A Compromise Saves “Washington’s Charge” at Princeton

When the American Battlefield Trust announced on May 30, 2018, that it had closed on the $4 million purchase of 14.85 acres of the most historic ground in the 1777 Battle of Princeton, it marked a capstone achievement in a new realm of the battlefield preservation movement. 

The acquisition of the Revolutionary War battlefield acreage was the third most-expensive in Trust history. The organization had spent more only for Fredericksburg’s Slaughter Pen Farm ($12 million) and Lee’s Gettysburg Headquarters ($5.5 million). The Princeton purchase exemplified the Trust’s determination to deliver major achievements on its new mission to expand its vision beyond Civil War battlefields to include those of the Revolution and the War of 1812. 

On Veterans Day, November 11, 2014, when now Trust President Emeritus Jim Lighthizer announced the organization’s new Campaign 1776 preservation initiative, he did it in Princeton, underscoring the need in that historic New Jersey town. 

For 27 years, dating back to the beginning of the Civil War battlefield preservation movement in 1987, the focus had remained solely on the Civil War. The fields of conflict of the Revolutionary War and War of 1812, fewer in number and smaller in scale, were the unprotected flanks of the movement. 

The National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program recognized that deficiency in 2007, identifying 243 significant combat sites from the two wars. It urgently recommended protection. In 2013, the Trust agreed to the ABPP’s formal request to consider expanding its mission. 

“You don’t say ‘no’ to your biggest partner,” Lighthizer said in Princeton. He estimated that at least 10,000 to 15,000 battlefield acres from the two wars needed protection, none more so than the grassy plain at Princeton known as Maxwell’s Field, where General George Washington led a dramatic, victorious, history-making charge. 

The Battle of Princeton on January 3, 1777, was the climax of the Revolution’s “Ten Crucial Days,” when Washington and some 5,000 ill-clothed, hungry soldiers fought their way out of the Continental Army’s darkest time. The British occupied most of three colonies and were poised to capture Philadelphia, the colonial American capital. 

“I think the game is pretty near up …” Washington wrote to his brother. Enlistments were set to expire. His army was evaporating. But Washington launched one more offensive, crossing the half-frozen Delaware River on a rainy Christmas night to rout the Hessians at Trenton before executing a freezing night march to confront the British force at Princeton. 

The battle on January 3 started disastrously. A British regiment crushed the American left flank and mortally wounded General Hugh Mercer. Facing yet another defeat, Washington personally led a counterattack while mounted on a shirking, terrified white horse, urging his men forward as he advanced to within 30 yards of the British. In a brief and bloody fight on the ice-hard ground of Maxwell’s Field, Washington’s men overwhelmed the Redcoats. The tide slowly turned after Washington’s victory at Princeton. Four years later, in 1781, the British surrendered at Yorktown. 

As Campaign 1776 got underway in 2014, the grassy plain of Maxwell’s Field had remained almost unchanged through more than two centuries of private ownership. But more than a decade earlier, in 2003, the landowner, the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), had announced plans to build 15 faculty housing units on Maxwell’s Field.  

The IAS is an intellectual bastion of higher learning with great prestige and worldwide renown. Albert Einstein lived and studied there from 1933 until his death in 1955. In 1938, the IAS built its campus on land just north of where the two armies had clashed.  

The original, 40-acre Princeton Battlefield State Park was dedicated in 1946, owing largely to the efforts of the battlefield’s first savior, Moses Taylor Pyne, a wealthy Princeton philanthropist who transformed the small College of New Jersey into prestigious Princeton University. When development threatened the battlefield around the turn of the 20th century, Pyne twice stopped it by purchasing land. In 1946, long after Pyne’s 1921 death, his land and parcel became the original Princeton Battlefield State Park.  

It included the site of the battle’s first phase, where Mercer was mortally wounded, but though the park was expanded through the years, it never encompassed the IAS-owned Maxwell’s Field parcel of about 22 acres. 

The IAS was determined to develop Maxwell’s Field, having been thwarted in two previously proposed development projects on or near the battlefield. Both had ended with the IAS selling the land or development rights to the state. The Princeton Battlefield Society, created in 1971 to confront one of these previous threats, led the way in the fight for Maxwell’s Field, which by 2014 had dragged on for 11 years. A week before the launch of Campaign 1776, the Princeton Regional Planning Board unanimously approved the IAS project. 

With scant hope for victory, the Trust launched a campaign to spread the word of the Princeton Battlefield threat while pursuing negotiations with the IAS in hopes of preserving part of Maxwell’s Field while also allowing new faculty housing.  

In December 2016, the IAS and Trust announced an agreement that would allow the institute to build 16 townhouses on the northernmost seven acres of the tract while selling 14.85 acres to the Trust for $4 million. 

The Trust was busy with other acquisitions, too, and by the time the Princeton deal closed in 2018, it had acquired more than 675 acres at 10 battlefields of the Revolution or War of 1812 in six states, with more purchases on the horizon. 

Reflecting on the demonstrable need for a comprehensive approach to battlefield preservation across multiple conflicts — and always mindful of maximizing its efficiency — in May 2018, the Civil War Trust announced the creation of the American Battlefield Trust as an umbrella organization to oversee its diverse activities. The Civil War Trust and the Revolutionary War Trust (formerly Campaign 1776) continue as land preservation and education entities under the auspices of the American Battlefield Trust, serving as its chief divisions.  The adoption of this new structure simply means that we are working and dreaming on a larger scale.