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Washington's Crossing by David Hackett Fischer.
Oxford University Press, 2004, 576 pages.
The Road to Freedom by Stephen Cox
George Washington's army had been marching through the
back country of New Jersey for five hours on a cold winter night.
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Cox is a professor of literature at UC-San Diego.
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"The wet ground was frozen solid, and the roads were covered with a glaze of
quick-frozen ice and snow. An artillery sergeant remembered that many of his men
were "entirely barefooted," and here again "the ground was literally marked with
the blood of soldiers [sic] feet." The artillery horses also "were without shoes
and when passing over the ice would slide in every direction and could advance
only by the assistance of the soldiers."
Finally, "as the first streaks of dawn appeared in the eastern sky, the army
came to Quaker Bridge. There suddenly it stopped in its tracks. The bridge was
strong enough for Quakers on their way to meeting, but it would not bear the
army's artillery and ammunition carts. It was necessary to build another, and a
party of axemen and carpenters went frantically to work."
They built the bridge, they passed the river, they found the British army in
an orchard near Princeton. The battle was on. During a British bayonet charge, an
American officer was shot from his horse, trapped by the onrushing enemy, then
mortally wounded by a blow from a musket butt. Because he was "handsomely
uniformed," the British thought he was General Washington. He refused to
surrender, so "they bayoneted him many times, and one cried, 'Damn him he is
dead. Let us leave him.'"
Never forget: that was what would have happened to Washington, if the enemy
had caught him. But heedless of danger, as he always was, Washington rode among
the troops, rallying them with shouts.
"'Parade with us, my brave fellows! There is but a handful of the enemy, and
we will have them directly.' Washington led his men straight into the center of
the battle, within thirty paces of the British line. He was mounted on a white
horse, an easy mark for any British soldier, and yet none shot
him." |
| Even before Washington's
victories in New Jersey, armed militia sprang up all around the British forces,
harassing, killing, and impeding them. |
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As the battle progressed, blood appeared "everywhere in the orchard and
fields, flowing bright across the icy surface of the snow." But one of
Washington's men spoke for many others when he wrote to his wife, "O, my Susan!
It was a glorious day, and I would not have been absent from it for all the money
I ever expect to be worth." And Washington's men won the battle.
This, the battle of Princeton, Jan. 3, 1777, is but one episode in David
Hackett Fischer's story of the turn in America's fortunes during the first six
months after the Declaration of Independence. The events began with Washington's
withdrawal from New York City in the face of the largest European army that had
ever been projected overseas. They proceeded through his retreat across New
Jersey to Pennsylvania, the British army's occupation of New Jersey and its
hopeful attempt to subdue the state and bring it back into the empire,
Washington's epic (re)crossing of the Delaware to attack the British in their
frontier outpost at Trenton, his defeat of General Cornwallis' avenging legions
at the second battle of Trenton, his successful surprise attack at Princeton, and
the destabilization of the British plan to hold America by subduing one vital
region after another. First New York, then Rhode Island and New Jersey . . . each
section would be conquered and held as a rallying-place for loyalists and a base
for future operations.
That was the plan decided upon by the two chief commanders of British forces,
William Howe (army) and his brother Richard Howe (navy), and it failed. Fischer's
book is especially enlightening on the various alternatives that the Howes
considered. One of the alternatives they decided against was the one that, in
this reviewer's opinion, they should have adopted. It was the scheme naggingly
urged by General Henry Clinton: go after Washington's army, trap it, and wipe it
out. The Howes spurned opportunities to do that, preferring to proceed (Vietnam
style?) with more pacific and graduated responses. They didn't work. Clinton's
plan appears to have had a better chance of succeeding. It was military common
sense, and its wisdom appears confirmed by the countless references in Fischer's
book to statements by leading Americans prophesying doom if Washington's force
should be caught and eliminated.
On the other hand, the ready response of American citizens to the needs of
Washington's army argues that the spirit of independence was much too deeply
seated to lose its capacity to raise new armies. Even before Washington's
victories in New Jersey, armed militia sprang up all around the British forces,
harassing, killing, and impeding them. And although Washington was plagued by the
tendency of many of his soldiers to get up and leave when their short enlistment
periods ended, it didn't take much to persuade many of them to stay.
| Greatness and courage may
be capable only of ostensive definition: you point at such stories and you say:
"There they are." |
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The relationship of money and finance to the American war effort is an
endlessly interesting subject, and Fischer provides a good deal of information
about it. Faced with a mass of soldiers whose enlistments were expiring,
Washington appealed to a leading businessman of Philadelphia, Robert Morris.
Morris contacted a business friend "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." The money was spent on $10 bounties for the men who agreed to
re-enlist. It was an idea originated by Thomas Mifflin (whose fascinating picture
with his wife Sarah, by John Singleton Copley, graces a page of this volume),
another wealthy Philadelphian who supported the war financially and served in it
himself. Washington thought that $10, the modern equivalent of $1,000, was too
high! But he was pleased to put the proposition to his men, and to put it twice,
because it didn't work the first time:
"The men watched as Washington 'wheeled his horse about, rode in front of the
regiment,' and spoke to them again. Long afterward, a sergeant still remembered
his words:
'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.'
| His maps are good —
and his plot and characters can never be surpassed.
