What David Hackett Fischer Learned About George Washington

Bob Thompson, in the Washington Post (April 3,2004):

Big guy in a uniform stands rigidly erect in a wooden rowboat, gazing into the distance. Clutch of worried-looking soldiers huddles around him, some fending off chunks of river ice with their oars. Talk about your iconic images: It's the first George W., of course, schlepping across the Delaware in 1776 to surprise those hapless Hessians at Trenton on Christmas Day and change history. And as David Hackett Fischer stood in a packed Smithsonian lecture hall Thursday holding up the cover of his latest book, "Washington's Crossing," he could be sure the 150 or so people in his audience would already know the whole heroic tale.

Except for the parts they didn't.

"It's a wonderful story," Fischer said, and what makes it wonderful is that "we think we know it." He certainly thought he did -- hadn't he been telling it to his students for 40 years? -- before he proved himself wrong.

Fischer is an iconic figure himself, in a modest way. A longtime professor at Brandeis University, he is a leading practitioner of what's been called "crossover history," an attempt to combine academic rigor with popular appeal. He did it in 1994 with "Paul Revere's Ride," and now he's done it again with another historical work -- in addition to its fast-paced narrative, it features more than 150 pages of appendices and notes -- that's headed into its fifth printing and even managed to sneak onto the New York Times bestseller list for a week.

He was surprised repeatedly while researching it, he said.

Take the Father of Our Country, for starters. Forget that somber senior citizen, redolent of rectitude and gravitas, who gazes out at us from dollar bills. The George Washington Fischer met was 44 and looked even younger: a lean, vigorous, athletic man in his prime. And he was far more emotional than the general whose stoical tenacity we've been taught to admire. After a disastrous series of defeats in New York in the fall of 1776, he found himself watching helplessly from across the Hudson as the last American stronghold in Manhattan fell and some of his men were put to death. He "dissolved into tears of frustration and despair," Fischer said -- then pulled himself together and went on.

Washington was also a "man of intellect," Fischer emphasized, countering the accepted notion that brainpower was not among the great man's many virtues. Raised in the orderly, aristocratic culture of northern Virginia, he was smart enough to figure out that to command an army of disparate, individualistic colonials he would have to develop a less-hierarchical leadership style. Councils of war in the American army became "open, free exchanges of information," in which the commander in chief -- while always in charge -- truly listened.

A second surprise was the Delaware crossing. It's usually portrayed, correctly, as a daring and desperate gamble, but our mental picture doesn't include all the horrendous snafus that could easily have turned victory into defeat.

To cite just a couple: Three main bodies of American troops were supposed to cross from Pennsylvania to New Jersey on Christmas night, landing at different points and coordinating an attack on the Hessians in Trenton. But two were defeated by the ice on the river, and in the end, only Washington's personal command, which crossed a few miles upriver from the city, actually made it -- through a raging storm -- to the opposite bank.

Then, as the general and his men approached the town, there occurred what Fischer has called a "scene no novelist could invent." They ran into 50 American riflemen who had crossed the river on their own initiative and attacked a Hessian outpost. It seems the Hessians had killed one of their comrades on the river and they had invoked the old back-country "rule of retaliation" to wage their own private war.

"You, sir," a furious Washington raged at their commander, "may have ruined all my plans by having put them on their guard."

Yet another surprise was the picture Fischer began to get of Washington's opposition. Few armies in history have as poor a reputation as the Hessians -- German troops from Hesse-Cassel who had been hired to help stamp out the rebellion. Scapegoated by the British and American loyalists after the battle, they've been portrayed for two centuries as incompetent laggards who incapacitated themselves through a bibulous Christmas celebration.

"Hessians Not Drunk" would have been the headline if Fischer had been writing a news story. He found eyewitnesses to their sobriety and much evidence that they had fought and died with disciplined courage. He also noted that after the battle Washington's troops "discovered a large supply of rum, and they were the ones who got drunk" -- making their journey back across the Delaware somewhat harrowing....

"There is an old American folk tale about George Washington and the Crossing of the Delaware," Fischer wrote. In its essence it is true, but "it is not the whole truth." His careful research didn't turn history on its head, but it enriched and reshaped it.