Washington's Crossing

by David Hackett Fischer

Just after it was completed, a fire broke out in the artist’s studio, and the canvas was damaged in a curious way. The effect of smoke and flame was to mask the central figures of Washington and Monroe in a white haze, while the other men in the boat remained sharp and clear. The ruined painting became the property of an insurance company, which put it on public display. Even in its damaged state it won a gold medal in Berlin and was much celebrated in Europe.

Emanuel Leutze painted another full-sized copy, and sent it to America in 1851, where it caused a sensation. In New York more than fifty thousand people came to see it, among them the future novelist Henry James, who was then a child of eight. Many years later he remembered that no impression in his youth “was half so momentous as that of the epoch-making masterpiece of Mr. Leutze, which showed us Washington crossing the Delaware, in a wondrous flare of projected gaslight and with the effect of a revelation.” Henry James recalled that he “gaped responsive at every item, lost in the marvel of wintry light, of the sharpness of the ice-blocks, the sickness of the sick soldier.” Most of all he was inspired by the upright image of Washington, by “the profiled national hero’s purpose, as might be said, of standing up, as much as possible, even indeed of doing it almost on one leg, in such difficulties.”6 The great painting

The presence of an African American in the boat was not an accident; the artist was a strong abolitionist.

At Trenton on December 26, 1776, 2,400 Americans fought 1,500 Hessians in a battle that lasted about two hours. By contrast, at Antietam in the American Civil War, 115,000 men fought a great and terrible battle that continued for a day. The

For many millennia, people had been made to serve others, but this was something more than that. It was an invention of new methods by which people could be trained to engage their will and creativity in the service of another: by drill and ritual, reward and punishment, persuasion and belief. Further, they could be trained to do so not as slaves or servants or robots, but in an active and willing way.

In 1776, a new American army of free men fought two modern European armies of order and discipline.

profound error in historical interpretations of the War of Independence, but by developing the strengths of an open system in a more disciplined way.

“A people unused to restraint must be led; they will not be

drove.”10

Men accustomed to unbounded freedom, and no controul, cannot brook the Restraint which is indispensably necessary to the good Order and Government of an Army. —George Washington, 17761

These men of the Northern

Neck believed that people were not born to these qualities but learned them by discipline and exercise. Washington himself was a sickly youth, and he suffered much from illness. He was taught to strengthen himself by equestrian exercise and spent much of his life outdoors on the back of a horse. Whenever he had the time, he went hunting three times a week. Even in his last years, he walked several miles every night to keep fit. By exercise Washington acquired extraordinary stamina and strength. The painter Charles Willson Peale remembered a moment at Mount Vernon in 1772 when he and other men were pitching a heavy iron bar, a popular sport in the Chesapeake. Washington appeared and, “without taking off his coat, held out his hand for the missile, and hurled it into the air.” Peale remembered that “it lost the power of gravitation, and whizzed through the air, striking the ground far, very far beyond our utmost efforts.” Washington said, “When you beat my pitch, young gentlemen, I’ll try again.”20

Washington thought of liberty in the Stoic way, as independence from what he called “involuntary passion.” He was a man of strong passions, which he struggled to keep in check. For him the worst slavery was to be in bondage to unbridled passion and not in “full possession of himself.”

When his brother died, he became the master of Mount Vernon at the age of twenty-two, leasing it from his sister-in-law, then owning it outright.

At first George Washington was not happy about the enlistment of African Americans, but after much discussion he worked out a sequence of compromises. The first was to allow African Americans to continue in the ranks but to prohibit new enlistments. The second was to tolerate new enlistments but not to approve them. By the end of the war, African Americans were actively recruited, and some rose to the rank of colonel in New England. Washington’s attitudes were different from those of Colonel Glover, but here again he worked out a dynamic compromise that developed through time.

Altogether about twenty thousand Hessians served in the American War of Independence, plus ten thousand soldiers from other German states, and other men who were recruited individually for service in British regiments.

It is startling to discover from French and German sources that as early as the winter of 1774–75, British envoys held secret negotiations at the Hessian palace of Hofgeismar for the employment of large numbers of German troops to control the American colonies, many months before the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. The talks failed because Hessian price was high and the parties could not agree on terms.3

On Brooklyn Heights, General Howe advanced his siege lines methodically toward the American lines. Admiral Howe prepared to send his warships into the East River. Washington’s army would soon be surrounded, and its destruction appeared to be only a matter of time. Then something happened that seemed of small importance to General Howe. There was a change in the American weather. The first sign was a shift in the wind. The prevailing westerlies below New York backed around to the northeast, and the wind began to rise. Then came dark clouds, and a cold rain began to fall on August 28. On both sides it made life a muddy misery for private soldiers in sodden coats and flooded trenches. The next day was worse. The rain grew into a great storm, a classic American nor’easter with “such heavy rainfall as can hardly be remembered.” That morning Washington rode to the forward positions on Brooklyn Heights. He studied the British entrenchments through the driving rain, and the soldiers hard at work as the storm beat down on them. The siege lines advanced inexorably, protected by folds in the ground that the Americans had not been able to cover.49

One company was equipped and commanded by the American artist Charles Willson Peale. Watching from the Pennsylvania shore, he was shocked by what he saw of Washington’s army struggling to cross the Delaware. Peale wrote that it was “the most hellish scene I ever beheld. All the shores were lighted up with large fires, boats continually passing and repassing, full of men, horses, artillery and camp equipage. . . . The Hollowing of hundreds of men in their difficulties of getting Horses and artillery out of the boats, made it rather the appearance of Hell than any earthly scene.”

