War in the Garden State

Abstract

David Hackett Fischer.Washington's Crossing. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 576 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00 Taking a critical inventory of a "House Beautiful" along the Mississippi, Mark Twain noted two versions of "Washington Crossing the Delaware" displayed in the parlor—a chromolithograph hung over the mantel and on the opposite wall a copy "done in thunder-and-lightning crewels by one of the young ladies" of the house, a "work of art which would have made Washington hesitate about crossing, if he could have foreseen what advantage was going to be taken of it."1 The most famous image in American history, the scene had already become a cliché. We can see Washington standing in the boat, the flag behind him, his men rowing through the ice floes on the Delaware. And yet, how well do we know either the story behind the dramatic scene or Emmanuel Leutze's painting that has forever captured it? Leutze's original painting no longer exists. He conceived it during the European revolutions of 1848; damaged by smoke when his studio caught fire, it hung in a Bremen art museum until 1942, when a British bombing raid destroyed it. But Leutze, like the young lady along the Mississippi, had made a copy. Eight-year-old Henry James was one of fifty thousand New Yorkers who turned out to see Leutze's painting when it arrived in 1851. The novelist remembered how he "gaped responsive" at the huge canvas, taking in every detail: the sharp ice blocks, the sick soldier, the wintery light, but above all the image of Washington "standing up, as much as possible," even on one leg "in such difficulties" (p. 3). From New York the painting traveled to Washington, where it was displayed in the Capitol. During the Civil War, exhibitions of the painting helped raise money both for the Union and for the abolition of slavery, and copies proliferated, decorating homes throughout both sections of the divided country. A wealthy art collector bought the canvas in 1897 and donated it to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. [End Page 159] Leutze's painting fixed the scene in the American consciousness. In his superb recovery of the story of Washington's crossing—beginning with the Continental army's humiliating loss of New York and ending with Washington overseeing the British army's decimation in New Jersey—David Hackett Fischer shows why the event itself was the epochal moment of the Revolution. Washington stands in the boat—the central figure (and Fischer makes it clear that Washington, and most of his men, would have been standing) but as important are the men with him. Leutze presents individual men (and one who could be a woman)—farmers from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, a gentleman from Maryland, a recent Scottish immigrant, a backwoodsman in a coon-skin cap, an African-American sailor from Massachusetts—joined together in a common cause. Behind them on the icy Delaware we see other boats with other individuals, all crossing to an unknown future. Leutze has illuminated the historical moment. Fischer illuminates how difficult it was for Washington and the men in the boat to get to this moment and how much they would endure afterward. The Delaware crossing was the critical moment in a year of critical moments. The year had begun on a high note—Thomas Paine's clarion call for independence in January, followed by the liberation of Boston in March, and the Declaration of Independence in July. But after this, the cause had sputtered. An army sent to Quebec succumbed to smallpox as the people of that province rebuffed the American call to join the cause, and Washington's army was humiliated on Long Island and Manhattan before being chased across New Jersey—as the British buglers mocked them by playing fox hunting calls. The British Empire had sent two-thirds of its army, and half of the Royal Navy, to...