Destruction of the King's Portrait in Nassau Hall.—Prisoners taken.—Skirmish at Worth's Mills.—Cornwallis at Princeton.
racks by the enemy) there remained a portion of a regiment. Washington drew up some cannon within a short distance of these buildings, and commenced firing upon them.
The first ball, it is said, entered the prayer hall, a room used as a chapel, and passed through the head of a portrait of George the Second, suspended in a large frame upon the wall. After a few discharges, Captain James Moore, of the Princeton militia, with a few others of equal daring, burst open a door of Nassau Hall, and demanded the surrender of the troops within. They instantly complied, and, with several invalids, were made prisoners.
At the close of the action at Clark's, where Mawhood, with the seventeenth, was routed, Washington detached a small party, under Major Kelley, of the Pennsylvania militia, to destroy the bridge over Stony Brook, at Worth's Mills. They had scarcely began the work of destruction when the van of the British troops, advancing from Trenton upon Princeton, appeared upon the hill at Millett's. Cornwallis heard the firing in the direction of Princeton, and suspecting the object of his enemy to be the seizure of his stores at New Brunswick, he made a forced march in pursuit, and arrived near Stony Brook just after the first and decisive battle had been fought. When the British discovered the party engaged in demolishing the bridge, they opened upon them a discharge of heavy round-shot, which drove them away; not, however, until the loose planks were thrown into the stream, and the bridge was rendered impassable for the artillery and baggage. Delay was dangerous, perhaps fatal, and Cornwallis ordered the troops to dash into and ford the swollen stream. *
