October 22, 1777. The air along the Delaware was cold and thick with the kind of dread that only comes before a battle. The leaves along the riverbank had already turned and fallen, and the smell of salt, mud, and woodsmoke mixed into a heavy haze. To the west, Philadelphia had fallen into British hands. To the east, across the river in New Jersey, stood Fort Mercer—unfinished, undermanned, and about to become the unlikely stage for one of the most stunning upsets of the entire American Revolution.
The British thought they’d already won the Philadelphia Campaign. General Sir William Howe had taken the city in late September, marching in triumph as red-coated soldiers and hired German auxiliaries set up winter quarters. But Howe’s hold on the city was fragile. His supply lines were stretched thin. The Delaware River was the artery that fed his army, and the Americans still held its defenses. General George Washington understood the math perfectly. “If the river defenses can be maintained,” he wrote, “General Howe’s situation will not be the most agreeable.”
So he turned to a quiet, unassuming officer from Rhode Island named Christopher Greene. Washington told him the plain truth: the fate of the Delaware was in his hands.
Fort Mercer wasn’t much to look at. It was an earthen fort on a rise above the river, facing Pennsylvania. Across the water sat Fort Mifflin, built on Mud Island. Between them stretched a gauntlet of underwater spikes known as chevaux-de-frise—massive timbers sheathed in iron, sunk to shred the hulls of any ship that dared the channel. A small fleet of Continental and Pennsylvania State Navy vessels patrolled the shallows under Commodore John Hazelwood, their galleys armed with cannon that could rake a line of ships broadside to broadside. It was a bold design—part engineering, part desperation.
But when Colonel Greene arrived with his regiment, he took one look at Fort Mercer and saw trouble. The fort was far too large for the 400 men he had to hold it. The walls stretched thin, the parapets half finished. That’s when fortune sent him help in the form of a young French engineer, Chevalier Thomas Antoine de Mauduit du Plessis.
Du Plessis had the kind of sharp mind that thrives in crisis. He saw that the fort’s original design, probably drafted by well-meaning amateurs, was a disaster. He called it “the work of those little practiced in the art of fortification.” So he set to work. Inside the fort’s outer wall, he built a new, smaller defensive line of earth and timber. The wide space between the two became a death trap, filled with tangled abatis—fallen trees with sharpened branches—perfect for catching men like flies in a web. Fourteen cannon faced outward from the inner wall.
By the time the British decided to strike, Fort Mercer was ready. Or at least as ready as 600 tired, outnumbered soldiers could be.
Those men weren’t the typical picture of the Continental Army. The 1st and 2nd Rhode Island Regiments were integrated units, a rarity in that day. Among them were dozens of free and formerly enslaved Black men, Native Americans, and white farmers fighting shoulder to shoulder. Their presence wasn’t an accident. In Rhode Island, patriot leaders had authorized the enlistment of enslaved men in exchange for freedom—a radical move that produced one of the most effective units in the army. In the decades that followed, history would try to forget them. But at Red Bank, they were the heart of the defense.
Meanwhile, on the opposite shore, the British had a problem. Their fleet couldn’t reach Philadelphia until the forts were cleared. General Howe turned to his Hessians—the professional German soldiers hired by Britain to do its dirty work. Their commander, Colonel Carl von Donop, was eager to reclaim his honor. At Trenton, less than a year before, Hessian troops had been humiliated. Von Donop, a proud man, took that defeat personally. “Either that will be Fort Donop,” he reportedly said, “or I shall be dead.”
On October 21, his column—around 2,000 strong—crossed the Delaware into New Jersey. They marched through Haddonfield, their brass buttons gleaming, their drums echoing through the autumn night. One local man, Jonas Cattell, overheard their plans while detained in town. He slipped away and ran the seventeen miles to Fort Mercer through swamps and brush to warn Greene. That warning would make all the difference.
By the afternoon of October 22, von Donop’s troops had formed outside the fort. He sent an officer forward under a flag of truce to demand surrender. The message was cold and theatrical: “The King of England orders his rebellious subjects to lay down their arms. If they stand the battle, no quarter whatever will be given.”
The reply came back sharp and unshaken: “We ask no quarter, nor will we give any. We mean to defend the fort to the last extremity.”
At 4:45 p.m., the Hessians opened fire. Their artillery thundered, and the ground shook. Then the infantry advanced, their grenadiers moving in precise formation, carrying bundles of sticks to fill the defensive ditch. They came on shouting “Vittoria!” expecting another easy victory.
What they got instead was murder.
The northern assault, led by Colonel von Minnigerode, stormed the outer rampart only to find the inner wall still ahead. The men became tangled in the abatis. Cannon from the fort tore into them at close range, and musket fire ripped through the packed ranks. The southern column, led by von Donop himself, pressed toward the nine-foot parapet under withering fire. Greene ordered his men to hold their fire until the enemy was trapped, then to aim low—“That is where you must shoot,” he said, “at the belt.”
When the volley came, it was devastating. Cannon belched grapeshot. Muskets fired in waves. The air filled with smoke, screams, and the sharp hiss of lead. The Hessians fell in rows and heaps, unable to climb, unable to retreat.
One British observer later said it looked like “a butcher’s shambles.” The American galleys in the river added their own fury, blasting the Hessian flank with chain and bar shot. After barely forty minutes, the assault collapsed. Von Donop lay bleeding from a shattered thigh. His adjutant, Captain Wagner, was dying beside him. Minnigerode was shot through both legs. Colonel Schieck was killed at the gate. Those who could run fled through the dark toward Haddonfield. Those who couldn’t were left among the dead.
When the smoke cleared, the fort still stood. The defenders had lost fewer than fifty men. The Hessians had lost nearly four hundred, with scores more wounded and captured. It was the worst day the German auxiliaries would suffer in the entire war, second only to Bunker Hill in total British casualties.
