Princeton

Princeton matters because of what happened in the ten days between Christmas 1776 and January 3, 1777. After the surprise victory at Trenton, Washington slipped around Cornwallis's army in the night and struck the British garrison at Princeton in a sharp, costly fight that proved the Trenton victory was not a fluke. The two battles together — the Ten Crucial Days — transformed the war from a likely British victory into a genuine contest.

The battle itself centered on an open field south of town and then moved into Princeton's streets and the grounds of Nassau Hall, the College of New Jersey's main building. American troops under Hugh Mercer clashed with British regulars in a bayonet fight that killed Mercer and nearly broke the American line. Washington rode forward into the fire to rally his troops, an act of personal courage that entered American mythology and, more importantly, held the army together at a critical moment.

Nassau Hall, the largest stone building in the colonies at the time, served as a barracks, hospital, and briefly as the seat of the Continental Congress in 1783. A cannonball fired during the battle reportedly passed through a wall and destroyed a portrait of George II — a detail too symbolic to have been invented, though it probably was.

Princeton today preserves the battlefield as an accessible park, and the town's deep institutional memory through the university ensures that the Revolutionary history is maintained with scholarly rigor uncommon in smaller towns.