A pivotal moment for America

The image remains familiar, if only because it has been so often parodied: George Washington stands erect in an overcrowded boat, gazing steadfastly ahead. At his feet, soldiers pull at the oars and thrust aside jagged ice floes; behind him men support the American flag against a strong wind. Emanuel Leutze painted this scene in 1851 and called it “George Washington Crossing the Delaware.” He intended it to present the elements of a familiar story -- a mythic moment in history -- in visually powerful form.

Apart from the sheer difficulty of taking in a canvas as big as a double garage door, the chief problem modern Americans face when we see Leutze’s work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is that we’re no longer very familiar with the story. When, and why, Washington crossed the Delaware and the significance of the event are questions most of us could not answer. We have a hard time imagining that the survival of the United States -- and hence our own existence -- could ever have been in serious doubt.

David Hackett Fischer, a scholar of prodigious energy, aims to restore our understanding of the contingent, surprising quality of the episode Leutze depicted. His great achievement in “Washington’s Crossing” is to enable the reader to appreciate the fragility of the Revolution in late 1776, and hence to understand the days around the battles of Trenton (Dec. 26, 1776) and Princeton (Jan. 3, 1777) as a watershed in American history.

Fischer’s story begins in the summer of 1776, shortly after Congress declared independence. Accounts of the Revolution tend to portray this as a moment pregnant with promise, but Washington and his fellow soldiers at New York understood their situation as anything but hopeful. On the evening of July 9, 1776, after a formal reading of the Declaration of Independence to the troops, he and his men needed only to look toward Staten Island, where hundreds of British vessels rode at anchor and tens of thousands of enemy soldiers were throwing up fortifications, to see what kind of pickle they were in.

In August, British soldiers and their German (Hessian) mercenary auxiliaries, all under the command of Gen. William Howe, crossed from Staten to Long Island and drove the Continental Army onto Manhattan. In September, Howe’s forces landed at Kip’s Bay, then pushed Washington and his men north to Harlem and beyond. When the last of the Continentals fled across the Hudson in November, the British and Hessians pursued them across New Jersey. As they retreated toward the Delaware River, the ill-clad, ill-fed, half-shod Continentals suffered terribly. Their path, it was said, could be traced by bloody footprints in the snow.

The British and Hessians left off the chase at the Delaware and established winter quarters across central New Jersey. Washington had only one-tenth the force with which he had tried to defend New York; the rest had been lost to battle deaths, wounds, disease and desertion. This remnant of an army encamped along the Pennsylvania shore upriver from Philadelphia while Washington contemplated its imminent dissolution. The enlistments of most of his soldiers would expire on the last day of the year, and few were unlikely to stay with him Jan. 1.

Washington was no stranger to crises in manpower, because Congress had forbidden him to enlist men for longer than a year. His first army, recruited in 1775 to drive the British from Boston, had dissolved at the end of that year. He had replaced them during the winter and spring of 1776 with the men whom he now expected to leave on New Year’s Day. But how would Washington persuade his veterans to reenlist in a beaten army, or convince new men to risk their lives in a losing cause? Without some sort of victory to boost morale and restore confidence in his leadership, the Continental Army would die, along with any hope of resurrection. Inasmuch as America’s claims to independence depended on the army’s existence, the Revolution itself would be lost.

Fortunately for Washington, the situation was not completely hopeless. Thomas Paine’s newspaper series, “The American Crisis,” with its famous denunciation of “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot” and its appeal to stand by the cause of independence in “the times that try men’s souls,” had begun to counter the defeatist spirit. Moreover, the occupation troops in New Jersey had largely ignored Howe’s orders forbidding looting and the abuse of civilians. As reports of rape and plunder spread, armed individuals and small groups began to waylay patrols and foraging parties. Resistance became more organized in mid-December, climaxing in twin uprisings -- one in the countryside north of Trenton and the other to the south -- and a series of raids across the Delaware by Pennsylvania militiamen.

Washington had had no part in directing this intifada but recognized an opportunity when he saw one and began planning to cross back into New Jersey on Christmas night with what was left of his Continentals, in order to attack the Hessian garrison at Trenton. As night fell, a tremendous nor’easter struck, making a river that would have been dangerous to cross at any time all but impassable. With jams of ice clogging the river below Trenton and impossibly rough water farther downstream, three of four Continental forces failed to make it across. Only Washington’s own division, positioned farthest north, succeeded. They marched through snow, sleet and rain to reach Trenton after sunrise Dec. 26.

Washington’s soldiers defeated the Hessians that morning not because the mercenaries were (as later legend had it) hung over from holiday celebrations, but because they were exhausted. For weeks, Col. Johann Rall’s troops had been on alert, dealing with guerrilla attacks on outposts and foragers and marching against aggressive militia formations. The ferocious nor’easter of Christmas night had meant an opportunity to rest, not celebrate, because it was inconceivable that any major attack could emerge from such a storm. When it did, the Hessians fought back as bravely as any surprised, outnumbered and outgunned force could. The Battle of Trenton was no walkover, but it was by any reckoning a victory. Washington took advantage of the huge surge in morale that followed to appeal for short-term reenlistments and looked for another opportunity to strike.

After consulting his fellow generals, Washington ordered another crossing Dec. 30, bringing on the second Battle of Trenton (this time against British forces) on the afternoon of Jan. 2, 1777. The result was costly for the British, but indecisive, so rather than wait for them to renew their attack the following morning, Washington ordered his troops to disengage under the cover of darkness, then led them on an all-night march north to Princeton, where a British outpost lay exposed. The Continentals’ success at the Battle of Princeton on Jan. 3 proved that Trenton had been no fluke. Washington withdrew his men to a winter camp at Morristown, 40 miles north behind the Watchung Mountains. From there he set about recruiting for the coming campaign while militiamen and Continental detachments harassed British outposts and foraging parties across East Jersey. The British and Hessians, now on the defensive, retreated to a 10-mile stretch of the Raritan Valley from New Brunswick to Perth Amboy. Howe had conquered New Jersey but could not hold it.

George Washington stands as much at the center of Fischer’s narrative as of Leutze’s painting. The critical difference, however, is that Leutze’s goal was to sustain the myth of Washington as hero, while Fischer’s enterprise is to contextualize Washington’s actions and reflect on their significance. The contexts he chooses to explicate range from the character of the three contending armies to the qualities of 18th century generalship to the importance of fodder for the armies’ horses. They frame a narrative in which outcomes are always dependent on chance and circumstance and frequently surprising. Fischer tells a story so dependent on military factors that many historians may find it problematic -- though even the most skeptical of them should appreciate his description of the values and behavior of the Hessians, a group seldom portrayed in American historiography with understanding or sympathy. Lay readers, however, are unlikely to object to a tale told with gusto, punctuated by finely rendered accounts of battles and tactics. If it remains part of the historian’s obligation to make scholarly writing accessible beyond the academy, David Hackett Fischer deserves to be recognized for a job well done. Not least because it helps us understand anew a great American icon.