It was now late in November, the weather was cold, and gloomy were these "dark days of the Revolution," when the militia left the army by hundreds, their terms of enlistment having expired, and no others took their places.

While the little army of less than four thousand men was constantly depleted, it seemed as if its foes increased, in that country of loyalists and British sympathizers.

It was with only the "skeleton of an army" that Washington, on the eighth of December, crossed the Delaware at Trenton, less than three thousand troops remaining by him then.

Cornwallis and his soldiers were not far behind, during a portion of that gloomy retreat, a few days measuring the distance between the rival armies; but they did not catch up with the Americans that time.
The very day after his arrival at Trenton Washington ordered Putnam to Philadelphia, where he was placed in absolute command, and where he displayed the same energy and integrity of purpose that had always animated him hitherto.

He had been a sustaining force to the Commander-in-Chief on that march across New Jersey, and of the few generals who had stood by him, no one had endured with less complaint or performed with more alacrity than Old Put.