A Hessian colonel stood in the New Jersey countryside, about four miles south of the Delaware River, staring at a half-finished earthen fort defended by four hundred Americans. Behind him, two thousand of the finest professional soldiers in Europe formed up for the attack. Grenadiers with their tall brass caps, and Jaeger riflemen who had campaigned in European wars before most of the colonists had ever picked up a musket. The colonel had been humiliated at Trenton, and he had waited nearly a year to erase the stain on his name.
He would not leave New Jersey without a victory. Turning to his officers, he gestured toward the fort and announced that either it would be called Fort Donop by dusk, or he would be among the dead. Forty minutes later, he lay in a ditch with a shattered leg, bleeding to death among the bodies of his men. Nearly four hundred of his elite soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured.
The Americans lost fourteen. In the summer of 1777, British General William Howe loaded a large portion of his army onto transports and sailed south from New York to Chesapeake Bay. His objective was Philadelphia, the capital of the fledgling American nation. When Washington tried to stop him at Brandywine Creek on September 11, the Continental Army suffered a severe defeat.
The British entered Philadelphia on September 26, but Congress had already fled west to York, Pennsylvania. On paper, it looked as though the war might be drawing to a close. The rebels had lost their capital, and their army was exhausted. Howe had every reason to feel confident.
There was only one problem. Philadelphia sat on the Delaware River, and the only reliable way to supply his army was by ships coming up that river from the sea. The overland route from the coast was slow, winding, and completely exposed to American raiding parties who knew the terrain far better than the British. Wagon trains were ambushed.
Militia tore apart supply convoys. One could not feed an army of several thousand men through a Pennsylvania winter by hauling flour along dirt roads. Howe needed the river opened, and for the moment, two American forts closed it completely. Fort Mifflin sat on a muddy island in the middle of the Delaware on the Pennsylvania side.
Fort Mercer stood on high ground at a place called Red Bank on the New Jersey shore, directly across the water. Between the forts, the Americans had driven rows of pointed wooden obstacles called chevaux de frise into the riverbed. These were iron-tipped posts designed to tear open the hull of any ship that tried to pass. A small fleet of Continental Navy vessels and Pennsylvania state navy galleys guarded the gaps.
Together, these defenses formed a blockade that no British warship could break. As long as it held, the British army inside Philadelphia was slowly starving. Howe understood the arithmetic. Taking the forts and opening the river would turn Philadelphia into a secure British winter base.
Failing would make his conquest a trap. So he decided to strike both forts at once. The Royal Navy would bombard Fort Mifflin from the water, while a ground force would storm Fort Mercer. For that land assault, he turned to the Hessians.
The Hessians were German soldiers, mostly from the principality of Hesse-Cassel, fighting in America since 1776. Their ruler had hired them to the British crown for a substantial sum, a deal that enriched him and gave King George the professional infantry needed to wage a war across the Atlantic. By the time of the Revolution, about thirty thousand German soldiers served in British forces in America, and the Hessians of Hesse-Cassel were the largest and most respected corps. They drilled rigorously in the Prussian style, were masters of the bayonet, and many had fought in the Seven Years War in Europe.
Americans feared them, and rightly so. At Long Island in 1776, Hessian grenadiers stormed American positions with such ferocity that entire regiments fled. At White Plains, they did the same. Stories of bayonet charges had circulated through the Continental ranks for over a year.
The man who volunteered to lead the attack on Fort Mercer was Colonel Carl von Donop. He came from a noble Hessian family and had served as adjutant to the Landgrave himself before crossing the Atlantic. He had fought at Brooklyn Heights, Harlem Heights, and White Plains. By late 1776, he was the de facto commander of British garrisons in southern New Jersey.
He was well-connected, ambitious, and, by the testimony of those who served alongside him, arrogant. But here is where the story becomes interesting. In December 1776, Von Donop was supposed to be close enough to reinforce the Hessian garrison at Trenton if trouble arose. He was not.
When George Washington crossed the Delaware on Christmas night and crushed Colonel Johann Rall’s brigade at Trenton, Von Donop’s forces were miles away at Mount Holly. According to his Jaeger commander, a man named Johann Ewald, Von Donop was spending the holiday with a young widow. Whether the story was entirely true or just a rumor that stuck, the result was the same. Rall’s garrison was destroyed.
