Most Americans think of 1776 as a glorious year in revolutionary history, capped off when the Founders declared independence to the peals of Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell. Indeed, as the summer of 1776 approached, the country did have much to celebrate. The war that began at Lexington Green on April 19, 1775 had gone suprisingly well. For almost a year, citizen militia had inflicted heavy damage to British Regulars and Loyalist forces in a succession of engagements: Lexington and Concord in April, Ticonderoga in May, Bunker Hill in June, and Virginia’s Great Bridge in December, culminating in the withdrawal of British forces from Boston in March 1776. Unfortunately, 1776 was also the year in which the nation—and its revolution—was very nearly stillborn.

Notwithstanding the brave words of July 4, during the five months that followed the Declaration of Independence, American forces lost every battle they fought. They were driven from Long Island to Westchester, and then successively across the Hudson and Delaware Rivers into Pennsylvania. Manhattan became a Loyalist enclave, hosting British regimental balls. New England was under threat as a British fleet conquered Rhode Island and occupied the city of Newport without firing a shot. New Jersey was overrun by British and Hessian forces in a horrific campaign of rapine and pillage; many of its dispirited inhabitants—including one signer of the Declaration—gave up the patriot cause and swore oaths of allegiance to the Crown.

As the losses piled on, the American army suffered staggering casualties. At the battle of Fort Washington in upper Manhattan alone, 2,800 men were lost—some of them put to the sword after they surrendered—as General Washington watched helplessly from a vantage point across the Hudson on the New Jersey Palisades. By winter, the army was reduced to 10 percent of its original size, and many of the remaining troops intended to go home when their enlistments were up at the end of the year.

In the face of this “cataract of disaster,” George Washington hit upon an audacious plan to turn the tide of war. On Christmas night, 1776, he led a force of 2,400 men across the ice-choked Delaware River, into the teeth of a vicious blizzard, a two-day nor’easter so severe that Washington almost aborted the operation. After marching all night through the storm, they attacked and defeated a garrison of 1,500 Hessian regulars at Trenton. The storm gave the American attack an element of surprise; it concealed their approach and interrupted patrols by the Hessian sentries, already exhausted from days of fending off guerilla attacks from local irregulars.

A week later, having persuaded his veterans to stay past their enlistment dates through a combination of moral suasion and a ten dollar bounty in hard coin, Washington set out to re-establish an American presence in New Jersey. Recrossing the Delaware—under conditions even worse than the first time—on January 2, Washington’s men withstood a fierce counterattack by British Regulars led by General Cornwallis on the outskirts of Trenton. Seemingly trapped in their defensive position, the Americans stole away under cover of night, made a fifteen-mile march over miraculously frozen ground—the road had been knee-deep mud the day before—to Princeton. There, the exhausted troops encountered and defeated two British regiments rushing to reinforce Trenton. Victorious, Washington slipped away with his men, eventually finding winter quarters in Morristown. To the British eyes, Washington had suddenly “shown himself both a Fabius and Camillus,” his march an unexpected “prodigy of generalship.”

It is this campaign—nine days that saved the revolution—that forms the core of David Hackett Fischer’s marvellous new book, Washington’s Crossing.[1] I am not a great fan of military history, but this is one of the most engaging—even exciting—works of history that I have read in years. Professor Fischer—who, incidentally, began his career chronicling the Federalist party in works like The Revolution of American Conservatism (1976)— has an extraordinary gift for storytelling. He has crafted a genuine page-turner out of an iconic event, highlighting the importance of chance and individual decisions in the formation of history. Along the way he dispels more than a few misconceptions; among them, the Hessian soldiers were not sleeping off a Christmas hangover when the Americans struck, and the American army was surprisingly well-provisioned during the winter campaign. I might add, Professor Fischer’s narrative discipline is admirable; many supporting specialist details are left to the extensive (and extremely interesting) appendices.

