Ihave just finished reading David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing an account of the crucial turning point in the American Revolutionary War that began with Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River into New Jersey on Xmas night of 1776. The story Fischer tells is a thrilling one.
There is heroism aplenty. Fischer is inter alia a superb military historian with a complete command of 18th-century warfare — military organization weaponry logistics the importance of maintaining proper sanitation in encampments and tactics — and he draws compelling portraits of major figures on both sides of the fighting and of the battles themselves.
The physical privation of the soldiers is almost too much to believe. Many of those who crossed the Delaware River choked with ice and impassable in many places at night and in blizzard conditions wore only the most threadbare of clothing. After surprising the Hessian garrison in Trenton and taking the town — virtually the first American victory since Bunker Hill and the eviction of British forces from Massachusetts — the American forces retreated across the Delaware River. Two days later they once again crossed into New Jersey under conditions even worse than the first time.
In early January at the second battle of Trenton the Americans stymied a fierce British and Hessian attack inflicting heavy casualties on the first day of fighting.
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