Nearly a thousand Hessians were captured, and Von Donop, who could have marched to the rescue, did nothing. He was never formally punished, but the stain on his reputation was real. For ten months, he carried the weight of Trenton like an anchor. So when Howe needed someone to lead the assault on Fort Mercer in October 1777, Von Donop did not hesitate.
He volunteered. It was his chance to prove himself again, to show that Hessian troops could still fight and win, and to settle his personal score with the American rebels once and for all. Howe gave him about two thousand men and sent him across the Delaware. The Americans defending Fort Mercer were also in a difficult position.
Colonel Christopher Greene of Warwick, Rhode Island, had endured more trials than most Continental officers by this point. In 1775, he volunteered for Benedict Arnold’s famous march through the Maine wilderness to attack Quebec, an ordeal in which men nearly died of starvation and cold. Greene participated in the assault on Quebec City on New Year’s night and was captured when the attack failed. He spent the next year and eight months as a British prisoner of war before being exchanged in August 1777.
When he returned home, he learned he had been promoted to colonel of the First Rhode Island Regiment while in a British prison. He barely had time to recover before Washington needed him again. In early October, Washington ordered Greene to take the First Rhode Island Regiment, along with the Second Rhode Island Regiment under Colonel Israel Angell, to Fort Mercer at Red Bank. Their mission was simple on paper: hold the fort, keep the river closed, and buy time for the Continental Army.
The problem was numbers. Greene arrived at Red Bank in mid-October with about four hundred men from the two regiments. Some sources suggest the number was slightly higher, perhaps close to five hundred if New Jersey militia and a small company of Continental artillery are included, but the core fighting force consisted of the two Rhode Island regiments, and many of the men were exhausted after months of campaigning. The fort they were supposed to defend was designed for a much larger garrison.
It was a rectangular earthen redoubt stretching about three hundred and twenty yards, surrounded by a ditch and a wall of sharpened logs called an abatis, with fourteen guns aimed mostly toward the river. The Polish engineer Tadeusz Kościuszko had helped design the original plan, but with only four hundred men to defend it, the place was simply too large. Greene could spread his troops along the entire perimeter, making them weak everywhere, or he could concentrate them and leave entire sections empty. Neither option was good.
Then a twenty-four-year-old French engineer changed everything. Thomas Antoine de Mauduit du Plessis arrived at Fort Mercer before the Hessian attack, took one look at the situation, and immediately saw the solution. The fort was too large, so he decided to make it smaller. He ordered the construction of a new inner wall that cut across the northern section of the fort, effectively dividing it in two.
The southern section, roughly pentagonal in shape, became the actual fort. Greene packed his four hundred men into this tighter space, where they could cover every wall with concentrated fire. The northern section, the part behind the new inner wall, was simply evacuated. But here is the part that made the work a masterpiece.
The new inner wall was not visible from outside the fort. From the perspective of the approaching Hessians, the outer walls of the abandoned northern section looked just as fortified as the rest of the fort. The attacking force would storm those outer works, climb the ditch, cross the abatis, and pour into the fort thinking they had breached the defenses, only to run into a second wall they never knew existed. The abandoned section became a kill zone, a dead area surrounded on three sides by American rifles and cannons loaded with grapeshot.
Du Plessis also strengthened the fort’s inner walls and provided firing platforms, positioning the fourteen guns so they could sweep the abandoned outer section with devastating enfilade fire. By the time he finished, four hundred men could defend the fort as effectively as a garrison three times their size. It was a simple idea, and it proved to be one of the most effective defensive tricks of the entire war. On October 21, the Hessian column under Von Donop crossed the Delaware and landed at Cooper’s Ferry, in what is now Camden, New Jersey.
They camped that night about four miles from Fort Mercer. Inside the fort, Greene and his men knew the Hessians were coming. Local farmers had reported the column’s movements, and the Americans spent their last days preparing for exactly this kind of attack. The men slept with loaded muskets and dry powder.
At three in the morning on October 22, the Hessians struck camp and resumed their march. By late afternoon, two thousand Hessian soldiers reached Red Bank and began deploying for the assault in the fading autumn light. Von Donop organized his force into three columns. He anchored his flanks on the Delaware River and placed his battalions in an arc around the landward side of the fort.
Each assault unit carried bundles of sticks called fascines, meant to be thrown into the ditch so soldiers could cross. What they did not carry were axes and saws to cut through the sharpened abatis. That proved to be a fatal mistake. At four in the afternoon, Von Donop sent an officer and a drummer under a white flag with a message to Colonel Greene.
