On the morning of June 23, 1780, one hundred and sixty men stood behind a bridge with its planks torn away, watching nearly five thousand British and Hessian soldiers march toward them across the New Jersey countryside. The men belonged to the Second Rhode Island Regiment. Their commander, Colonel Israel Angell, had begun the war as a barrel maker from Johnston, Rhode Island. The position they were ordered to defend, Galloping Hill Bridge over the Rahway River, was the key choke point separating the British army from the destruction of George Washington’s headquarters at Morristown.
They were outnumbered by roughly thirty to one. They had a single cannon. And they were not going to leave. To understand how 160 Rhode Islanders ended up at that bridge, one must understand what had already gone wrong.
By the summer of 1780, nearly everything had. The war was in its fifth year, and the Continental Army was falling apart, not because of battlefield losses, though there were plenty of those, but from within. The winter encampment at Morristown had been worse than Valley Forge, though most people never learned that. The winter of 1779 to 1780 brought snow to northern New Jersey unlike anything the living had ever seen.
Roads vanished. Supply wagons could not move. Soldiers went days without food, and when food did arrive, it was often spoiled or so scarce that men shared a single ration among four. Pay was months overdue, and when it came, the Continental currency was so worthless that a month’s wages could not buy a pair of shoes.
Enlistments were expiring, and no one was reenlisting. Desertion was constant. Two regiments of the Connecticut Line had actually mutinied in late May, throwing down their arms and refusing to serve until they were paid and fed. Washington managed to persuade them back, but the message was clear.
The army that had survived Valley Forge and fought the British to a standstill at Monmouth was now closer to collapse than at any point in the war. Washington wrote letter after letter to Congress, begging for supplies, for men, for anything. Replies were slow, if they came at all. Some never did.
So when Lieutenant General Wilhelm von Knyphausen, the Hessian commander running the British garrison in New York City, looked across the water toward New Jersey that spring, he saw his opportunity. His intelligence reports told him the people of New Jersey were exhausted, sick of the war, sick of quartering troops, sick of watching their farms trampled by both sides. Knyphausen believed that if he marched a large enough force into the state, the locals might actually welcome the British, perhaps even turn completely against the Continental Army. It was a reasonable bet.
It was also completely wrong. Knyphausen had six thousand soldiers at his disposal on Staten Island. British regulars from famous regiments: the Brigade of Guards, the Black Watch, the 37th and 38th Foot, the 43rd Foot. Professional Hessians, including the dreaded Jäger Corps, riflemen trained as hunters in the forests of central Europe, specialists in skirmishing and flanking maneuvers.
Loyalist units like the Queen’s Rangers and the New Jersey Volunteers, men who knew the local roads and farms because many had grown up on those very roads and farms before choosing the Crown. Artillery batteries with heavy guns that could smash fortifications from half a mile away. Cavalry from the 17th Light Dragoons. This was not a raiding force.
This was a full-scale invasion force, and their target was Hobart Gap, the narrow pass through the Watchung Mountains that would open a direct road to Washington’s headquarters eleven miles to the west. If Knyphausen could break through that gap, the war in the North could end in a single afternoon. On the night of June 6, the first troops boarded boats at Staten Island. General Thomas Stirling led the vanguard, the light infantry companies of the 37th and 38th Foot.
They landed around midnight at a marshy point near Elizabethtown, found no American guards, and signaled the rest of the force to cross. By morning, thousands of British and Hessian soldiers were marching west through New Jersey. They expected to be welcomed. Instead, they were shot at.
The New Jersey militia turned out in force. These were not professional soldiers waiting in formations. They were farmers, shopkeepers, and blacksmiths who grabbed their muskets and ran toward the sound of gunfire. The Third New Jersey Regiment under Colonel Elias Dayton met the British column head-on.
