Trenton, the capital of New Jersey, is thirty miles from Philadelphia,
a prosperous city with seventy thousand people. The first and most
lasting impression many visitors get of it is of the deep rift cut
into the clays and gravels of the southern part of the town, to let
the Pennsylvania Railroad go through. Here, as everywhere, are
displayed the lavish deposits of the "Trenton gravel" as the railway
passes under the streets, and even under the Delaware and Raritan
Canal, to its depressed station alongside Assunpink Creek of
Revolutionary memory, the chief part of the city spreading far to the
northward. Trenton is as old as Philadelphia, its reputed founder
being Mahlon Stacy, who came up from Burlington Friends' Meeting,
while the settlement was named for William Trent, an early Jersey
law-maker. The Trenton potteries are its chief industry, established
by a colony of Staffordshire potters from England, attracted by its
prolific clay deposits; and the conical kilns, which turn out a
product worth five or six millions of dollars annually, are scattered
at random over the place. Their china ware has been advanced to a high
stage of perfection, and displays exquisite decoration. The Trenton
cracker factories are also famous. The finest building is the State
House, as the Capitol is called, the Delaware River's swift current
bubbling over rocks and among grassy islands out in front of the
grounds. At Broad and Clinton Streets, the intersection of two of the
chief highways, mounted as an ornament upon a drinking-fountain, is
the famous "Swamp Angel" cannon, brought from Charleston harbor after
the Civil War. This was one of the earliest heavy guns made, plain and
rather uncouth-looking, about ten feet long, and rudely constructed in
contrast with the elongated and tapering rifled cannon of to-day, and
it rests upon a conical pile of brownstone. It was the most noted gun
of the Civil War, an eight-inch Parrott rifle, or two-hundred-pounder,
and, when fired, carried a one-hundred-and-fifty-pound projectile
seven thousand yards from a battery on Morris Island into the city of
Charleston, which was then regarded as a prodigious achievement. It is
a muzzle-loader, weighing about eight tons, and burst after firing
thirty-six rounds at Charleston, in August, 1863, the fracture being
plainly seen around the breech.
Trenton's great historical feature is the Revolutionary battlefield,
now completely built upon. Washington, having crossed the Delaware on
Christmas night, in the early morning of December 26, 1776, marched
down to Trenton, and surprised and defeated the Hessians under Rahl,
who were encamped north of Assunpink Creek. A fine battle-monument
stands in a small park adjoining Warren Street, at the point where
Washington's army, coming into town from the north, first engaged the
enemy. Here Alexander Hamilton, then Captain of the New York State
Company of Artillery, opened fire from his battery on the Hessians,
who fled through the town, along Warren, then called King Street. The
monument is a fluted Roman-Doric column, rising one hundred and
thirty-five feet, surmounted by a statue of Washington, representing
him standing, field-glass in hand, surveying the flying Hessians, his
right arm pointing down Warren Street. The elevated top of this
monument gives a grand view over the surrounding country, the course
of the Delaware being traced for miles. The subsequent fortnight's
campaign ending in the battle of Princeton revived the drooping
spirits of the Americans, and was said by as accomplished a soldier as
Frederick the Great to be among "the most brilliant in the annals of
military achievements." Trenton is at the head of tidewater on the
Delaware, the stream coming down rapids, known as the "Falls." On the
Pennsylvania side is Morrisville, called after Robert Morris, who
lived there during the Revolution. His estate subsequently became the
home of the famous French General Jean Victor Moreau, the victor at
Hohenlinden, who was exiled by Napoleon in 1804. He returned to Europe
afterwards at the invitation of the Czar Alexander, and devised for
him a plan for invading France. They were both at the battle of
Dresden in 1813, and were consulting about a certain manoeuvre when
a cannon ball from Napoleon's Guard broke both Moreau's legs, and he
died five days afterwards.