Crossing the Delaware on Christmas Night and the Ten Days That Saved the Cause

Imagine running a revolution on a calendar with an expiration date. Not a metaphor: a literal date, December 31, 1776, on which most of your soldiers' enlistments would end and most of your army would be free to walk home. That was the position of General George Washington at Christmas, and it explains everything about what he did next.

The famous painting of the crossing shows a general standing in a boat in the ice, flag flying, jaw set, and a crew of rowers posed as if a committee had told them to look heroic. The painter, a German-American who worked decades later and far away, got the boat wrong, the flag wrong and probably the posture wrong. But he got the mood right. This was a man staking everything on a few days. What follows is those days, in order, because this story is best told as a calendar.

Why the Spring of Hope Became a Winter of Despair

Start with where things stood. In the summer of 1776 the Americans had declared independence. By autumn they were losing the war.

The British had landed a huge force at New York, and Washington's army was beaten on Long Island in August and driven out of Manhattan in the weeks that followed. On November 16 the British and Hessians took Fort Washington on the northern tip of Manhattan, capturing close to three thousand American soldiers. Fort Lee, across the Hudson, was abandoned a few days later. Washington then retreated across New Jersey with the British in pursuit, and in early December he put the Delaware River between his army and the enemy, taking the boats with him so that no one could follow.

By mid-December the cause looked finished. Congress left Philadelphia for Baltimore in the middle of December, which is the only time in history a legislature has been quick about anything. General Charles Lee, Washington's second in command, was captured by a British patrol on December 13. Men deserted. The army that had numbered many thousands in the summer had dwindled to a few thousand, many of them sick and many without shoes. Worst of all was the calendar. The enlistments of most of the Continentals ran out at the end of the year.

If you want to feel what that winter was like from the inside, read the words Washington had read to his men in those same days, which I take up in Thomas Paine's The Crisis and the Words Read Aloud to a Freezing Army. Paine's essay appeared on December 19, and tradition says Washington had it read to the troops, though the story is weakly sourced. Words alone did not win the war, but the army needed something to believe in before it could be ordered to do something this hard.

The Timeline

December 25, 1776: The Crossing

Washington's plan was audacious. A garrison of Hessian troops, German soldiers hired by the British Crown, sat at Trenton, New Jersey, on the east bank of the Delaware. Washington would take about 2,400 men across the river on the night of December 25 and attack at dawn on the 26th. Other columns were meant to cross at other points to trap the garrison, but the ice and the weather prevented them from getting across, so the whole weight fell on Washington's main force.

The crossing took place at McConkey's Ferry, in Pennsylvania, upstream from Trenton. The weather turned vicious: a storm of rain, then sleet and snow, with ice choking the river. The men who got the army across were the soldiers of Colonel John Glover's regiment from Marblehead, Massachusetts, fishermen and sailors who had already saved the army once by ferrying it off Long Island in August. They handled the heavy flat-bottomed boats through the ice. The artillery, under Henry Knox, went across too, about eighteen guns, horses and all.

Why it mattered: it was a gamble that depended on professionals doing a hard, unglamorous job. The sailors of Marblehead were the reason a plan that looked impossible was merely very dangerous. The crossing took much longer than planned, and the army did not finish landing until about three in the morning.

December 26, 1776: Trenton

The army then marched about nine miles to Trenton in the storm, in two columns, over frozen roads. At about eight in the morning they struck. The Hessian force there, three regiments under Colonel Johann Rall, numbered roughly 1,400 men. Washington's advance drove in the pickets, and the artillery, with Alexander Hamilton commanding a battery, swept the streets that ran through the town. The Hessians tried to form up and counterattack, and were beaten back. Rall was mortally wounded. About nine hundred of his men were captured, and only a few hundred escaped.

American losses were remarkably small: a handful of wounded, including a young lieutenant named James Monroe, who would become the fifth President, and two soldiers who died of exposure on the march.

Now a word about the myth. The story that the Hessians were drunk from Christmas celebrations has been told for generations. The evidence is not strong. The garrison had been on alert for days because of harassing raids, and the weather and the surprise were what mattered. Washington did not beat a hung-over army. He beat a competent one that did not expect him to cross a frozen river in a blizzard. The credit belongs to the attacker.

Why it mattered: it was the first clear American victory in months, and it captured prisoners, weapons and stores at a point when the cause needed proof that it could still win. It was also a lesson in a basic military truth: surprise multiplies force.

December 27 to 31, 1776: The Problem of the Calendar

Here is the part that is left out of most pictures. After the victory Washington had a problem. His troops were exhausted, the British would respond, and the enlistments were about to expire. Washington took the prisoners back across the river on the 26th and 27th, then crossed again into New Jersey at the end of December with the army and some militia, preparing to hold Trenton.

He then did something that I think shows his character better than the crossing. He asked the men to stay. On the parade ground he appealed to the veterans whose terms were up to serve six more weeks, and offered a bounty of ten dollars. According to tradition, the first response was silence, and then, after he spoke again, enough men stepped forward to keep the army in being. The bounty money was thin; it was the appeal that worked. Some of the men chose to stay because they believed in the cause, and that choice kept the army from dissolving on New Year's Day.

Why it mattered: a victory is only worth what you can do with it. Washington used the moment to keep the army whole, and the men who stayed made possible everything that followed.

January 2, 1777: Assunpink Creek

The British could not leave a defeat at Trenton unanswered. Lord Cornwallis, who had planned to return to England, was sent back with a strong force, thousands of men, to retake the town. Washington drew up his army behind Assunpink Creek, on the south side of Trenton, and delayed the advance with skirmishers during the day. By late afternoon Cornwallis's troops reached the creek and tried to cross the bridge. The Americans held. Three assaults on the bridge failed. Night fell with the British on one side of the creek and the Americans on the other.