General William Maxwell deployed his entire New Jersey Brigade behind a ravine near the village of Connecticut Farms. The fighting on June 7 was brutal. The British pushed from house to house, fence line to fence line. Knyphausen himself noted that the Americans were retreating from house to house and wood to wood, resisting with all their might.
But the thing that truly changed the nature of this fight happened at a small parsonage on the edge of the village. Hannah Caldwell was the wife of Reverend James Caldwell, chaplain of Dayton’s regiment and one of the most outspoken patriots in New Jersey. James had moved most of his family to safety as the British approached, but Hannah stayed with her nine-month-old baby and her four-year-old son. She thought that as a civilian, and as a mother holding an infant, she would be safe.
A British light infantryman approached the parsonage window. According to the family servant, Abigail Lennington, the soldier raised his musket and fired through the glass. Hannah Caldwell died instantly, her child in her arms. The British burned the parsonage afterward.
They burned the church. They burned nearly every building in Connecticut Farms. By evening, Knyphausen realized something that should have concerned him far more than any single skirmish. The resistance was growing stronger, not weaker.
More militiamen were arriving hour after hour. The people of New Jersey were not welcoming the British. They were furious. Knyphausen pulled his troops back to a defensive position near Elizabethtown and waited.
For two weeks, the countryside was tense. Signal fires blazed on the Watchung Mountains every night, ready to announce another attack. Then on June 23, the British came again. This time they brought far greater firepower, nearly twenty guns.
Two full columns advanced on separate roads. The northern column, under General Edward Mathew, took the Vauxhall Road along the edge of Short Hills. The southern column, led by Knyphausen himself with about three thousand men, marched straight up the Galloping Hill Road toward Springfield. The plan was simple: hit the Americans from two directions, crush them, race through Hobart Gap, and end the war in the North.
Standing in their way was Major General Nathanael Greene. Washington had been in Springfield until the day before, but intelligence reports suggested the British might also target West Point, so he had headed north to inspect the defenses there. Greene was left behind with a force that, on paper, was laughably small. About 1,500 Continentals and a few hundred New Jersey militia against an invading force more than three times their size.
But Greene was one of the finest tactical minds in the Continental Army, a self-taught strategist from Rhode Island who had gone from managing his family’s iron foundry to commanding divisions in the field, and he knew exactly how to use the terrain. The Rahway River ran through Springfield in two branches, and every road the British needed crossed that river at some point. The bridges were the choke points, and whoever controlled the bridges controlled the pace of the entire battle. Greene ordered the planks stripped from every bridge.
He did not destroy the bridges entirely because he wanted his men to be able to retreat across the exposed beams if they had to withdraw in a hurry. But without the planks, the British could not rush across in military formation. They would have to fight through the river under fire, wade through chest-deep water, or halt their advance long enough to rebuild the crossings. Every option cost them time, and time was exactly what Greene was fighting for.
Every hour the British spent stuck at a river crossing was another hour for New Jersey militia to arrive from farms and towns across the region. Greene then laid out four successive defensive lines along the Galloping Hill Road. Colonel Dayton with the Third New Jersey Regiment and militia under Brigadier General Nathaniel Heard held Connecticut Farms as the first line, a forward screen. Behind them, at Galloping Hill Bridge itself, Greene placed Colonel Israel Angell and his Second Rhode Island Regiment.
Behind Angell, at a second bridge over the western branch of the Rahway, he placed Colonel Israel Shreve and the Second New Jersey Regiment. Behind Shreve, Brigadier General Philemon Dickinson waited with more New Jersey militia as the final reserve. Galloping Hill Bridge was the critical point. If the British broke through that position, they would advance straight toward Springfield and beyond.
And the man Greene trusted to hold it was Israel Angell, whose regiment had been reduced by sickness and expired enlistments to just 160 soldiers. Knyphausen was sending 3,000 men, supported by six cannon, directly at a bridge defended by 160. Angell’s men had only one piece of artillery to answer with, an old four-pounder iron cannon that militia Captain Eliakim Little had dragged onto a hill behind the bridge. It was not much, but it had a clear field of fire for three-quarters of a mile, and that mattered.
