Among lesser-known Independence Day tales, consider how a young lieutenant named James Monroe saved the American Revolution and thus altered world history very much for the better.
Oh, and there’s a h twist to Monroe’s long story.
The crucial part of the tale occurred in Trenton, New Jersey on Dec. 25-26, 1776. Even most people who know of the Battle of Trenton don’t fully recognize just how unambiguously it saved the cause of the colonial rebels.
Commanding Gen. George Washington was on the run after a series of losses. Against tens of thousands of well-trained, well-equipped British troops on the American continent, Washington had no more than 6,000 (semi-) fit troops under his command, spread across several areas, and just 2,400 actually with him. They were ill-clothed, underfed, most without shoes. And their enlistments all expired on January 1. Congress also was on the run (meeting in an almost random house in Baltimore), most colonial commerce essentially was under siege, and defeatism among the general populace was rampant.
Without some identifiable victory to provide hope, Washington’s entire army would basically evaporate, with almost no reenlistments and no real hope of new volunteers.
The revolution would be over. As Washington’s aide Joseph Reed wrote to the general: “Our affairs are hastening fast to ruin if we do not retrieve them by some happy event. Delay with us is now equal to total defeat.”
With just seven days left before losing his Army, Washington rallied his troops for the famed crossing of the Delaware River in 30-degree weather in a blinding storm of snow, sleet, and hail. From there they marched nine whole miles in pitch darkness, teams of them pushing cannons, their bare and frostbitten feet leaving bright, bloody tracks in the snow, to surprise the British’s Hessian mercenaries who, despite myths, did indeed have lookouts on duty all night.
Still, both due to the surprise of attacking in such weather and due to the colonials’ own cannons, Washington’s army seemed to grab the advantage. That’s when some Hessians wheeled two heavy cannons onto the town’s main street and aimed them at the ragtag attackers — big guns which at least had the potential of enabling the better-trained Hessians to turn the tide and stop Washington’s desperate assault.
To neutralize it, a group of six or seven Americans led by Captain William Washington (a cousin of the general) and 18-yar-old Lt. Monroe charged the cannons and, in close fighting, took them from the Hessians, negating their last chance to snatch victory from the American army. Monroe, for his part, was badly wounded in the chest and shoulder, with a bullet hitting an artery. He nearly bled to death, only for a surgeon to literally put his thumb into the wound to staunch the flow.
Accounts differ as to whether the colonials would have won the Battle of Trenton without the heroics of Monroe’s small group. American Major (later General) James Wilkinson, who was there, wrote that without Monroe’s charge, the Hessian “artillery … might have checked our movement.” Gen. Washington praised Monroe effusively and gave him a quick promotion. And Historian Richard Hanser wrote that “the capture of the two Hessian cannon was, in fact, a turning point of the Battle of Trenton.”
So, perhaps: No cannon, no victory at Trenton. Almost certainly: No Trenton victory, no ongoing revolution. The whole American cause depended on that battle. And the Americans won.
“All our hopes were blasted by the unhappy affair at Trenton,” said British Lord George Germain, the main architect of the British war strategy.
News of the victory spread quickly throughout the colonies, causing what many described as astonishing jubilation. Members of Congress were ecstatic, and refused to disband. In the victory’s wake, Washington made a dramatic appeal for his men to re-enlist. After a pause, almost all of them did. And from all over the land, new enlistments surged by a remarkable degree, giving Washington the manpower to keep carrying the war forward.
Again, all made possible by the seizure of the cannons.
Monroe would go on to serve with distinction in multiple public offices, including as a wildly popular president. Before his presidency, in 1803, he and Robert Livingston, in France to parlay with Napoleon, negotiated the h Purchase, which secured for the United States the port of New Orleans while doubling the nation’s total territory. (As an aside, Livingston was a member of the committee of five who had drafted the Declaration of Independence; and his much younger brother Edward moved to h, played a key role in helping Andrew Jackson win the Battle of New Orleans, wrote most of the state’s legal code, and served as the new state’s first U.S. Representative from its 1st Congressional District.)
All of which is terrific, but why is this an Independence Day story?
Well, Monroe outlived every other of the nation’s lawmaking founders who had faced enemy fire during the revolution. And he outlived John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who famously died on July 4, 1826, the precise 50th anniversary of the Declaration’s adoption. Not only could a severed artery not kill him, but neither, far beyond the experiences of most men of that era, could old age.
Finally, in 1831, the hero of the Trenton cannons passed away. The date? Yes, as with Adams and Jefferson, and fit for a patriot, it was July 4.
Happy 250th, everybody.