And so was the image of that Christmas night, recorded seventy-five years later in Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. The painting’s inaccuracies abound—the flag Monroe carries has yet to be introduced, the ice is much too thick—but it hardly matters.9 Leutze managed to capture a certain against-all-odds spirit, which seemed to persuade the world that America was born righteous, so Washington along with it.