The message was direct. The King of England ordered his rebellious subjects to lay down their arms. If they refused and chose to fight, there would be no mercy. Greene’s reply was equally direct.
They asked for no mercy and would give none. Von Donop had the answer he wanted. He turned to his men and gave the order to attack. The Hessian columns advanced at a quick pace, trying to cover the open ground as fast as possible while American artillery and the guns of three American warships in the river pounded them from the flank and rear.
The bombardment was intense, but the Hessians were professionals and kept coming. A column led by Lieutenant Colonel von Minningerode pushed toward the fort’s northern front. The other two columns, under Colonels von Mirbach and von Lensing, attacked the eastern and southern walls. Minningerode’s men hit the outer works first.
They pushed through a thin American skirmish line, climbed the ditch, fought their way through the abatis, and poured into the fort. For a moment, they thought they had won. The northern section of Fort Mercer was empty. They were inside the walls.
Then they saw it. A second wall, higher and stronger than the first, with American rifles and cannons protruding from every opening. They had marched straight into du Plessis’s trap. The Americans opened fire at point-blank range.
Musket balls tore through the packed Hessian ranks. The cannons, loaded with small iron balls, blasted volleys of shrapnel that shredded bodies at close range. The Rhode Islanders had been waiting for this moment, and they did not waste it. Some lobbed grenades over the wall into the crowds of Hessians trapped below, sending fragments and smoke in every direction.
On the other sides of the fort, Mirbach and Lensing’s battalions faced an even worse situation. Those parts of the wall were fully manned by American defenders, and the Hessians never came close to breaking through. The wooden obstacles slowed their advance considerably. These were not small branches.
They were whole trees, felled and sharpened, with branches cut into points and angled outward toward the attackers, forming an interlocked barrier nearly impossible to penetrate under fire. Without axes or saws, the Hessians had no way to cut through. Men tried to climb, tried to squeeze between the posts, while the Americans on the wall above them kept firing. The soldiers spread out into a line to try to find gaps in the obstacles, which made them easier targets, because a spread-out line moves slowly and exposes more bodies to aim at.
The American musket fire harvested their lives as they floundered in the ditch, tangled in the sharpened wood, unable to advance and unwilling to retreat. The American warships in the Delaware rained cannonballs and grapeshot on the Hessian flanks and rear the entire time. The Hessians had placed a battalion of grenadiers to try to suppress the ships, but a land unit could do little against vessels maneuvering in the water. The crossfire was devastating.
Von Donop himself fell somewhere near the ditch on the fort’s southern side. A blast of grapeshot or shrapnel shattered his thigh, and he collapsed among the dead and dying. With their commander wounded and the assault failing on all fronts, the Hessian officers still standing tried to rally their men for another push. They managed a second assault, then a third, but neither advanced farther than the first.
The fire from behind those walls was simply too dense. After about forty minutes of fighting, the surviving Hessians withdrew. They left their dead and wounded scattered across the ditches and tangled in the obstacles around the fort. The battle was over.
The scene outside Fort Mercer after the fighting stopped was gruesome. Hessian bodies lay in heaps in the ditches and among the sharpened stakes. The official Hessian report listed eighty-two killed, two hundred and twenty-eight wounded, and about sixty missing or captured, though some accounts put the total closer to four hundred. Inside the fort, American losses were astonishingly light.
Fourteen killed and twenty-three wounded. The ratio was almost unbelievable, and it reflected just how effective du Plessis’s fortification design had truly been. After the firing stopped, du Plessis himself went out beyond the walls to survey the damage and repair some of the abatis that had been torn during the assault. As he walked among the corpses, he heard a voice calling from the ditch.
“Whoever you are, get me out of here. ” It was Colonel von Donop, lying among his dead soldiers with a shattered leg, unable to move. Du Plessis realized he was speaking to the enemy commander. He ordered the wounded colonel carried into the fort.
Von Donop was later moved to the house of a woman named Ann Whitall, which the Americans were using as a field hospital. He was placed alongside other wounded men, American and Hessian alike. When Greene came to see the dying colonel, things could have gone badly. Von Donop’s own surrender demand had threatened to give no mercy, and his men had been ordered to show none.
The Americans had every reason to treat him harshly, but they did not. Von Donop reportedly looked at his captors and said he was in their hands and they could take revenge on him. When he realized du Plessis was a French officer, he switched to French and said he was content to die in the hands of honor itself. Von Donop lingered for three days.
