If Washington is the general I take him to be he will not be found in the morning.

From 1776 by David McCulough. Page 287.

In the last light of day Cornwallis and his commanders had convened to decide whether to carry the attack across the Assunpink still again, or to wait for daylight. “If Washington is the general I take him to be,” one of them, Sir William Erskine, is alleged to have commented, “he will not be found in the morning.” Cornwallis is said to have replied that they would “bag him” in the morning.

It was an understandable decision. Night attacks could be extremely costly and there seemed no reason not to wait.

The British engineer Captain Archibald Robertson thought the Americans had positioned themselves extremely well. “We…durst not attack them,” Robertson recorded in his diary. “They were exactly in the position Rall should have taken when he was attacked, from which he might have retreated towards Borden’s Town [downstream on the Delaware] with very little loss.”

It had turned cold again. The British troops slept that night on the frozen ground and without campfires in order to keep watch on the rebels and their fires across the creek.

But when morning came, the Americans were gone. Leaving a small force to keep the fires burning and make the appropriate noises of an army settling in for the night, Washington and some 5,500 men, horses, and cannon had stolen away in the dark. But instead of heading south to Bordentown as would be expected, he struck off on a wide, daring sweep on little-known back roads to attack Cornwallis’s rear guard at Princeton.

They marched east to Sandtown, then north-northeast to Quaker Bridge by mud roads frozen as hard as rock. Fields along the way were covered with hoarfrost, and with a few dim stars overhead the night was not as dark as it might have been. But for men with scant clothing and broken shoes, or no shoes, it was again an extreme ordeal.