On the morning of June 23, 1780, 160 men stood behind a dismantled bridge and watched nearly 5,000 British and Hessian soldiers crawl toward them across the New Jersey countryside. The men behind the bridge 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 had been ordered to defend, Galloping Hill Bridge over the Rahway River, was the most critical choke point separating the British army from the destruction of George Washington’s headquarters at Morristown.

They were outnumbered 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, you have to understand what had already gone wrong.

Because by the summer of 1780, almost everything had. The war was in its fifth year, and the Continental Army was coming apart. Not because of battlefield losses, though there had been plenty. The army was rotting from within.

The winter encampment at Morristown had been worse than Valley Forge, and most people do not know that. The winter of 1779 to 1780 brought snowfall to northern New Jersey unlike anything anyone alive 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. Wages were months overdue, and when they came at last, Continental currency had become so worthless that a month’s pay could not buy a pair of shoes. Enlistments were expiring, and no one was reenlisting. Desertion was constant.

Two Connecticut Line regiments actually mutinied in late May, throwing down their arms and refusing to serve until they were paid and fed. Washington managed to talk them out of it, but the message was clear. The army that had survived Valley Forge and fought the British to a draw 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.

The replies were slow when they came at all. Some never came. 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, tired of the war, tired of quartering troops, tired 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, maybe even turn fully against the Continental Army. It was a reasonable bet. It was also utterly wrong. Knyphausen had 6,000 soldiers at his disposal on Staten Island.

British regulars from storied regiments: the Brigade of Guards, the Black Watch, the 37th and 38th Foot, the 43rd Foot. Professional Hessians including the dreaded Jaeger Corps, riflemen trained as hunters in the forests of central Europe who specialized 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 of them had grown up on those very roads and farms before choosing to stand with the Crown. Artillery batteries with heavy cannons that could smash fortifications from half a mile away.

Cavalry from the 17th Lancers. This was not a raiding force. This was a full-scale invasion. Their objective 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 on Staten Island. General Thomas Stirling led the advance party, light infantry companies from the 37th and 38th Foot. They landed around midnight at a marshy point near Elizabethtown, checked for American sentries, found none, 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 came out in force.

They were not professional soldiers waiting in formations. They were farmers, shopkeepers, blacksmiths, men 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, house to house, fence to fence. Knyphausen himself noted that the Americans were falling back from house to house and from wood to wood, resisting with everything they had. But the thing that truly changed the nature of this fighting 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, 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 with her baby in her arms. The British burned the parsonage afterward. They burned the church. They burned nearly every building in Connecticut Farms.

But by evening, Knyphausen realized something that should have worried him far more than any single skirmish. The resistance was getting stronger, not weaker. More militia were arriving hour by 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 simmered. 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 more firepower, nearly twenty cannons. Two full columns advancing on two separate roads. The northern column, under General Edward Mathew, took the Vauxhall Road, hugging the edge of Short Hills.

The southern column, under Knyphausen himself with about 3,000 men, marched straight up the Galloping Hill Road toward Springfield. The plan was simple: hit the Americans from two directions, crush them, rush 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 Washington headed north to inspect the defenses there. He left Greene with a force that was, on paper, 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 running 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. Whoever controlled the bridges controlled the rhythm of the entire battle. Greene ordered the planks stripped from every bridge.

He did not destroy the bridges outright because he wanted his own men to be able to retreat across the exposed beams if they had to fall back in a hurry. But without the planks, the British could not rush across them in military formation. They would have to ford the river under fire, wade through chest-deep water, or halt their advance long enough to rebuild the crossings. Both options cost 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. Then Greene set up 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 shield. 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 a 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 men. To put that in perspective, Knyphausen was sending 3,000 men, supported by six cannons, straight at a bridge defended by 160. Angell’s men had a single piece of artillery to answer with, an old four-pounder iron cannon that Captain Eliakim Littell of the militia had dragged up onto a hill behind the bridge. It was not much, but it commanded 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 hit the American positions first, quickly overrunning them and capturing a number of men along with three small cannons. Alarm guns fired immediately. Withdrawing soldiers carried 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 positions with the First New Jersey Regiment and 400 of Lee’s dragoons. Then the main British force appeared along the Galloping Hill Road, and Angell’s men got their first look at what they were facing. Ranks of red-coated infantry stretching down the road. Hessian Jaegers 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 before. Knyphausen wasted no time. He placed his six cannons 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 tore into the earth around the American position, throwing up fountains of dirt and smashing what was left of the bridge’s wooden framework. Splinters ripped through the brush where Angell’s men were sheltering 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-rattling noise, and the Rhode Islanders were taking all of it.

Angell’s men answered with their single four-pounder, and that old cannon did more work than anyone could have expected. Its position on the hill behind the bridge gave the gunners a commanding view of the road for about three quarters of a mile, and every shot tore into the packed British formations trying to advance on the crossing. One cannon against six is not a fair fight by any measure, but one cannon in the right place, served by men who knew they could not miss, can do real damage to troops marching in column formation down an open road. The British infantry charged the bridge twice, trying to storm it in a rush.

