cember 13th, and made prisoner by
Lieutenant-Colonel Harcourt and a party of dragoons. (The account of
the capture by Captain Bradford, Lee's aid, not heretofore published,
is given in _Document_ 46. In Wilkinson's _Memoirs_ there is another
account.) Sullivan then took command of Lee's troops and joined
Washington, who at Trenton had crossed to the Pennsylvania side of the
Delaware, removing all boats to delay the enemy, and had halted in
camp a few miles above.]

Washington resolved to make a sudden dash upon this Hessian. A
surprise, an irresistible attack, the capture of a post with a
thousand men, might work wonders in their moral effect. The soldiers
with him were trusty men, twenty-four hundred of whom he proposed to
lead himself on this enterprise. Many of the regiments we have already
become familiar with, and their leaders are men who have led them from
the first. Here are Greene, Sullivan, Stirling, Mercer, Glover, and
Sargent, for division and brigade commanders; and with them we meet
new officers--Brigadier-Generals Adam Stephen, of Virginia; Arthur St.
Clair, of Pennsylvania, and De Fermoy, a French officer, lately
commissioned by Congress. Here also are Hand's battalion, parts of
Smallwood's and Haslet's, Knox and his artillerymen, Durkee's, Charles
Webb's, Ward's, and parts of Chester's and Bradley's, from
Connecticut; Sargent's, Glover's, Hutchinson's, Baldwin's, Shepherd's,
Bailey's, and Paterson's, of Massachusetts; Stark's, Poor's, and
Reed's, from New Hampshire, who, with Paterson's, have just arrived in
camp from Ticonderoga; the remnants of McDougall's and Ritzema's New
York Continentals, and Weedon's, Scott's, Elliot's, Buckner's, and
Reed's Virginians. How depleted are these battalions, many of them
less than a hundred strong!

Washington's plan included a simultaneous move from several points.
The body he was to lead was concentrated, on the night of December
24th, at McConkey's Ferry, nine miles above Trenton. The troops were
to cross at night, reach the town at dawn, and take its garrison by
surprise. Lower down were two other bodies of troops. About opposite
Trenton, General Ewing was posted with Pennsylvania militia and
Nixon's Continental brigade, now commanded by Colonel Daniel
Hitchcock, of Rhode Island. At Bristol, General Cadwallader commanded
still another corps of Pennsylvanians, including many young men from
the best families in Philadelphia. Ewing and Cadwallader were to cross
a