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It was a rational appeal to rational interests, both material and spiritual,
and it worked. Lest you think that the $10 was a mercenary influence on
superficial minds, Fischer adds that the soldiers "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.'"
Your heart stops when you read that. It's something that happens frequently
during the reading of this book. It is a big book, distinguished for its
plenitude of information on obscure subjects that turn out to be interesting and,
very often, deeply moving: the organization of the American and British armies,
and of the Hessian soldiers imported by the British (no, they weren't drunks, and
they weren't automata, as they have commonly been pictured); the nature, supply,
and use of the many kinds of military equipment that the two armies employed;
their different styles of leadership; the fate of civilian populations in enemy
hands; the giving of "quarter" to enemy soldiers; problems of weather and
geography; the reason why Washington would not have simply sat down in the boat
during his famous crossing of the Delaware (the boat that he used on that daring
voyage would have been full of freezing water). But the best effects in Fischer's
story are those that involve the emotions of the participants.
Soldier John Greenwood, remembering the hours he spent freezing on the banks
of the Delaware, after the crossing but before the attack on Trenton:
"The noise of the soldiers coming over and clearing away the ice, the rattling
of the cannon wheels on the frozen ground, and the cheerfulness of my
fellow-comrades encouraged me beyond expression, and, big coward as I acknowledge
myself to be, I felt great pleasure, more than I now do in writing about it."
Big coward?
Soldier Stephen Olney, waiting with other besieged Americans before the second
battle of Trenton, to see whether the British would break through and destroy
them, asking another man "what he thought now, of our independence. He answered
cheerfully, 'I don't know; the Lord must help us.'"
Cheerfully.
| It is a big book,
distinguished for its plenitude of information on obscure subjects that turn out
to be interesting and, very often, deeply moving.
|
|
Dr. Benjamin Rush, American courier, getting some rest in Trenton after riding
all night on behalf of the cause, waking up to the sound of an alarm gun: "'I
started up, and the first creature I saw was a black woman crying and wringing
her hands in my room. She was followed by general St. Clair with a composed
countenance. I asked him what was the matter. He said the enemy were
advancing.'
'What do you intend to do?' Rush asked.
'Why, fight them,' St. Clair replied, with a smile."
General George Washington, watching the retreat of his soldiers across the
bridge at Assunpink Creek, sitting "his horse quietly beside the bridge" with the
horse's chest "pressed close" against the bridge rail, so close to the action
that the soldiers brushed the horse and the general's leg as they rushed in a
mass to safety. The British and the Hessians were pushing forward, just on the
other side of the little bridge.
Greatness and courage may be capable only of ostensive definition: you point
at such stories and you say: "There they are."
David Hackett Fischer, the author of this book, is one of America's most
prominent historians. He deserves his reputation. In 1970 he published
"Historians' Fallacies," the best introduction to the problems of American
historiography, and to problems of argumentative logic, that I know anything
about — a work rich in wisdom and humor. In 1989 he published "Albion's
Seed," a searching analysis of the settlement of America by British immigrants;
and in 1994 his best book, "Paul Revere's Ride," a meticulous yet emotionally
harrowing account of the first armed clashes between Americans and Britons in
what became the War of the Revolution. I believe that Fischer has published only
one bad book, his history of the "price revolution" of the 16th century, "The
Great Wave" (1996); it's a good subject, but the book is foggily conceived and
sloppily written.
In "Washington's Crossing," as in "Paul Revere's Ride," Fischer has
rehabilitated narrative history, still frowned on in certain academic circles,
restoring it as a medium of argument and bringing out the emotion that should
emerge from good stories and good analysis. I could wish for only two
improvements in this book.
First, in both "Washington's Crossing" and "Paul Revere's Ride," Fischer
discusses the various ideas of liberty that various groups of Americans
entertained. In the current book he distinguishes "an idea of liberty as
reciprocal rights that belonged to all the people," an idea characteristic of
politically active Philadelphians, from three other ideas: "the exclusive rights
of New England towns, or the hierarchical rights of Virginia, or the individual
autonomy of the backsettlers" or frontiersmen. This is interesting, and I wish he
would elaborate on his ideas; but he does so in neither book. I also wish he
would respond to the obvious question: if those ideas of liberty were so
different, why do we see so many shared assumptions about liberty in the debates
of the Continental Congress?
Second, we need better illustrations. Fischer's book jacket could scarcely be
improved, except by enlarging it: it's a glorious color reproduction of most of
Emanuel Leutze's deservedly famous painting, "Washington Crossing the Delaware"
(1851). The book provides an interesting discussion of the painting and its
origin. But the illustrations inside the book, though many, are small, black and
white, and so dim that one sometimes cannot make out the features to which
Fischer's captions call attention. But his maps are good — and his plot and
characters can never be surpassed.
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