From the greenest private to the commander-in-chief, most men in the army were American Whigs, fighting for their own rights. Paine was an English radical, fighting for everybody’s rights. Graydon remarked upon the difference. He observed Paine’s friendship with George Washington and his “good reception at headquarters and acquaintance with the Commander-in-chief, whom he seems to have considered from that time, as embarked with him on the general cause of reforming, republicanizing, and democritizing the world, than which nothing was more foreign to the views of the General, or those of the others who took a lead.”

The American Crisis was more than an exhortation. It was a program for action. Paine laid out the broad agenda for Congress and the states, for the army and the militia, for merchants and farmers, for Americans who were still free and others who were under the heel of a foreign conqueror. Most important, he concentrated the mind of a nation on the single most urgent task, which was to rebuild its army, and do it quickly.

There is an old American folk tale about George Washington and the Crossing of the Delaware. It tells us that the new American republics nearly failed in the winter of 1776, that George Washington crossed the Delaware on Christmas night, and that his victory at Trenton revived the Revolution. All of this story is true, but it is not the whole truth. There was more to it. The great revival did not follow the battles of Trenton and Princeton, important as they were. It preceded them, and made those events possible (though not inevitable). Further, the revival did not rise solely from the leadership of George Washington himself, great as he was as a general and a man. He would have been the first to agree that it emerged from the efforts of many soldiers and civilians, merchants and farmers, leaders in the army and members of the Congress. Most of all it rose from the acts and choices of ordinary people in the valley of the Delaware, as Thomas Paine’s American Crisis began to circulate among them.

“Our republics cannot exist long in prosperity,” Rush wrote “We require adversity and appear to possess most of the republican spirit when most depressed.”14

General Charles Lee was a strange and turbulent character, bizarre beyond even a novelist’s imagination. Born in Cheshire, the son of a British army officer, he was raised in an unhappy home and sent to school in Switzerland, where he broke out of the British mold. He never formed the manners of a gentleman or adopted the attitudes of his brother officers. He remained a loner, and rarely trusted others. Historian John Shy writes that “his sex life seems to have been of the transient kind.” His closest friends were the dogs that always surrounded him.26

The British capture of Charles Lee was a gift to the American cause. It delivered Washington from a very difficult problem of leadership. A week after Lee was taken, Washington at last succeeded in drawing together the fragments of his army. On December 20, the brigades that had been commanded by Lee and Gates began to arrive in the camps along the Delaware River.

On November 30, 1776, the Howe brothers issued a proclamation that offered amnesty to all who returned to the Crown. Everyone was invited to take an oath of allegiance. Those who did so within sixty days and promised to remain “in a peaceful obedience to his Majesty” would receive “full and free pardon” for whatever they had done. They were also offered a certificate that guaranteed their lives and property.4

As the advancing British armies entered the village of Hackensack, they were surprised to be welcomed by the inhabitants. The Hessian Lieutenant Andreas Wiederholdt described the town as “a place of about 160 houses and many well affected people, mostly Dutch.” The same thing happened at New-Bridge, two miles north of Hackensack, where British Lieutenant Henry Stirke wrote that the “inhabitants came in to take the oath of allegiance.”13

One problem was the drunken plunderer. Then none of the rules applied. Plundering became pillage and a carnival of destruction. There were also angry, demented, and even sociopathic plunderers.

John Mott was horrified to see one Hessian “flaying a live cow for meat,” a sight so outrageous that even a Quaker got a weapon and fired at the German soldier “with intent to kill.”52

George Washington received reports of many rapes by British soldiers in the town of Pennington, New Jersey. A judicial inquiry confirmed that they had happened on a large scale. Mary Campbell, wife of Daniel Campbell, appeared before Justice Jared Saxton of the Hunterdon County Court and swore that she was raped many times by soldiers when she was “five months and upwards Advanc’d in her Pregnancy.” Rebekkah Christopher testified under oath that she was raped several times by British soldiers and got away, only to find her ten-year-old daughter in a barn being raped by five or six others.56