The next morning, October 23, brought another calamity. The British Navy, eager to redeem the defeat, sent two warships—the 64-gun HMS Augusta and the 18-gun sloop HMS Merlin—upriver to bombard the forts. They ran aground near the chevaux-de-frise and became sitting ducks. American gunners opened up. Fire rafts drifted toward them. The Augusta caught fire and exploded with such force that windows shattered miles away in Philadelphia. Sixty sailors died in the blast. The Merlin burned soon after. Two ships of the line lost in a single day—another blow to British pride.
For a brief moment, the river belonged to the Americans.
But fortune in war is fickle. The British regrouped. They poured men and guns into new batteries opposite Fort Mifflin, and by November 10, began one of the most brutal bombardments of the war. Witnesses said a thousand cannonballs struck the fort every twenty minutes. For five days, the defenders clung to shattered walls and smoke-filled casemates, firing until their cannon burst. On the night of November 15, what was left of them slipped away to Fort Mercer.
Cornwallis crossed into New Jersey with 2,000 men. Greene knew the end had come. He evacuated Fort Mercer on November 20, saving his men. The British finally took the fort the next day. The river was open. Howe could feed his army at last. But that month-long delay—paid for in blood at Red Bank and Mud Island—forced the British to dig in for winter, giving Washington time to move to Valley Forge and rebuild his army.
That’s the part of the story most people know, at least in outline. But what’s been forgotten—or worse, deliberately erased—is who those soldiers were.
The men of the 1st and 2nd Rhode Island Regiments were among the first integrated combat units in American history. Dozens of their ranks were filled by African Americans and Native Americans who had been promised freedom in exchange for service. Their bravery at Red Bank proved that courage wasn’t bound by color or condition. After the war, though, the country turned its back on that truth. By the early 20th century, the story of Fort Mercer had been rewritten to fit a whiter, more comfortable version of history.
In 1906, a tall obelisk was raised at the site. It spoke of valor and victory but said nothing of the Black or Native men who fought there. In 1927, a Gloucester County historian named Frank Stewart wrote a book that denied their participation entirely. His version of events was taught in local schools for generations. Battlefield guides repeated it into the 1990s.
It took modern historians to set the record straight. Dr. Robert Selig documented the participation of at least 48 men of color at Red Bank. Rowan University’s Jennifer Janofsky, the current director of Red Bank Battlefield Park, has led efforts to restore their place in the narrative. A new monument is planned for 2026—one that will tell the whole story. The site is being nominated for the New Jersey Black History Trail.
And while the written record is being corrected, the ground itself has started to speak.
In 2022, archaeologists excavating a section of the park discovered a trench that had lain untouched since 1777. A volunteer spotted what looked like a stick poking from the soil. It was a human femur. Within days, they uncovered the remains of at least thirteen soldiers—Hessians, by all evidence—buried in a mass grave. The bones bore the marks of war. Musket balls lodged in ribs. Shattered legs. Teeth cracked by trauma. Some skeletons were partially dismembered, likely rolled into the trench in haste.
Nearby lay musket balls, grapeshot, uniform buttons, and a single gold guinea dated 1766, still bright after two and a half centuries underground. Forensic analysis continues, with the hope that DNA might identify who they were.
Archaeologist Wade Catts called it “Battlefield Gore.” But it’s more than gore. It’s humanity—raw, stripped of flag and cause. Men who fought and died far from home, buried together without ceremony.
The discovery has changed the tone at Red Bank. Once it was a site of patriotic triumph. Now it is also a place of mourning. Both things can be true.
Christopher Greene’s story didn’t end in triumph either. In 1781, while commanding the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, he was ambushed and killed by Loyalists in New York. They mutilated his body, a savage act that some believe was punishment for leading Black soldiers. He was only forty-four. Congress had given him a sword for his bravery at Red Bank. He never lived to see what his defense truly meant.
The Whitall House still stands at the battlefield, its white clapboards facing the river. During the battle, its Quaker owner, Ann Whitall, refused to flee. She stayed and turned her home into a hospital, tending to Hessians and Americans alike. She wrote later that “the floors ran with blood.” Today the house is preserved, the floorboards scarred but silent.
The Red Bank Battlefield is smaller now, trimmed to forty-four acres of parkland, surrounded by suburbs. But if you stand there on an autumn afternoon, when the wind carries the smell of the river and the trees turn red again, you can almost hear the echoes of that day. The thunder of cannon. The shouts in German and English. The desperate cries of men who learned, too late, that the fort they attacked was not the fort they expected.
It’s easy to romanticize these old battles, to dress them up in glory and flags. But the truth of Red Bank is harder and more honest. It was forty minutes of slaughter that delayed an empire and bought a winter’s breath for a revolution that might have otherwise died. It was a victory by men who had little reason to believe the freedom they fought for would ever be theirs. And it was an act of defiance that still whispers across the centuries.
We like to think we’ve come far since 1777, that the nation those men helped build has learned to remember all its heroes. But memory is a fragile thing. It fades, it bends, it’s rewritten by the comfortable. Red Bank reminds us that history isn’t just what’s carved in stone. It’s what’s buried in the dirt, waiting to be uncovered, named, and honored.
The men who fought there didn’t have the luxury of myth. They had mud, fire, and faith in something that didn’t yet exist—a country that might someday see them as equals. The least we can do is remember them as they were.
Fort Mercer fell. The river opened. Winter came. But in that brief moment, as smoke curled above the Delaware and the stars came out over the ruins, America had won something rare. Not land. Not treasure. But proof—proof that courage can hold the line, even when the world says it can’t.
DAVE DOES HISTORY 
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