Washington’s Crossing (2004) by David Hackett Fischer

There aren’t many historians like David Hackett Fischer, widely respected by his judgmental, often captious peers in the academy, the recipient of some of the most prestigious awards in his field, and capable of taking serious scholarship mainstream and with commercial success. I was first introduced to Fisher in graduate school when we were required to read his landmark “Historians’ Fallacies,” a withering attack on shoddy historiography. He set a high bar for scholarship in that classic text, a benchmark he meets in his own work.

I read this book, one in a series on pivotal moments in US history, with a mix of curiosity and surprise. The topic was one that I was well familiar with and which has been covered many times before, including a relatively recent, quality account by Ralph Ketchum, “Winter Soldiers.” I found “Washington’s Crossing” to be stellar, forcefully and clearly written, certainly worthy of its many accolades, and superior to others, including Ketchum’s.

Fischer accentuates several aspects of the campaign that resonated with me. First, he demonstrates the unparalleled reach and professionalism of the British armed forces, every bit as dominant globally in 1776 as the United States is today, capable of executing feats of logistics, maneuver, coordination and power projection that no other peer competitor could hope to match. Fischer describes the British landing on Long Island as a masterwork amphibious assault. The number and skill of the Royal Navy overawed American observers. The size of the British expeditionary force the largest the empire had ever sent abroad. The author also stresses the competence and often progressive outlook of the leading British general officers, especially the Howe brothers in charge of the Army and Navy, and the main figure in the New Jersey campaign, General Cornwallis, “a figure of greater gravitas than George Washington,” he reminds us. The American rebels weren’t just facing an indomitable, mindless war machine in 1776; they were facing some of the most experienced, thoughtful and daring military leaders in the world, who happened to be politically liberal and initially inclined toward reconciliation and moderation in their campaigns.

At first, the generals’ moderation appeared to be working, many of the British policies taking on the familiar outline of contemporary counterinsurgency doctrine: generous offers of blanket amnesty; stressing the fair and honest treatment of locals; an ink spot strategy of gradually expanding the area of control; instituting new government structures manned by loyalists. Indeed, Fischer emphasizes the civil war and insurgency aspect of the struggle in 1776 much more than other accounts that I’ve read. Despite the best efforts of the Howes and Cornwallis, the British troops, and especially the Hessians, abused the local population, which led to an uprising, a “Jersey Awakening” of sorts, packs of militia marauding the countryside, sniping at patrols and ambushing convoys, tactics and counter tactics similar to the present day conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Wherever red coats and brass caps appeared in the countryside, they were attacked.”

The thing that surprised me about this book was Fischer’s highly flattering appraisal of George Washington’s generalship, particularly given the admonishments to hero worship he laid down in “Historian’s Fallacies.” After decades of being cut down to size like the apocryphal cherry tree of his youth, Fischer pumps Washington up to Olympian dimensions. He is described as a brilliant leader and strategist, who sought and retained the initiative beginning in late December 1776, drove a campaign of high tempo and speed that the vaunted British couldn’t hope to match, despite all of their professionalism and efficiency, and succeeding in feats of battlefield concentration that Napoleon in his prime would be pressed to duplicate. Fisher suggests that Washington was a master of taking full advantage of opportunities, and ultimately he “improvised [a] way of war that became an American tradition.”

Fischer is most glowing in his treatment of Washington’s leadership style, especially his openness to new ideas, his fostering of debate, and his willingness to hear from a wide group of men in his frequent war counsels. Moreover, he eventually found his footing and welded a polyglot army of vastly different cultures into a fighting force capable of fighting toe-to-toe with Europe’s best. “His method was beginning to work in this army of free spirits. It was uniting cantankerous Yankees, stubborn Pennsylvanians, autonomous Jerseymen, honor-bound Virginians, and independent backcountrymen in a common cause.”

The end result were historic victories of the winter campaign in New Jersey, victories that turned the tide of the war, analogous to the Tet Offensive, Fisher argues (although I think that is stretching it). Literally, over the course of few weeks the entire character of the war changed. The Americans had confidence, which led to desperately new recruits, and they had found a way to meet and beat the British. The British and Hessians, on the other hand, had suddenly lost their nerve, more concerned about being attacked than attacking, a shift of historic importance. “The battles at Trenton and Princeton and the Forage War were not small symbolic victories, as many historians have regarded them,” Fischer says. “The winter campaign inflicted severe damage on British and Hessian forces.”

Finally, Fisher ends on a high note, or at least from my perspective. His conclusion is an unapologetic paean to the nobility and virtue of the Founding Fathers and our need to emulate their example. I was dumbstruck by his tone and his words, so out of character are they, unfortunately, for an established American historian. The final paragraph of the book is worth quoting in full.

“They set a high example, and we have much to learn from them. Much recent historical writing has served us ill in that respect. In the late twentieth century, too many scholars tried to make the American past into a record of crime and folly. Too many writers have told us that we are captives of our darker selves and helpless victims of our history. It isn’t so, and never was. The story of Washington’s Crossing tells us that Americans in an earlier generation were capable of acting in a higher spirit – and so are we.”