Twice Angell’s men beat them back with concentrated musket fire from behind the riverbank. Without the ability to flank around the bridge, the British soldiers were forced to pick their way across the exposed beams or wade directly into the river while Rhode Island muskets blazed at them from the opposite bank. The Rahway River in 1780 was deeper than it is today. Before modern drainage systems changed the water level, the river reached about five feet deep in some places, enough to slow a man carrying sixty pounds of equipment and a musket held over his head to a crawl.

And all the time they spent in that water, they were exposed targets. Here comes the most famous moment of the story. The wadding for Angell’s cannon was running low. 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 had nearly run out. Reverend James Caldwell was on the field that day. The same James Caldwell whose wife Hannah had been shot through the window sixteen days earlier. The same Caldwell who had watched the British burn his church, his parsonage, his village.

He was serving as chaplain to Dayton’s regiment, but he was everywhere during the battle, carrying ammunition, rallying troops, doing whatever needed to be done. When he learned the artillerymen had no more wadding, Caldwell ran to the Presbyterian Church in Springfield. He came back 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 throughout the colonies.

Every congregation in New Jersey would have recognized these books. 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 line of the entire battle: “Give ’em Watts, boys! ” The gunners rammed the hymn pages down the barrel and kept firing.

There is something almost absurd about it, using church hymns as ammunition. But that is exactly what war looks like when everything has run out and you still refuse to surrender. For more than forty minutes, Angell’s 160 men held off five times their number at that bridge. Forty minutes does not sound long when you say it, but stand outside for forty minutes in the June heat while cannons are firing at you and musket balls are whizzing past your head and thousands of soldiers are trying to kill you, and forty minutes becomes a very long time.

The British finally broke the line, but not over the bridge. The 37th and 38th Foot, along with the Hessian Jaegers, forded the Rahway upstream, away from the direct line of fire. They emerged from 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 woods along the riverbank.

Angell’s men fell back slowly, contesting every yard. They fell back toward Shreve’s Second New Jersey 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 roughly 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 stopped 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 pulled the planks from the Vauxhall bridge over the eastern branch of the Rahway, and the river there, though narrow, was deep enough to impede any advance under fire.

Lee’s dragoons 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 regiments streamed in from all over northern New Jersey, men who had heard the signal fires the night before or simply followed the sound of the guns. Knyphausen made one last attempt.

He shifted the Queen’s Rangers, the Guards battalion, and most of his remaining British regulars from the Galloping Hill Road north to the Vauxhall Road, trying to turn the defenders’ flank above Galloping Hill Bridge. But Greene had anticipated this. He had set his defenses in depth precisely because he expected the British to try flanking moves, and every attempt to outflank 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 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 options: advance up the hill into 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 climbing steadily.

His supply line ran 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 horrible way imaginable. As the British troops retreated east through Springfield, they set fire to everything within reach.

Houses that families had built with their own hands went up in flames. Barns filled with hay and grain, mills grinding local wheat, fences, outbuildings. The Presbyterian Church. Everything flammable burned.

The 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 had been used as a British field hospital during the fighting. Even a retreating army does not burn a building full of its own wounded.

That destruction was the final act of a force that realized it had failed. The British marched back through the burned ruins of Connecticut Farms, the same village they had burned two weeks earlier, back to Elizabethtown Point. They crossed to Staten Island over 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 through orchards and churchyards and river crossings, the British were done. They would not try to break through the Watchung Mountains again. 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 upon the officers and soldiers.

He wrote that they had defended an important pass with such stubborn bravery that they lost more than forty men killed, wounded, and missing before they gave up their ground to overwhelming numbers. Nathanael Greene wrote a similar letter of commendation. Israel Angell retired from the army in January 1781 when the two Rhode Island regiments were consolidated into one. He returned home to Rhode Island, where he became a farmer, an innkeeper, and a merchant.

He married three times and fathered seventeen children. He died in Smithfield, Rhode Island, in 1832 at the age of ninety-one. A plaque still stands on the modern bridge over the Rahway River in Union, New Jersey, honoring Angell and his men. But that is what makes this story different from most battles of the Revolutionary War.

This was not Bunker Hill, where thousands of Americans lined up behind fortifications. This was not Saratoga, where a grand campaign ended in 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 achieved a decisive tactical victory. They were eventually pushed 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 holding New Jersey would cost more than it was worth. That regiment had endured more 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 whittled away by sickness, by expiring enlistments not renewed, by 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 soldiers and Native Americans 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, one that fought as fiercely as any unit Washington commanded. At Springfield, those were the men behind the bridge. Veterans from every walk of Rhode Island life standing together at a river crossing in New Jersey, firing hymn pages out of 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 for a battle of 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 battlefield 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 pushed 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, 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 right there, eighteen months before the British surrendered at Yorktown.

That did not happen. And one of the main reasons it did not happen is that 160 men from Rhode Island, 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 gone by nightfall.

The soldiers and farmers who walked through the wreckage thought it was a defeat. But the British were already on their boats heading back to Staten Island, and they never came back. Sometimes, that is what victory looks like.

Not a brilliant triumph, not a parade, just a burned field and an enemy that finally stopped trying.