening was in the dead of night, under sleet and snow cloaked in darkness and fear.
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True Washington ran some four to five hours late, but it was not dawn of the morning at the crossing.
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Even the flag was wrong.
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Stars and stripes he hoists aloft did not yet exist.
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In the Christmas of seventeen seventy six, the uniforms are tidy, even theatrical, a costume designer's dream.
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Washington himself stands upright in a bucking boat, coat whipping in the wind, balancing on the edge of disaster.
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No commander would risk that kind of posture in an ice jammed river and certainly not one responsible for the last best hope of that revolution.
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And yet for it all it bends the facts.
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The painting does speak to a deeper truth, though.
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It understands what was at stake that night in that overloaded boat.
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The painter packs the idea of a people, a farm boy, a frontier scout, a black oarsman, men of different regions and backgrounds straining at the oars towards an uncertain shore.
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The geography may be off, but the emotional map is dead on.
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This was a nation being rowed inch by inch out of oblivion.
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Washington may not have stood like that, but he did.
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He did stand in that moment of history, calm amid panic, resolved when others despaired, willing to gamble everything on one impossible stroke.
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So yes, the boat is wrong, the ice is wrong, the light, the flag, the posture, all wrong.
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But what the painting gets right is the thing that matters most the sense of a cause on the brink, a leader refusing to yield, a fragile revolution forcing its way through despair and darkness and chaos toward a dawn it could not yet see but chose to believe in any way.
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So let's back up to tell this full story of America's story.
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And we will begin with the unraveling in New York.
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In New York State, Fort Washington fell on november sixteenth, and with it some twenty eight hundred badly needed American soldiers disappeared into British captivity.
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Four days later, Cornwallis ferried five thousand of his British and Hessian troops across the Hudson River and pronounced or pounced on Fort Lee, forcing Washington into a beleaguered and panicked retreat.
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What followed was a less tidy strategic withdrawal than a bruising, humiliating flight across the state of New Jersey.
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The Continental Army staggered from town to town, trying to draw its line in the sand at each and every place.
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Hackensack, Newark, Elizabeth, Woodbridge, New Brunswick, Princeton, Trenton.
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Each and every place they could not make a stand.
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They were hounded by British red coats and Hessians, sleeping in fields short of food, wrapped in rags instead of winter coats.
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Men marched with bleeding bare feet through sleet and freezing rain.
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Each step eastward toward the Delaware felt less like a maneuver and more like a funeral procession for the American cause.
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The British did not destroy Washington's command in a single battle.
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His army was dissolving on its own.
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Of the men who had fought at Long Island in August of seventeen seventy six, perhaps one in ten still stood in the ranks by December of that year.
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The rest had been killed, captured, sickened, or simply gone home, deciding the cause was lost.
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The calendar promised a final blow for Washington.
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Most enlistments were due to expire on january first, seventeen seventy seven.
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If those men went home on schedule, Washington would be left with little more than a skeleton force.
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Even the political center of the rebellion seemed to have lost its nerve.
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Fearing the British troops might push straight towards Philadelphia, the Continental Congress abandoned the Capitol and fled to Baltimore, Maryland.
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The United States now existed mainly on paper and in the person of one commander, trying to hold a crumbling army together on the cold banks of the Delaware River.
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It was into this darkness that stepped a writer who understand how powerful words could stiffen a spine.
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The writer Thomas Paine, who had once lit the fuse for independence with his tracked common sense, was now serving alongside the soldiers he had indeed wrote about.
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Watching them shiver besides campfires and talking openly of going home, he sat down to put pen to paper yet again.
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The result was the American crisis.
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It arrived just as Washington's men were preparing for what few of them knew would have been an attack, passed from campfire to campfire.
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On Washington's orders it was read aloud by officers and sergeants.
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Its opening line rang in their ears as they marched eastward on their surprise attack.
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These are the times that try men's souls, the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of his country.
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Pain was challenging them not to be sunshine patriots, not to walk away when the cause most needed them.
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His pamphlet did not feed or clothe the troops, but it gave them something just as essential, a moral reason to endure just a little bit longer.
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Washington understood that he was standing on the absolute low point of the revolution, an army on the verge of disappearing, a government in flight, a people wavering, only a dramatic, unmistakable victory could reverse that slide.
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Anything less would let the war simply bleed out.
