Death on The Battlefield
A woman guided the Continental army on that night march. A detachment of two hundred men, under Mercer, was sent to seize a bridge at Worth’s Mill. The night had been dreary; the morning was severely cold. Mercer’s presence was revealed at daybreak. General Mahood counter-marched his regiment and crossed the bridge at Worth’s Mill before Mercer could reach it. The British troops charged. The Colonials were driven back. General Mercer dismounted and tried vainly to rally his men. While he was doing this, he was attacked by a group of British troops, who, with the butts of muskets, beat him down and demanded that he surrender. He refused. He was then bayoneted and left for dead on the battlefield. Stabbed in seven different places, he did not expire until January 12, 1777.
Washington finally won the Battle of Princeton, but Mercer was a part of the price he paid. The battles of Trenton and Princeton were the most brilliant victories in the War of the Revolution.
At Fredericksburg a monument perpetuates Mercer’s fame. At the funeral in Philadelphia 30,000 people were present, and there his remains rest in Laurel Hill Cemetery.
The St. Andrew’s Society, which he joined in 1757, erected a monument to his memory and in the historical painting of the Battle of Princeton, by Peale Mercer is given a prominent place. The states of Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Virginia and New Jersey have, by an act of Legislature, named a county “Mercer,” and on October 1, 1897, a bronze tablet to his memory was unveiled at Princeton, N. J. We have not the space to relate all of his illustrious life, but somewhere there is a poem, the last lines of which voice the sentiment of his countrymen.
“But he, himself, is canonized,
If saintly deeds such fame can give;
As long as liberty is prized,
Hugh Mercer’s name shall surely live.”
Sir Lewis Littlepage
In the possession of a well-known man of Richmond, Va., is a large gold key.
It is vastly different from the keys one sees these days, and inquiry develops that it was once the property of one of the most picturesque characters in America—a man who began his life in the cornfields of Hanover County, Va., in 1753, and was swept by the wave of circumstance into the palace of a King.
The atmosphere of old William and Mary College, where Lewis Littlepage was graduated, after the death of his father, gave a mysteriously romantic note to the beckoning song of adventure, which finally became a definite urge, when the youth, after residing in Fredericksburg, listened to the advice of his guardian, Benjamin Lewis, of Spotsylvania County, who placed him with John Jay, the American Minister at Madrid.