'Crossing' superbly takes readers back to 1776

They were, wrote Thomas Paine, "the times that try men's souls." It was November 1776, and Paine, the English radical pamphleteer who had joined the American forces that summer, was with the Army as it regrouped after the loss of New York and defeat in four major battles.

But, historian David Hackett Fischer writes in "Washington's Crossing," Paine's words, in a pamphlet titled "The American Crisis," "had the cadence of a drumbeat" whose "call to arms" came even as "ordinary people" in British-occupied New Jersey were organizing in "spontaneous risings." Paine's pamphlet, Fischer writes, "caught that spirit and helped it grow."

That spirit of revolutionary revival would directly influence George Washington's decision to go on the offensive, lead his forces back across the Delaware River, and defeat the British forces during Christmastime 1776-77 at Trenton and Princeton.

In Fischer's narrative, the reader, too, cannot help but be caught up by the spirit of these events. "Washington's Crossing" is history at its best, fascinating in its details, magisterial in its sweep.

Fischer, a professor at Brandeis University, sets his stage with an absorbing analysis of the contrasting forces as they stood after the early battles in and around Boston -- "the forces of order" against "the army of free men."

While Washington was forging an army from varieties of "free men" -- seamen and fishermen from Marblehead, many of them Indians and African-Americans, and silk-stocking regiments from Maryland -- the brothers Howe, General William and Admiral Richard, "sympathized with American demands for the rights of Englishmen within the empire."

Readers of Fischer's "Paul Revere's Ride," will recall his fascination with the impact of the weather on momentous events. There, it was the "dark moonshadow" that "miraculously shrouded" Revere's boat as it passed near a British warship while crossing to Charlestown. Here, forgiving Fischer's unfortunate use of the TV weathercasters' "nor'easter," it is such meteorological events as the fog that shielded the retreat from Long Island, the storm that kept Hessian sentries in their quarters at Trenton, and the cold front that swept across the Delaware Valley to end a brief January thaw, freezing over the slushy roads for Washington's army to advance on Princeton. The outcome of that Christmas campaign was at every moment a chancy thing, as Fischer makes clear. Of three planned crossings of the ice-clogged Delaware on Christmas night, only one made it, that led by Washington.

And Washington, Fischer writes, "knew the desperate risk that he was running." If the surprise attack failed, his outnumbered forces could be "[trapped] against an ice-choked river" and destroyed. Recruitment of another American army would be unlikely. Setting the stakes as high as possible, Fischer writes that "without an army, the American Revolution could become yet another failed rebellion, much like the Scottish rising of 1745, or the Irish insurrection of 1798. American independence could have been lost on the banks of the Delaware."

But Washington wins his gamble, and Fischer's story is really that of Washington's crossing. But which Washington? Fischer gives us two.

Fischer opens his account not with history, but art, with a discussion of Emanuel Leutze's iconic 1851 painting, "Washington Crossing the Delaware," now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which provides the jacket illustration. Leaving aside its historical inaccuracies -- wrong flag, a daylight crossing, for instance -- it portrays a Presidents' Day, "father of his country" Washington, in full-dress uniform, steely facing the frigid wind while a figuratively all-American, but gloveless, crew mans the oars. Leutze, writes Fischer, "understood better than many Americans that their Revolution was truly a world event" -- the point, of course, of Fischer's writing.

But as his narrative suggests, it was also a human event and Washington a leader of ordinary men -- as he appears in Thomas Sully's 1819 painting "The Passage of the Delaware," which, alas, has been removed indefinitely from exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts for conservation.

Sully's Washington is the one remembered by his men, "on horseback and alone," rallying the troops at Trenton; leading "his men straight into the center of the battle" at Princeton." "Most American soldiers," Fischer writes, shared those memories "of serving by the side of General Washington. They knew him not only as a leader but a comrade in arms."

Consideration of "Washington's Crossing" cannot end without calling attention to the superb features that add depth and insight to Fischer's narrative.

Tracking the action, there are no fewer than 23 maps, and, taking the place of photographs, three sketches by painter John Trumbull, who served during the campaign in the Connecticut infantry -- quick sketches, Fischer writes, that "captured the kinetics of the battle."

And finally, extensive commentaries on the varied interpretations of the crossing, the Revolution, Whig and Tory, conservative and Marxist, reflect, Fischer writes, "a continuing conversation" -- one in which "Washington's Crossing" will hold an important place.