At five in the morning, the British vanguard moved out from Elizabethtown Point. The Queen’s Rangers and New Jersey Volunteers struck the American positions first, overran them quickly, and captured a number of men along with three small cannon. Alarm guns fired immediately. The withdrawing troops passed the news to Maxwell, who sent Dayton forward to slow the advance.
On the Vauxhall Road, Major Henry Light-Horse Harry Lee and Colonel Aaron Ogden took up positions with the First New Jersey Regiment and 400 of Lee’s cavalry. Then the main British force appeared along the Galloping Hill Road, and Angell’s men got their first look at what they faced. Rows of red-coated infantry stretching down the road. Hessian Jägers moving through the woods on the flanks, their green coats blending with the tree line.
Artillery pieces being hauled into position. And behind it all, more soldiers than most of these Rhode Islanders had ever seen in one place. Knyphausen wasted no time. He placed his six guns on the high ground along the Galloping Hill Road and opened fire on the bridge with everything he had.
The bombardment was relentless. Iron cannonballs smashed into the earth around the American position, throwing up fountains of dirt and shattering the wooden remains of the bridge structure. Shrapnel tore through the vegetation where Angell’s men crouched behind whatever cover they could find: fallen trees, fence rails, the stone abutments of the bridge itself. Six cannons firing in sequence is a chest-shaking noise, and the Rhode Islanders took all of it.
Angell’s men answered with their single four-pounder, and that old cannon did more work than anyone expected. Its position on the hill behind the bridge gave the gunners a commanding view of the road for nearly three-quarters of a mile, and every shot tore through the packed British formations trying to advance toward the crossing. One gun against six was not a fair fight by any measure, but one gun in the right place, served by men who knew they could not miss, could do real damage to troops marching in column formation on an open road. Twice the British infantry rushed the bridge in force.
Twice Angell’s men drove them back with concentrated musket fire from behind the riverbank. Without the ability to bypass the bridge, the British soldiers had to pick their way across the exposed beams or wade directly into the river, while Rhode Island muskets poured fire from the opposite bank. The Rahway River in 1780 was deeper than it is today. Before modern drainage systems changed the water levels, the river reached about five feet deep in places, enough to slow a man carrying sixty pounds of equipment and a musket over his head to a crawl.
And all the time they spent in that water, they were exposed targets. Then came the most famous moment of the battle. The wadding for Angell’s cannon was nearly gone. Wadding is the material packed into the barrel after the powder charge and before the cannonball to create a seal that makes the gun fire properly.
Without it, the cannon was useless, and their supply was almost exhausted. Reverend James Caldwell was on the field that day. The same James Caldwell whose wife Hannah had been shot through a window sixteen days earlier. The same Caldwell who had watched the British burn his church, his parsonage, and his village.
He was serving as chaplain of Dayton’s regiment, but he was everywhere during the battle, carrying ammunition, rallying troops, doing whatever needed to be done. When he learned the gunners had no more wadding, Caldwell ran to the Presbyterian church in Springfield. He returned with his arms full of hymn books, heavy leather-bound volumes that had been placed in the pews. These were hymns by Isaac Watts, the English minister whose psalms and hymns were standard in Presbyterian churches across the colonies.
Caldwell tore them apart with his bare hands, ripped the pages from their bindings, and handed handfuls of hymn sheets to the gunners. Then he shouted what became the most famous phrase of the entire battle: Give ’em Watts, boys. The gunners stuffed the hymn pages into the cannon’s mouth and kept firing. There was something almost absurd about it, using church hymns as ammunition, but that was exactly what war looked like when everything had run out and you still refused to surrender.
