After the “two lucky strokes at Trenton and Princeton,” as he himself called them, Washington took up a strong position at Morristown and waited.  His plan was to hold the enemy in check, and to delay all operations until spring.  It is easy enough now to state his purpose, and it looks very simple, but it was a grim task to carry it out through the bleak winter days of 1777.  The Jerseys farmers, spurred by the sufferings inflicted upon them by the British troops, had turned out at last in deference to Washington’s appeals, after the victories of Trenton and Princeton, had harassed and cut off outlying parties, and had thus straitened the movements of the enemy.  But the main army of the colonies, on which all depended, was in a pitiable state.  It shifted its character almost from day to day.  The curse of short enlistments, so denounced by Washington, made itself felt now with frightful effect.  With the new year most of the continental troops departed, while others to replace them came in very slowly, and recruiting dragged most wearisomely.  Washington was thus obliged, with temporary reinforcements of raw militia, to keep up appearances; and no commander ever struggled with a more trying task.  At times it looked as if the whole army would actually disappear, and more than once Washington expected that the week’s or the month’s end would find him with not more than five hundred men.  At the beginning of March he had about four thousand men, a few weeks later only three thousand raw troops, ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-shod, ill-armed, and almost unpaid.  Over against him was Howe, with eleven thousand men in the field, and still more in the city of New York, well disciplined and equipped, well-armed, well-fed, and furnished with every needful supply.  The contrast is absolutely grotesque, and yet the force of one man’s genius and will was such that this excellent British army was hemmed in and kept in harmless quiet by their ragged opponents.

Washington’s plan, from the first, was to keep the field at all hazards, and literally at all hazards did he do so.  Right and left his letters went, day after day, calling with pathetic but dignified earnestness for men and supplies.  In one of these epistles, to Governor Cooke of Rhode Island, written in January, to remonstrate against raising troops for the State only, he set forth his intentions in a few words.  “You must be sensible,” he said, “that the season is fast approaching when a new campaign will open; nay, the former is not yet closed; nor do I intend it shall be, unless the enemy quits the Jerseys.”  To keep fighting all the time, and never let the fire of active resistance flicker or die out, was Washington’s theory of the way to maintain his own side and beat the enemy.  If he could not fight big battles, he would fight small ones; if he could not fight little battles, he would raid and skirmish and surprise; but fighting of some sort he would have, while the enemy attempted to spread over a State and hold possession of it.  We can see the obstacles now, but we can only wonder how they were sufficiently overcome to allow anything to be done.