Battle of Bound Brook, 1777: Cornwallis surprises Lincoln's outpost

Bound Brook was a raid, not a battle in the grand sense: a few hours' fighting at dawn, a few dozen men lost, a village held for less than two hours. But it came within minutes of destroying an American outpost and capturing its general, and it marked the end of a quiet winter and the start of the fighting season of 1777.²

Background: a winter of raids

After Trenton and Princeton the two armies spent the winter of 1777 in New Jersey: Washington's around Morristown, the British in New York and a few posts in New Jersey, among them New Brunswick. Through the winter both sides sent out foraging and scouting parties, and the country between them became a no man's land of ambushes and skirmishes over supplies and forage.³ › The Ten Crucial Days, 1776 to 1777

Bound Brook was one of the American outposts used to strike at the British foragers. It stood on the Raritan seven or eight miles above New Brunswick, on the way north to Morristown, with the first ridge of the Watchung Mountains rising behind it. The Americans kept militia guards on the fords of the river.⁴

Armies and commanders

The post was held by Major General Benjamin Lincoln, a farmer and militia officer from Hingham, Massachusetts, who had held local office before the war and had come south with Massachusetts militia to serve under Washington. When the militia's terms of service at Bound Brook ran out in March, Washington sent Continental troops to relieve them; a return of 15 March, cited by the editors of the Washington Papers, shows 342 men of the 8th Pennsylvania Regiment at the post.⁵

How many men Lincoln had on 13 April is uncertain. American History Central and the Crossroads of the American Revolution heritage area put his strength at about 500, most of them from the 8th Pennsylvania, with militia and a company of artillery with a few small guns; the American Battlefield Trust gives 400. Against him came Lord Cornwallis, who commanded the British forces in New Jersey, with about 4,000 British and Hessian soldiers by the first two counts, 5,000 by the third. Cornwallis, a veteran of the Seven Years' War who had opposed the policies that drove the colonists to revolt, had chased Washington across New Jersey late in 1776 and had seen his gains slip away after Trenton and Princeton. The American raids from Bound Brook on his foragers had become an irritant he meant to remove.⁶

His force was a mix of British regulars and German auxiliaries. Among the Hessians was Captain Johann Ewald of the jägers, who led the advance of Grant's column; his diary is one of the accounts on which the editors of the Washington Papers based their reconstruction of the raid.⁷

The battle in phases

Three columns in the dark

Cornwallis set out in the night of 12 to 13 April with a plan to close on Bound Brook from three sides at once. Colonel Carl von Donop, with fifty dragoons and four hundred Hessian grenadiers, marched up the south side of the Raritan to seize the bridge into the town. On the north side General James Grant, with Hessian jägers and a battalion of British Guards, came at the town from the east. The third column, light horse under Lieutenant Colonel William Harcourt with two battalions of light infantry and a battalion of grenadiers, swung south and west by way of Hillsborough to attack from the west; Cornwallis rode with it. Seen from the American side, as Hamilton described it the next day, one division made a feint in front while the other two came in on each flank, with Cornwallis and three or four major generals in the party.⁸

The open ford

Harcourt's column crossed the Raritan at a ford that the American militia guard seems to have left without warning. Washington put the near disaster down to the carelessness of a militia guard at one of the fords. American History Central repeats a local story that a Loyalist farmer gave the British the password and points out that the river could be forded in many places, so the fault may not have been the militia's alone.⁹

Escape to the mountain

The attack fell in the early morning. The Hessian jägers at the head of Grant's column ran into American pickets east of the town, and the defenders fired back before falling back. Lincoln got notice of the enemy's approach just in time, Washington wrote the next day, to withdraw himself and most of his men to the mountain just behind the town. Nathanael Greene told John Adams that Lincoln barely had time to draw his troops off between the heads of the two flanking columns, which kept up a warm fire as they passed. Hamilton wrote that the British got possession of Bound Brook but that the Americans eluded the design of surrounding and cutting off the whole party, and gave the enemy three full volleys at short range as they went.¹⁰

The loss fell mainly on the artillery. A party of horse was pushed on the gunners so fast that they could not get away, and Washington reported two guns lost with Lieutenants Ferguson and Turnbull and about twenty men of Proctor's artillery regiment. Hamilton counted three field pieces lost, one iron six-pounder and two brass three-pounders, and about thirty men killed and taken.¹¹

Turning point

The battle turned on the ford. Had Harcourt's column been seen in time, Lincoln would have had his whole garrison ready; had the three columns closed together a little sooner, he would have lost it. As it was, the British had the town but not the prize they came for. American History Central judges the attack nearly flawless, its only failure the road north to Morristown, which Grant's men blocked too late.¹²

Aftermath

The British did not stay. Washington wrote that they remained about an hour and a half and went back to New Brunswick, and that Lincoln returned to his post with reinforcements the same day.¹³

The losses were disputed from the start. Henry Knox later gave six killed and twenty five or thirty prisoners, while the British officer Stephen Kemble wrote that about eighty were taken and that the rebels ran off in their shirts and hid in the woods. Kemble also claimed most of the American baggage.¹⁴

Washington was angry with the militia. His aide wrote to General Nathaniel Heard that the commander in chief had heard that Heard's whole brigade had run from its post at the alarm, and demanded the names of any who had. Four days after the raid Washington told General William Maxwell that the campaign was about to open, that the number of posts must be reduced and the men drawn closer together, with scouts instead of fixed guards along the enemy's lines, so that the army would be less liable to surprise.¹⁵ › Washington vs Cornwallis

Legacy and memory

Bound Brook was a small affair, but it was one of the first moves of the 1777 campaign. At the end of May Washington brought the main army down from Morristown to Middlebrook, in the hills just north of Bound Brook, where it could watch the British in New Brunswick. American History Central counts the raid as the opening engagement of the Philadelphia campaign, which would bring Cornwallis and Washington face to face again at Brandywine in September.¹⁶

For the two commanders it was an early meeting in a long war. Lincoln went on to the northern campaign that ended at Saratoga, where a musket ball shattered his ankle, and in May 1780 he had to surrender Charleston with its whole garrison. Cornwallis fought on through the Philadelphia campaign and then in the South, until his own surrender at Yorktown in October 1781.¹⁷