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Washington's normal instinct was of caution, and up to this moment, frankly, Washington was a failed general.
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He was outmaneuvered at Long Island, he was forced off Manhattan Island.
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He was beaten at White Plains, and then he saw Forts Washington and Lee captured.
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Those defeats drove him and the army into a long, stumbling retreat across the state of New Jersey, with a shrinking, demoralizing army at every step.
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All of this gave plenty of ammunition to his critics in Congress and the ranks who questioned his ability.
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Yes, of course, Washington should have been credited for his early success in Boston, where he successfully bluffed and fought a little siege that led to the evacuation of the British Navy in March of seventeen seventy six.
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Yes, that was indeed an early success.
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But folks, that was almost a year ago by the time of December of seventeen seventy six.
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Washington knew he had to put his foot in the ground and fight.
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He knew how fragile his army was, but by late December, caution had become a form of surrender.
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If he did nothing, the army would simply melt away on New Year's Day, and the British would easily claim victory by default.
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Forced to choose between a slow death and a dangerous gamble, Washington chose the gamble.
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And here is Washington's brilliance.
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The plan he created was not reckless bravado.
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It was a carefully thought out strike against a vulnerable point in the British line.
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The Hessian garrison at Trenton sat on the New Jersey side of the Delaware, isolated and contemptuous of the quote rabble across the river.
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They had been worn down by partisan attacks.
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Washington aimed to destroy that garrison in one blow, to shock the British and to prove to Congress, the public, and indeed his own men that the Continental Army was still a real army.
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He called the password for the operation victory or death.
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This was not rhetoric.
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If the attack did fail, the army would likely be shattered beyond repair and the rebellion with it.
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The audacity of Washington's plan rested on more than courage, it depended on information and deception.
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In Trenton, a supposed Tory butcher, sympathetic to the British, named one John Honeyman, moved among the German Hessians in Trenton, selling meat and getting gossip.
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In reality he was one of Washington's spies.
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He listened in at taverns and watched patrol patterns and carried news back across the river.
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To the Hessian officers he played the part of a loyal king's man, describing the Americans as beaten, barefoot, and incapable of attacking.
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In a bit of theater worthy of a novel, Honeyman arranged to be quote, captured by an American patrol and brought to Washington himself.
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After giving his report, he was locked in a hut only to then escape during a conveniently timed fire and slip back into Trenton.
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His escape, of course, was no accident.
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It ensured that his tales of American despair would sound even more convincing to the Hessians.
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Meanwhile, in town a wealthy merchant named Abraham Hunt prepared a Christmas feast for the Hessian Colonel Johan Raw.
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Outwardly Hunt was a loyal subject.
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Inwardly he was sympathetic to the American cause.
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As the snow began to fall on Christmas night seventeen seventy six, Johann Rawl drank.
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He played cards and enjoyed the warm glow of a comfortable house all while Washington's men assembled in the darkness upriver.
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Now Johann Rawl was no coward.
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He had bravely fought at Fort Washington and enjoyed a reputation for courage.
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But courage is not the same thing as caution.
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Repeated warnings of a possible American attack had crossed his desk, in fact.
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He had dismissed them as nonsense, even while he privately asked his superior, General James Grant for reinforcements.
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General Grant refused, and Commander Rawl, for all his experience, never ordered proper earthworks dug around the town of Trenton.
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He trusted his troops' discipline and the Americans' exhaustion.
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The Hessian's soldiers under him had little reason to expect a major fight on this Christmas night.
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For days they had been harassed by New Jersey militia, sniping at pickets ambushing patrols, and keeping them jumpy and short on sleep.
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One officer had complained that they had not not slept one night in peace since arriving in Trenton.
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When a brutal winter storm popped up, a nor'easter by all accounts, when that blew up on Christmas night, the officers, those Hessians, assumed that no sane enemy would attempt a major operation in such horrible weather.
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They relaxed their guard just as Washington was tightening his Washington's design for the attack showed how far he had indeed come as a commander.
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He planned a classic envelopment, three forces converging on the town of Trenton to cut off every line of escape.
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He would lead the main column, roughly twenty four hundred men across the river at McConkey's Ferry nine miles above Trenton.
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Once on the New Jersey side this force would then split to strike the town from the north and the west.
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A second force under James General James Ewing would cross closer to Trenton and seize the bridge over the Asumpic Creek, the main southern escape route.