For more than forty minutes, Angell’s 160 men held against five times their number at that bridge. Forty minutes does not sound like a long time when you say it, but stand outside for forty minutes in June heat while cannons fire at you, musket balls whiz past your head, and thousands of soldiers try to kill you, and forty minutes becomes a very long time. The British finally broke through, but not over the bridge. The 37th and 38th Foot, along with the Hessian Jägers, crossed the Rahway upstream, away from the direct line of fire.
They came out of the woods on the far side and hit the Rhode Islanders from a different angle. What followed was twenty-five minutes of vicious tree-to-tree fighting in the dense forest on the riverbank. Angell’s men fell back slowly, contesting every yard. They withdrew toward Shreve’s Second New Jersey Regiment at the next bridge.
Even then, the British had to fight for it. Angell’s regiment lost more than forty men, killed, wounded, and missing. Out of 160, that was nearly one in four, and they had inflicted heavy losses in return. The men they were fighting, British regulars and Hessian professionals, were among the best-trained soldiers in the world, and the Rhode Islanders had held them at the river for nearly an hour.
Meanwhile, on the Vauxhall Road to the north, the second British column was having its own problems. Lee and Ogden had stripped the planks from the Vauxhall Bridge over the eastern branch of the Rahway, and the river there, though narrow, was deep enough to stall any advance under fire. Lee’s cavalry and Ogden’s New Jersey regulars fought a sharp, grinding battle at the crossing, buying the same time Angell was buying at Galloping Hill. The fighting along the Vauxhall Road was just as fierce as anything happening at the main bridge, and the militia kept arriving.
Companies and detachments poured in from all over northern New Jersey, men who had heard the signal fires the night before, or simply followed the sound of the cannon. Knyphausen made one final attempt. He shifted the Queen’s Rangers, the brigade of Guards, and most of his remaining British regulars from the Galloping Hill Road north to the Vauxhall Road, trying to flank the defenders at Galloping Hill Bridge from above. But Greene had anticipated this.
He had placed his defenses in depth precisely because he expected the British to attempt flanking movements, and every envelopment attempt ran into another line of American defenders. The British finally pushed into Springfield itself, but by the time they got there, they had been fighting for hours. Their momentum was completely spent. Greene had already pulled his troops back to prepared positions on the heights west of the town, where he had placed reinforcements and another cannon.
The American defensive line on the heights was strong, and Knyphausen could see it clearly. He had two choices: advance up the hill against fresh American troops holding the high ground, or withdraw. Knyphausen had expected the people of New Jersey to collapse. Instead, the militia were still streaming toward the battle from every direction.
His own casualties were mounting. His supply line stretched all the way back to Elizabethtown Point, and the longer he stayed, the greater the risk that Washington would return with the main army and cut off his retreat entirely. Knyphausen chose to withdraw, but he did it in the most brutal way possible. As the British forces retreated east through Springfield, they set fire to everything they could reach.
Homes that families had built with their own hands went up in flames. Barns full of hay and grain, mills grinding local wheat, fences, outbuildings. The Presbyterian church. Everything that could burn, burned.
Smoke rose high enough to be seen for miles, a dark column visible from the Watchung ridge line where American scouts watched the retreat. When the fires died down, only four houses remained standing in the entire village. One of them, the Cannonball House, survived only because it was used as a British field hospital during the fighting. Even a retreating army does not burn a building full of its own wounded.
This destruction was the final act of a force that realized it had failed. The British marched back through the burnt ruins of Connecticut Farms, the same village they had burned two weeks earlier, back to Elizabethtown Point. They crossed to Staten Island on a bridge of boats, then dismantled the bridge behind them. They never came back.
Not the next month. Not the next year. Never. The Battle of Springfield was the last British invasion of New Jersey.
After five years of marching back and forth across the state, burning towns and fighting running battles in orchards and churchyards and river crossings, the British were done. They would not try again to break through the Watchung Mountains. They would not threaten Washington’s headquarters at Morristown again. The northern front of the American Revolution was effectively over.
