Stony Point

The war in the north had gone static: Clinton in New York, Washington watching him from the Highlands, neither able to force a fight. So Clinton lunged up the Hudson, took the crossing at King's Ferry, and fortified a rock the British called close to impregnable, hoping Washington would come down and bleed for it. Washington refused the bait and planned something else entirely.

A thirteen-mile night march, two columns with their muskets unloaded so no nervous shot could give the surprise away, twenty-man parties hacking lanes through the abatis ahead of each, and one center detachment firing to pull the garrison the wrong way. It went in around midnight and it was over in about twenty-five minutes.

An army with every grievance in its hands took five hundred prisoners and gave quarter, and both sides said so. Three of the war's dozen medals, a French volunteer with the first one ever struck, a copycat raid a month later, and a fort Washington took the trouble to capture and then deliberately threw away.