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A third column under General John Callawander would cross further south and menace British positions near Bordentown, essentially keeping the Hessians reinforcements away.
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Washington ordered his men to carry three days rations and some sixty rounds of ammunition.
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The preparations were thorough for such an army in distress.
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But the most important order was not written on paper.
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It was that whispered password moving up and down the lines in the dark victory or death the men understood this was no raid.
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This was their throw of the dice for the future of their cause on Christmas afternoon as many in Trenton settled into warmth and wine, the Continental Army trudged towards the river.
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Reinforcements under John Sullivan and Horatio Gates had recently arrived, strengthening Washington's hand.
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He gave overall control of the crossing to Colonel Henry Knox, the big framed military artillery officer, who had once dragged guns and cannon from Fort Ticonderoga through the winter snow.
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Knox had now faced an even more delicate problem.
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He had to get an army its horses and eighteen heavy guns across the half frozen river in a brutal storm.
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The key to the operation was a band of New England sailor and fishermen, Colonel John Glover's marbleheaders.
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These men had ferried Washington's army to safety after the disaster on Long Island, and now they would try to ferry it to victory tonight.
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As darkness fell the weather turned vicious, rain hardened into sleet, then into snow, driven sideways by the howling wind.
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One soldier later said simply, it blew in a hurricane.
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Ice flows ground and hissed along the river's surface.
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In that blackness the marble headers worked their long heavy Durham boats, guiding them through the ice by instinct and experience.
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Men and horses slipped as they were loaded.
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Artillery wheels had to be wrestled into place.
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More than one man went overboard into the freezing water and had to be hauled back before he sank.
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Hour after hour in stinging cold and darkness the boats went back and forth.
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Miraculously no one was lost in the crossing.
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It was conducted in silence.
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All eighteen guns made it to the New Jersey shore, but the river exacted its price in time.
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What was supposed to be finished by midnight dragged on until three o'clock in the morning.
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The delay meant that Washington's army was three hours behind scheduled before it even began to march.
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Worse news then followed and reached General Washington.
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The other two columns had failed to cross ice and storm had stopped both Cadwallander and Ewing on the Pennsylvania side of the river.
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The carefully designed three pronged had collapsed into a single column moving along and alone into enemy territory.
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This was the sort of moment when many commanders would simply call it off the plan had broken.
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The weather was lethal the men were already dropping from cold and exhaustion Washington weighed those facts against one larger reality to go back would be to return with nothing but excuses to an army whose enlistments were about to expire.
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Washington looked to the sky it would be dawn soon and he made his choice The army would push on at all events.
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At four in the morning the column began its nine mile march south.
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The men were soaked, freezing and hungry.
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The snow and sleet whipped at their faces.
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Two soldiers died along the road from exposure.
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General Sullivan sent word that his men's gunpowder was wet in might misfire.
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Washington's answer to Sullivan was blunt Tell General Sullivan to use the bayonet I am resolved to take Trenton That reply laid bare his state of mind.
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Equipment might fail, the will to close with the enemy could not If the muskets would not fire the army would advance with cold steel.
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It was now near dawn two miles north of the town.
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Washington's column stumbled into an American patrol under one captain Adam Stefan, who had just skirmished with a Hessian outpost unaware of the larger plan afoot, furious that his element of surprise might be gone, Washington snapped You sir, might have ruined all my plans by putting the enemy on their guard.
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But luck if it can be called that was with General Washington tonight.
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Commander Hessian General Raw had treated the early morning shots as just another minor raid by those pesky rabble.
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No alarm was indeed sounded the garrison settled back into its routine.
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Around eight o'clock with snow still slanting through the air the Hessians unsuspecting Washington's weary army emerged on the heights above Trenton.
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Everything Washington had risked now came down to a few streets in a small New Jersey town.
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His plan for the two way attack survived the night his divided column closed in from the north and the south as the storm blew into the faces of the Hessian pickets.
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From the north the force under Nathaniel Greene accompanied by Washington himself drove down the Pennington Road.
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The storm gave them cover, blowing snow and sleet directly into the eyes of the Hessian sentries.
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The outpost there collapsed quickly under the surprise assault.
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Greene's men surged into the northern end of Trenton.
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From the south John Sullivan's division advanced along the river road.
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Their task was crucial seize the bridge over the Asun Pink Creek and seal off the usual escape route.