On October 25, he died in the house of a local man named Joseph Low. According to multiple sources, his last words were that this was an early end to a promising career, and that he died a victim of his own ambition and the greed of his prince. He was buried with military honors at Red Bank on the banks of the Delaware, where the river has likely long since washed away his grave. The disaster was not over for the British.
The day after the Hessian attack, October 23, a squadron of British warships tried to force their way past the Americans on the river. The fleet was led by HMS Augusta, a sixty-four-gun ship of the line and one of the largest vessels in the Royal Navy. Alongside her were HMS Roebuck, HMS Pearl, HMS Liverpool, and the small sloop HMS Merlin. Their mission was to break through the defensive obstacles, suppress the forts with naval gunfire, and finally open the river.
Things went wrong almost immediately. Navigating the narrow channels between the submerged obstacles and shifting sandbars was hazardous even in calm conditions. Under fire, doing it with precision was nearly impossible. Both the Augusta and the smaller Merlin ran hard aground on a sandbar while maneuvering into position.
They were stuck, unable to turn or retreat, and became easy targets for the American guns firing from Fort Mifflin and the Continental warships surrounding them in the water. The Americans poured everything they had into the two stranded vessels. Round shot slammed into the Augusta’s hull. At some point, fire broke out aboard her.
Whether the fire came from a lucky American hit or from the heat of Augusta’s own guns firing during the engagement is still debated. But once the flames caught, they could not be put out. The fire spread below deck and reached the ship’s powder magazine. The explosion was tremendous, one of the largest anyone in the region had ever seen.
Residents of Philadelphia, miles away, heard the blast and felt its concussion. More than sixty British sailors died in the explosion. The Augusta sank as the largest British warship lost in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. The crew of the Merlin set fire to their own ship and abandoned her to prevent her from falling into American hands.
In about twenty-four hours, the British lost nearly four hundred Hessian soldiers and two warships, and had not advanced an inch toward opening the Delaware. The victory at Red Bank did not guarantee Fort Mercer’s survival forever. Howe was furious at the failure and immediately began planning a larger, more organized attack on the river forts. From late October through November, British artillery batteries on the Pennsylvania shore bombarded Fort Mifflin with such force that the small island fort was practically reduced to rubble.
By November 15, the garrison at Fort Mifflin was forced to evacuate. Without its partner fort on the opposite side of the river, Fort Mercer’s survival became impossible. Greene’s men abandoned it on November 20, and the British finally opened their supply line before winter fully set in. But here is the significance of Red Bank in the larger picture.
Those extra weeks the forts held out were not worthless. Every day the British could not supply Philadelphia by river was added pressure on Howe’s army. Another day of shrinking rations, of frustrated officers and troops wondering why the most powerful navy in the world could not get past two small forts. And every one of those days gave Washington’s exhausted Continental Army a chance to regroup, reorganize, and prepare for what came next, which turned out to be the long, brutal winter at Valley Forge.
The Continental Army that marched to Valley Forge in December 1777 was ragged and undersupplied, but it was not broken. Red Bank was part of the reason why. The victory gave the American side something desperately needed at that stage of the war: proof that they could hold their ground and fight against professional European soldiers on a prepared battlefield and win. Not just survive a skirmish, or retreat in good order and call it a draw, but destroy an attacking force that outnumbered them five to one and force the survivors to limp back to their own lines.
Christopher Greene, the man who held the fort that day, went on to make more history. After losses at Red Bank and the rest of the 1777 campaign reduced the Rhode Island regiments, General James Varnum petitioned Washington to allow enslaved men to enlist, and Washington agreed. Greene returned to Rhode Island and recruited formerly enslaved Black men into the First Rhode Island Regiment, creating one of the first units of African American soldiers in American military history. That regiment fought with distinction at the Battle of Rhode Island in 1778 and later served at Yorktown when Cornwallis surrendered in 1781.
Greene himself did not live to see the end of the war. In May 1781, he was attacked and killed by a Loyalist raiding party along the Croton River in New York. Some historians believe he was targeted specifically because he led Black troops. Von Donop went to Red Bank seeking glory and found his grave.
Greene went there with four hundred men, a French engineer, and a simple plan, and achieved one of the most remarkable defensive victories of the Revolution. The battle lasted forty minutes, but the story behind it, the humiliated Hessian colonel, the defiant Rhode Islander, and the invisible wall inside the fort, is the kind of story that deserves to be remembered far more than it is now.