Yorktown was only sixteen months away. George Washington understood what had happened at that bridge. When the reports reached him, he wrote a personal letter to Governor William Greene of Rhode Island. Washington said the brave conduct of Colonel Angell’s regiment at Springfield reflected the highest honor on the officers and soldiers.
He wrote that they had defended an important pass with such stubborn courage that they lost more than forty men killed, wounded, and missing before yielding their position to overwhelming numbers. Nathanael Greene wrote a similar letter of praise. Israel Angell retired from the army in January 1781 when the two Rhode Island regiments were consolidated into one unit. He returned home to Rhode Island, where he became a farmer, an innkeeper, and a merchant.
He married three times and had seventeen children. He died in Smithfield, Rhode Island, in 1832 at the age of ninety-one. There is still a plaque standing on the modern bridge over the Rahway River in Union, New Jersey, honoring Angell and his men. But what makes this story different from most Revolutionary War battles is not the scale.
This was not Bunker Hill, where thousands of Americans lined up behind fortifications. This was not Saratoga, where a massive campaign led to the surrender of an entire British army. These were 160 sick, underpaid, undersupplied soldiers from the smallest state in the Union, led by a man who had made barrels for a living before the war, asked to stand at a bridge and hold against an army. And they did.
Not because they won a decisive tactical victory. They were eventually forced back. But they held long enough. Long enough for Greene’s defensive plan to work.
Long enough for the militia to arrive. Long enough for the British to realize that controlling New Jersey would cost more than it was worth. Those Rhode Island regiments had seen more service than most units in the Continental Army. They had served at Valley Forge.
They had fought at Brandywine and Red Bank. By the Battle of Springfield, they had been in the field for years, their numbers eroded by disease, expiring enlistments, and the slow attrition that gnawed at every Continental unit as the war dragged on. Only 160 men remained. And when you think about who those men really were, the story gains even more weight.
The Rhode Island regiments were among the most diverse units in the Continental Army. The First and Second Rhode Island Regiments included Black and Native American soldiers alongside white troops. Rhode Island, the smallest state with a population under 60,000, simply could not fill its quotas with white volunteers alone. So the state legislature passed a law allowing enslaved men to enlist in exchange for their freedom.
The result was a fighting force unlike the rest of the army, and it fought as fiercely as any unit Washington commanded. At Springfield, these were the men behind the bridge. Veterans from every part of Rhode Island’s population standing together at a river crossing in New Jersey, firing hymn pages from a cannon because they had run out of everything else. The Battle of Springfield rarely appears in textbooks.
It does not have the fame of Lexington or Yorktown or Valley Forge. If you ask someone about a battle from the Revolution, you will hear Bunker Hill, or Yorktown, maybe Saratoga. Almost no one mentions Springfield. Even people who live in New Jersey and drive past the battle site on their way to the Short Hills Mall.
The Rahway River, where Angell’s men fought, is today a quiet stream running through residential neighborhoods and public parks. Galloping Hill Road is an ordinary street with traffic lights. Nothing about the place today suggests that a battle of such importance happened there. But historians who study it closely tend to reach the same conclusion.
If the British had broken through at Springfield, if they had crossed the Rahway and passed through the Watchung Gap, they would have struck Washington’s main army at its weakest moment of the entire war. The Continental Army in the summer of 1780 was starving, mutinous, and barely holding together. A decisive defeat at Morristown could have shattered what remained of Continental resistance in the North. It could have ended the war there, eighteen months before the British surrender at Yorktown.
It did not happen, and one of the main reasons it did not happen is that 160 Rhode Islanders, led by a former barrel maker named Israel Angell, stood at a bridge for forty minutes and said no. Springfield burned. Most of the town was reduced to ash by nightfall. The soldiers and farmers who walked through the wreckage thought it was a defeat.
But the British were on their boats heading back to Staten Island, and they never came back. Sometimes that is what victory looks like. Not a triumph, not a parade, just a burned field and an enemy that finally stopped trying.