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Despite wet powder and brutal conditions they managed to secure the bridge over the creek, slamming the door on any orderly retreat to the south.
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In the center Henry Knox brought his artillery into action.
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He planted his eighteen guns at the heads of King and Queen Streets, the two main arteries through the town.
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When the Hessians tried to form up on those narrow streets they found themselves under a brutal storm of solid shot and canister that shredded their ranks and sowed panic.
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The Hessians tumbled out of their quarters half dressed, seized their muskets and tried to impose order.
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Colonel Rawl, stunned but still brave, rallied companies of Hessians and attempted to organize a counterattack.
00:29:29.119 --> 00:29:39.119
Under other conditions the disciplined German troops might have fought the Continentals to a standstill or forced even their way out.
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But the layers of Washington's plan were now working against them.
00:29:44.240 --> 00:29:56.640
Green's men pressed from the north, Sullivan's from the south, Knox's guns raked the streets, the storm itself cut visibility and muffled commands.
00:29:56.880 --> 00:30:02.640
The garrison had been worn down by weeks of alarms and nights without rest.
00:30:03.039 --> 00:30:13.839
Now caught off guard they were trying to fight a coordinated enemy in a snowstorm inside a town whose streets had become killing zones.
00:30:15.039 --> 00:30:20.319
Washington's brilliance and leadership and strategy started to pay off.
00:30:20.559 --> 00:30:31.680
Rawl led his men in a push to break out but was struck down, mortally wounded with their commander incapacitated their formations shattered.
00:30:31.920 --> 00:30:46.240
Every exit was blocked the Hessian regiments were gradually encircled the Raw and Losburg units trying to retreat found themselves surrounded and forced to surrender.
00:30:46.400 --> 00:31:00.720
A short time later the Cahusan regiment likewise hemmed in laid down its arms for the first shots to the general surrender less than an hour had passed.
00:31:01.279 --> 00:31:18.720
The casualty list tell the story American combat losses were minimal only a handful was wounded in the fighting two men had died of exposure on the march in and more would suffer from cold and illness in the days ahead.
00:31:19.039 --> 00:31:24.000
But on the field itself the cost in blood was remarkably light.
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The Hessians lost around twenty two killed including their commander Rawl and more than eighty wounded but more importantly between eight and nine hundred were taken prisoner.
00:31:36.960 --> 00:31:51.440
Among the wounded Americans was a young lieutenant named James Monroe, who nearly bled to death from a solder shoulder wound before a quick thinking doctor clamped his artery.
00:31:51.759 --> 00:32:03.680
He would survive that wound to become our fifth president of the United States, a small human thread tying this desperate winter battle to later American history.
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When the last Hessian guns fell silent and the enemy killers came down Washington is said to have remarked This indeed is a glorious day for our country.
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He had no time to savor it though.
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British troops still loomed across New Jersey and he had nearly some nine hundred prisoners to guard, along with captured muskets and artillery and supplies.
00:32:32.319 --> 00:32:46.640
Before British reinforcements could converge Washington hustled his army and its prizes back across the same treacherous Delaware river that they had crossed in the night.
00:32:46.960 --> 00:32:51.279
On any map Trenton looks like a small engagement.
00:32:51.680 --> 00:32:56.079
On the scale of war its impact was enormous.
00:32:56.720 --> 00:33:01.920
For months the Continental Army had known almost nothing but defeat and retreat.
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Trenton broke that pattern in one single blow on one single morning.
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Soldiers who had begun to think of themselves as losers suddenly had proof that they could surprise and overwhelm professional European troops.
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That moral shift cannot be measured in numbers but was indeed real Washington seized the moment.
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He appealed directly to men whose enlistments were about to expire, asking them to stay on for just one more month.
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He paired that appeal to duty with the practical incentive a ten dollar bounty for those who indeed re enlisted.
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Many in fact did.
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New recruits hearing of the victory were more willing to join a cause that no longer looked helpless.
00:33:56.559 --> 00:34:06.960
The army that night had vanished on january first, instead limped into the new year with its core intact and its confidence restored.
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Trenton also jolted British assumptions.
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General Howe had believed the campaign of 1776 had effectively broken that rebellion.
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New Jersey looked pacified.
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Its loyalists were coming forward.
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The rebel army seemed to be on its last legs.
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