Having left the Delaware regiment and five Virginia regiments at Princeton, under Lord Stirling, he moved all heavy military stores behind the Delaware, and returned to Princeton. Meeting Lord Stirling, who was falling back before a superior force of the enemy, he recrossed the Delaware at Trenton, established headquarters, and fixed the base for future action. In writing to Congress on the fifth, he used this language: “As nothing but necessity obliged me to retire before the enemy and leave so much of New Jersey unprotected, I conceive it my duty, and it corresponds with my _inclination_, to make head against them so soon as there shall be the least probability of doing so with propriety.” On the twelfth, he learned that General Lee had entered New Jersey with his division. As early as November twenty-fifth, he had ordered General Schuyler to forward to him all Pennsylvania and New Jersey troops then in the Northern Department. A glance at the plans and movements of the British army is now of interest. Howe reported his movements as follows: “My first design extended no further than to get, and keep possession of, East New Jersey. Lord Cornwallis had orders not to advance beyond Brunswick; but, on the sixth, I joined his lordship with the Fourth Brigade of British, under General Grant. On the seventh, Cornwallis marched with his corps, except the Guards who were left at Brunswick, to Princeton, which the Americans had quitted the same day. He delayed seventeen hours at Princeton, and was an entire day in marching to Trenton. He arrived there, just as the rear-guard of the enemy had crossed; but they had taken the precaution to destroy, or secure to the south side, all the boats that could possibly have been employed for crossing the river.” Cornwallis remained at Pennington until the fourteenth, when the British army was placed in winter quarters; “the weather,” says General Howe, “having become too severe to keep the field.”