Professor Fischer also tells a less familiar story, that of the twelve weeks of winter campaigning that followed the initial victories in southern New Jersey. In the little-known “Forage War,” Washington fine-tuned his strategy of opportunism. He built upon the activities of local insurgents, who independently harried British and Hessian troops as they ventured out to find fodder for their livestock. In these repeated small engagements, the American forces inflicted extremely heavy casualties and took relatively few themselves, gaining confidence under fire.

By the time the grass greened in the spring of 1777, the British strategy of overawing the colonists and cutting off New England by capturing the middle colonies was in tatters. British and Hessian forces were reduced to less than half their strength of the previous summer, with the heaviest losses in the most experienced units. Lord Howe, the British commander, was forced to ask Whitehall for 20,000 more men in preparation for a general offensive; the already strained government told him to expect only 7,800. For the rest of the war, British operations were hampered by a chronic shortage of troops.

Professor Fischer has a particularly nice eye for the telling detail. Lord Cornwallis, it turns out, was a staunch Whig—as were most of his officers. In fact, while sitting in the House of Lords, Cornwallis had voted against the Declaratory Acts, the legislation that many believe made separation inevitable. Although the British officers were thoroughly trained professionals, they affected the amateurism of British public school culture. In council, for example, Cornwallis called General William Erskine by his old school nickname, “Wooly,” while being himself addressed as “My Lord.” In a fine particular, Fischer relates, Cornwallis was heard to remark, “Faugh, Faugh! Wooly only wants a junction with Burgoyne that he may crack a bottle with his friend Philips.” Lieutenant Colonel Mawhood, who commanded the British column at Princeton, took the conceit even further; he rode to war on a brown pony, with a “pair of springing spaniels playing before him.” Both he and the spaniels survived the engagement, perhaps because, in the face of such bizarre gallantry, the Americans forebore their usual unsporting practice of shooting at officers.

Indeed, Fischer is especially strong when describing the different cultures of the three armies that met in the winter of 1776 to 1777. Both English and Hessian armies were professional volunteer forces, sharing the values of hierarchy, order, discipline, honor, loyalty, and service. Unlike the British, however, the Hessian officer corps drew on the middle class to lead a largely peasant rank and file. As Professor Fischer thoughtfully observes, they were not mercenaries in the usual sense but, rather, a well-paid army whose services permitted their ruler to reduce taxes and to improve conditions in their otherwise impoverished country. Interestingly, of the Hessian soldiers who survived the war, almost 25 percent chose to stay in America; still more subsequently emigrated to the New World with their families.

The American army itself was a mix of regional cultures and accents, each understanding the principles of liberty and freedom differently, from the individualism of the backcountry riflemen to the collectivism of the old New England militia units and the noblesse of the Virginia Fairfax County contingent. Growing into his command, Washington learned to make decisions by consulting them all; as he said, “A people unused to restraint must be led; they will never be drove.” And lead he did, at the front of his troops in the thick of battle, a tall man mounted on a white horse, an easy target, a person of surpassing personal courage and strength—the individual embodiment of the revolution’s moral authority.

Throughout the New York campaign, the professional soldiery consistently underestimated the Americans. Professor Fischer argues that this miscalculation carried an enormous strategic cost; in victory the Hessians and British had little to gain, but in defeat they had much to lose. Once they ceded even a few engagements to the army of “peasants,” the morale of the officer corps crumbled in mutual recriminations. Forty-five years later, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “if peace is peculiarly hurtful to democratic armies, war secures advantages for them which no other armies ever possess; and these advantages, which attract little notice at first cannot fail in the end to give them the victory. An aristocratic people, which, fighting against a democracy, does not succeed in bringing it to ruin in the first campaigns always runs a great risk of being defeated by it.” Setting himself against a generation of nay-saying revisionists, Professor Fischer’s book brings home those democratic advantages with all the gifts of a fine historian’s art.

Notes
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1. Washington’s Crossing, by David Hackett Fischer; Oxford University Press, 554 pages, $34. Go back to the text.