New Brunswick

New Brunswick at the Crossroads: A Town Caught Between Revolution and Occupation

Few towns in the American Revolution endured so thorough a transformation—from bustling colonial crossroads to military prize, supply depot, occupied city, and finally a symbol of strategic recovery—as New Brunswick, New Jersey. The town was generally known as Brunswick during the Revolution, although both names were used. Sitting astride the Raritan River along the main road connecting New York and Philadelphia, New Brunswick was never a place the war could simply pass through. It was a place where the war stopped, dug in, and stayed. Between late 1776 and the summer of 1777, the town changed hands multiple times, hosted the headquarters of both American and British commanding generals, and became the pivot point around which some of the Revolution's most consequential strategic decisions turned. To understand what happened at New Brunswick is to understand how close the American cause came to extinction in the winter of 1776—and how it survived.

New Brunswick's significance to the Revolution predated the military campaigns that would make it famous. George Washington passed through New Brunswick on June 24, 1775, en route to taking command of the Continental Army in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Provincial Congress of New Jersey met in New Brunswick from January 31 to March 2, 1776, at the White Hall Tavern, which was located on Albany Street —a gathering that helped shape the colony's posture toward independence. And on July 9, 1776, just days after the Continental Congress approved the Declaration, one of the earliest public readings of the Declaration of Independence was made at the foot of the church tower of Christ Church. On September 9, 1776, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams stayed at the Indian Queen Tavern in New Brunswick —likely while traveling as part of the ill-fated Staten Island Peace Conference with Lord Howe. The town was already, in every sense, a crossroads of the emerging nation.

In the autumn of that year, the Continental Army was in full retreat. Washington's forces had been driven from New York after a string of devastating defeats—Long Island, Kip's Bay, Fort Washington, Fort Lee—and by late November they were streaming across New Jersey with British and Hessian troops in aggressive pursuit. Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis, commanding the vanguard of General William Howe's army, pressed the Americans relentlessly, and on November 29, 1776, Washington's battered columns stumbled into New Brunswick. While in New Brunswick, Washington used Cochrane's Tavern as his headquarters. The town offered a momentary reprieve: the Raritan River was a natural defensive barrier, and the bridge over it could be destroyed to slow the British advance. Washington recognized the opportunity and ordered the bridge demolished after his forces crossed. They were only able to damage the bridge before being stopped by British and Hessian forces, who later repaired the bridge. It was a desperate act, carried out under pressure, but it bought the Americans precious time.

Washington had hoped to engage the British in battle here, but he decided that his own troops were not in the condition to do so, and he decided to move forward through Princeton and to Trenton. On December 1, as the main body of the army withdrew, a young artillery captain named Alexander Hamilton played a critical role in the rearguard action. Hamilton and his artillerymen atop the bluffs overlooking the Raritan River —on the hill that is now the site of Rutgers University's Queens Campus— Hamilton's artillery battery was positioned here, providing cover for Washington's troops to continue their retreat. Hamilton's battery engaged in an artillery duel with the British who were on the other side of the Raritan River. This delayed the British advance and allowed Washington's troops to withdraw.

The cannon duel continued until sundown, when the artillery was ordered to retreat.

No wagons were available to carry equipment, so troops burned their tents to deny them to the enemy. According to the American Battlefield Trust, General Washington personally observed Hamilton as he directed his battery in a rearguard action on the Raritan River that autumn, and was "charmed by the brilliant courage and admirable skill" of the artillerist. It was a performance that would ultimately lead Washington to invite the twenty-one-year-old captain onto his personal staff.

The retreat through New Brunswick was more than a military maneuver; it was a moment of profound crisis for the Revolution itself. Washington's army was hemorrhaging men. Enlistments were expiring, morale had collapsed, and many soldiers simply walked away. The New Jersey militia, whose support Washington desperately needed, was slow to turn out, and some residents of the region were openly sympathetic to the Crown. Among the most prominent Loyalists in the colony was William Franklin, the royal governor and estranged son of Benjamin Franklin, who had used his office to discourage rebellion and encourage allegiance to the king. Though Franklin had been arrested and removed from power by the Provincial Congress earlier that year—largely through the efforts of Patriot leaders like William Livingston, who would soon become New Jersey's first elected governor—his influence lingered. The political loyalties of central New Jersey were deeply fractured, and New Brunswick sat squarely in the fault line.

The British occupation that followed was swift and thorough. British troops occupied New Brunswick from December 1, 1776

to June 22, 1777. The occupation disrupted every facet of civilian life in the town. Queen's College—the young institution chartered in 1766 that would later become Rutgers University—saw classes suspended as students and faculty enlisted in the Continental Army, and the British occupation compelled the college to relocate operations temporarily to other sites. The college's tutor, John Taylor, was commissioned as a captain, and Simeon DeWitt, class of 1776, became the Surveyor General of the United States and mapped areas for George Washington during the war. Grand colonial homes were requisitioned for military use: The Mansion was occupied by British officers and the Enniskillen Guards of Ireland (now Northern Ireland) during the Revolutionary War and still shows saber and musket marks on its floors and banisters. At the nearby village of Raritan Landing, the British Brigade of Guards was stationed from December 1776 through June 1777, and archaeological excavations have uncovered evidence of both British and American encampments in the area.

New Brunswick also became a critical supply depot. Cornwallis was now in a quake lest Washington reach New Brunswick, where a small handful of British soldiers were guarding not only an enormously valuable quantity of stores and supplies but also a war chest of silver and gold worth about £70,000. After the Battle of Princeton on January 3, 1777, Washington wanted to push on to New Brunswick and capture a British pay chest of 70,000 pounds, but Major Generals Henry Knox and Nathanael Greene talked him out of it. Washington's exhausted men could go no farther, and the opportunity slipped away. After the battle, Cornwallis abandoned many