The Continental Congress and the governors of New Jersey and New York launched formal investigations. More evidence was gathered by county justices and clergymen such as Alexander McWhorter in Newark and John Witherspoon at Princeton. They documented an epidemic of rape in New Jersey by British soldiers: “Three women were most horribly ravished by them, one of them an old woman nearly seventy years of age, whom they abused in a manner beyond description, another of them was a woman considerably advanced in her pregnancy, and the third was a young girl.” Others described gang rapes not only by private soldiers but by officers: “British officers, four or five, sometimes more, sometimes less in a gang, went about the town by night entering into houses and openly inquiring for women.”58

Captain John Peebles, commander of a grenadier company of the Royal Highland Regiment, wrote sadly in his diary on Christmas Eve 1776, “In orders a man condemned to suffer death for a Rape, but pardon’d at the intercession of the injured party; the second instance, tho’ there have been other shocking abuses of that nature that have not come to public notice. The story of the poor old man and his daughter in Long Island was very bad indeed, hard is the fate of many who suffer indiscriminately in a civil war.”61

On the basis of the “law of war,” in New Jersey General Howe announced a new policy: Anyone not in uniform who attacked his troops would be judged an “assassin” and put to death on the spot. Captain Münchausen noted, “It is now ordered that inhabitants who ventured, in mobs or individually, to fire at our passing men, would be hanged at the next tree without trial.” The only result was that more infuriated American civilians took up arms, and more British and Hessian regulars died miserably on country lanes in New Jersey, far from home.64

In the night, a winter storm hit Trenton. The garrison breathed a sigh of relief. After three days of constant alarms and little sleep, the Hessian duty officers all eased off a little. Major Dechow “issued orders canceling the next morning’s predawn patrol because of the heavy storm.” On the north side of town, Lieutenant Wiederholdt allowed his men to take shelter in the picket house. At last, in the midst of a howling northeaster, the Hessian garrison relaxed for the first time in eight days. Nobody thought that the enemy could attack in such weather.59

On a wet winter night, anyone who sat in the bottom of a Durham boat or ferry would have been sitting in ice water. There are accounts of other Delaware crossings in 1776 in which the men were ordered to jump up and down in several inches of watery slush to clear the ice from the boats and to keep from freezing. The legions of American debunkers who have made a mockery of George Washington for “standing up in the boat” might try sitting down in such conditions.

Their orders were to seize the Hessian cannon at the start of the battle and turn them against the enemy. If that plan failed, their job was to disable the Hessian guns by driving iron handspikes into the touch holes and breaking them flush with the gun tube. This method of “spiking,” if carefully done, prevented guns from being fired until a skilled metalworker could drill out the touch holes, a laborious operation.8

The American leaders intended to use their guns as shock weapons against the enemy and as supporting arms for their own infantry. The battles around Boston and New York had taught them that artillery was highly effective in both roles. It could break a formation of highly trained British and German Regulars, and it could also steady an amateur army of citizen soldiers and give them a fighting chance against disciplined troops.

“My brave fellows,” Washington began, “you have done all I asked you to do, and more than could be reasonably expected; but your country is at stake, your wives, your houses, and all that you hold dear. You have worn yourselves out with the fatigues and hardships, but we know not how to spare you. If you will consent to stay one month longer, you will render that service to the cause of liberty, and to your country, which you probably can never do under any other circumstances.”26 The drums rolled again. The sergeant recalled that “the soldiers felt the force of the appeal” and began to talk among themselves. One said, “I will remain if you will.” Another said, “We cannot go home under such circumstances.” A few men stepped forward, then several others, then many more, and “their example was [followed] by nearly all who were fit for duty in the regiment, amounting to about two hundred volunteers.” These were veterans who understood what they were being asked to do. They knew well what the cost might be. One of them remembered later that nearly half of the men who stepped forward would be killed in the fighting or dead of disease “soon after.”27

Only a few days before, Washington was infuriated with these men, and ready to clap some of them in irons. Now he was leading them in another way. This gentleman of Virginia was learning to treat a brigade of New England Yankee farmboys and fishermen as men of honor, who were entitled to equality of esteem. That attitude had already begun to spread throughout the army. In 1776, American officers addressed even their lowliest privates as gentlemen. No other army in the world operated on such a principle. Europeans were startled to observe it at work in America; Nicholas Collin observed in 1771, “all are called gentleman and ladies.” Here was a new idea of a gentleman, a moral condition rather than a social rank. It was also a new idea of honor, which was not defined by rank or status or gender, but by a principle of human dignity and decency.

Washington’s pay chest was empty. On December 31, 1776, he sent an urgent message to Robert Morris. “Tomorrow the Continental Troops are all at Liberty,” he wrote, with some exaggeration. “In order to get their assistance [I] have promised them a bounty of 10 Dollars if they will continue for one Month—But here again a new difficulty presents itself. We have not the money.”30 Only the day before, Morris had scoured the money chests of Philadelphia for odds and ends of cash to pay Washington’s secret agents. Now he had to do it again. According to legend he visited a rich Quaker and persuaded him to unearth a chest of hard money that Morris knew to be buried in his garden. Morris literally dug up the cash and sent Washington “two parcels of hard money,” which arrived on New Year’s Eve, just in time.