Washington command

WASHINGTON’S CROSSING

By David Hackett Fischer

Oxford University Press, $30, 576 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY WOODY WEST

December 1776 was a bitter month, cold and stormy, and bitter as well for the prospects of the new nation’s War of Independence. After the fierce opening by the raggle-taggle American army at Bunker Hill that led the British to withdraw from Boston, the curve had been steeply down: In just 12 weeks, George Washington had lost parts of three states and 90 percent of the army under his command, the British victory at New York a signal defeat. “The Americans were baffled, indecisive, disorganized, undisciplined and soundly defeated” there, writes David Hackett Fischer, University Professor at Brandeis University, in “Washington’s Crossing.”

Thousands of colonists were rethinking their support of the rebellion and returning to allegiance to the crown, including a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Washington’s two top subordinates, Gens. Charles Lee and Horatio Gates, were lobbying to undermine him, and members of the Continental Congress were unhelpfully and constantly intrusive.

At this time of despond, Thomas Paine accompanying Washington’s army during the retreat was moved to write his pamphlet “The American Crisis.” It begins, writes Mr. Fischer, with the “cadence of a drumbeat” — “These are the times that try men’s souls.” The brilliant rhetorical indictment of the “summer soldier and the sunshine patriot” was read in every army camp and widely elsewhere. It was Paine’s genius to express a popular feeling that was already stirring in other hearts, the author writes.

Even during these dark days, however, American spirit was not extinguished. Lt. Col. Samuel Blachley Webb, a Connecticut Yankee wounded at Bunker Hill and twice at White Plains who was made an aide to Gen. Washington at the age of 23, replied to a friend’s letter: “You ask me our Situation. It has been the Devil, but is to appearance better. About 2,000 of us had been obliged to run damn’d hard before about 10,000 of the enemy. Never was finer lads at a retreat than we are … No fun for us that I can see; however, I cannot but think we shall drub the dogs.”

And Congress finally concluded that it could not after all manage the smallest details of military operations, and granted the frustrated Washington the full power necessary to rebuild a tattered army.

The “great revival” of American purpose and spirit, writes Mr. Fischer, thus grew from defeat not victory, and the Trenton campaigns would be the evidence.

It does not require a Carlylean view, that history is the actions of heroes, to appreciate that particular individuals at particular times have an indelible effect on events. Today, when heroism is sourly considered eccentric and retrograde and activists agitate to obliterate the name of Washington (and of Jefferson, et al.) from public schools and other institutions because they were slaveholders, Mr. Fischer’s balanced and admiring perspective of George Washington is heartening.

In this vividly documented history, Mr. Fischer begins appropriately with what is one of the most famous paintings in American history, “George Washington Crossing the Delaware” — a massive 20-foot-wide and 12-foot-high canvas that hangs in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Copies of this heroic painting used to be standard in American classrooms. When Henry James as a boy of eight saw the painting in New York, he related that no impression in his youth “was half so momentous as that … epoch-making masterpiece.”

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