This is sometimes called the Second Battle of Trenton. Cornwallis decided to wait for morning, expecting to finish the job. The American army was trapped between the British and the river, and by any normal reckoning it was finished.

Why it mattered: the Americans proved they could hold ground against regulars, and the Assunpink fight bought the time Washington needed for his boldest move.

The Night of January 2 and the Morning of January 3: Princeton

Washington called a council of war. He did not retreat. Instead he left a small force to keep the campfires burning and make noise, to fool the British into thinking the army was still in place, and took the main body of his army on a back road around the British flank, toward Princeton, where a smaller British force was stationed.

At Princeton, on the morning of January 3, 1777, the two sides met unexpectedly. The fight went badly at first. General Hugh Mercer, leading the advance, was mortally wounded and his troops began to fall back. Washington rode forward in the line of fire, rallied the Continentals and the Pennsylvania militia, and led them in a charge that broke the British regiments. He had gone up and down the lines in range of the enemy's muskets, and he survived by luck and nerve. Mercer died of his wounds days later.

After the victory Washington did not stay to press his luck. His army was spent. He marched to the hills around Morristown, New Jersey, and went into winter quarters. Over the course of ten days, the Americans had won two battles, taken a lot of prisoners, and driven the British back from most of New Jersey to a few posts near New York.

Why it mattered: Trenton and Princeton were small by the standards of later battles and enormous by the standard of morale. Recruits came in, the militia of New Jersey turned on the British foragers, and the idea that the British were invincible died in the snow.

The Strongest Objection

Let me give you the objection to the heroic reading, because a fair argument needs one.

The objection says: the Trenton raid was a lucky stroke. Washington's plan failed in part, the other columns never crossed, and a Hessian patrol that had been more alert might have spoiled it. The victory was small, and the war went on for six more years. Treating it as the turning point is storytelling, not history.

Four points in answer.

1. Concede the facts. The plan did go partly wrong. The other columns did not cross. The battle was small compared to what came later, and the war did continue. Nobody serious claims it won the Revolution in ten days.
2. The claim is narrower. The claim is that without it the Revolution would very likely have ended in the winter of 1776 and 1777. The enlistments were expiring, Congress had fled, and the best force the colonies had was disintegrating. The victories did not win the war. They kept it from being lost.
3. Luck is not an argument against a plan. Every great military success involves luck, and the question is who made himself ready to use it. Washington had scouted the garrison, knew its routine, and placed his men where the weather would cover them. He moved at the one moment when the British did not expect him to.
4. The result shows in the numbers that followed. Men who had been ready to go home stayed, and new recruits came in. Whatever you call that, it kept the Continental Army alive to winter at Morristown, to endure Valley Forge the next year, and to be there at Yorktown. See Valley Forge Was a Winter of Hunger That Turned Farmers Into an Army and Yorktown in October 1781 and How a French Fleet Helped Trap Cornwallis.

The Lesson About Leadership

Here is what the ten days teach, and I would argue it is why people still tell the story.

Leaders go first. At Princeton Washington rode into the fire. In an era when generals often commanded from the rear, he commanded from where the men could see him. A leader who asks for risk has to be seen to share it.

Leaders tell the truth about the stakes. Washington did not tell his army it was winning. He told them what was at stake and asked them to stay. People can bear a hard thing when they are told why. They cannot bear being managed.

Leaders plan around the calendar. The deadline was real, and he acted before it fell. A republic's institutions run on terms, deadlines and elections, and the people who serve it have to work inside those limits and not wish them away. It is worth noticing that Washington never tried to extend his authority past the calendar by force. He asked.

Leaders know when to stop. After Princeton he could have pressed on to New Brunswick, where a British pay chest was rumored to lie. He judged his army too tired and withdrew to winter quarters. Knowing the limit of an advantage is a form of discipline too, and one that most modern spending bills have never heard of.

A short companion to this story, written as a satire to make a point about what permit rules would do to bold action, is in A Thought Experiment Where Washington Needs a Permit to Cross the Delaware. And for two officers who faced the same war and made opposite choices, see Nathan Hale and Benedict Arnold Show Two Ways an American Officer Could Choose.

What the Founders Took From It

The Revolution was a war of ideas carried by men. The Declaration of Independence says that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed." Washington's army was held together by consent in a way that few armies of the day were. These men were not conscripts driven by fear. When they stayed in New Jersey after their terms expired, they were consenting to be governed by a cause. The war was won by people who chose, again and again, to do what they were not forced to do.

That is the sort of citizenship a republic depends on. The calendar still matters, and the habit of showing up when you could go home is the quiet virtue behind every jury summons, every school board meeting and every election.

The Case in Brief

1. By December 1776 the Revolution was close to collapse: New York was lost, Fort Washington had fallen, Congress had fled Philadelphia and most enlistments ended on December 31.
2. On the night of December 25, Washington took about 2,400 men across the ice with the help of Glover's Marblehead mariners, and on December 26 they captured roughly nine hundred Hessians at Trenton.
3. He then persuaded veterans to stay, held Assunpink Creek on January 2, 1777, slipped around Cornwallis in the night and won at Princeton on January 3.
4. The victories did not end the war, but they kept it from being lost, and the men who stayed made Morristown, Valley Forge and Yorktown possible.
5. The lesson is leadership by example, honest talk about the stakes and acting before the deadline, which is what a free people asks of those it follows.

What you can do: read the first Crisis essay in full with your family on a cold evening, then find the Delaware crossing or the Trenton battlefield in your state's historic sites listings and plan a visit.