Washington's Crossing 2016

I've been delinquent in posting, and since the last one, a tumultuous election occurred that provided an opportunity for consideration of what America was in the 18th Century and what it is now.  Leave it at that; one's answer to that question will flow directly from one's current assumptions and presumptions.  One thing that is consistent is the annual reenactment of the crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas Day, 1776.  The event takes on a kind of ritualism.  Still, it's a time for reflection. Credit goes to the reenactors as a cadre of near-clerics who keep alive the momentous nature of this event.  So without further comment, I'll share some of the images of the event today:

The Advance Party Lands

 First Boat Away

 One of Glover's Boatmen

Second Boat Away

 

 Washington's Boat

 The Commander in Chief

 Continental Army on the March

Miscellaneous Reflections from Washington's Crossing March 2015

The Mid-Atlantic region was hit with another severe snowstorm this week, leaving at least a foot of snow in large parts of central New Jersey.  I wandered over to Washington's Crossing.  The Delaware River was mostly frozen over and snow-covered.

Here is the marker on the New Jersey side, looking across to Pennsylvania.  On the Pennsylvania side, here is McKonkey's Ferryhouse:

In the world today, virtually the entirety of the domestic press seems obsessed with cults of personality, as political decimation passes for political discussion.  There are no big ideas being discussed, not really.  As a president tells us the flat-out falsehood that things in the world are not that bad, we are in the midst of a 21st century holocaust in the Middle East.  Ancient archaeological sites are being destroyed.  Independent nations int he Baltics are in imminent danger of aggrandizement. We said "never again" in 1945, and yet "again" has happened in Rwanda, Cambodia, the Balkans and now across the Middle East.  Gone are the plain words of a Thomas Paine.  Instead we have the smug rallying cries of self-absorbed columnists and pundits, regardless of reason or fact.  

Here at Washington's Crossing, we are in the presence of ghosts who held big ideas.  Ghosts who quite literally put their blood into their beliefs.  As Americans today agonize over the most minute of slights and are obsessed with "political correctness," we have forgotten completely how to maintain perspective, to evaluate and reason.  We have forgotten how to be a nation and a people.  We have become siloed, lost in our own selfish pursuits.  America is now us versus us.  We have displaced a healthy individualism and diversity with reflex attack solely for the purpose of destruction, a blue team versus red team mindset, that knows no value other that victory for its own sake.  Meanwhile, the world disintegrates.

Washington's Crossing 2014

I attended the annual reenactment of the 238th anniversary of General George Washington' Christmas Day crossing of the Delaware River, which preceded the 9 mile march south to Trenton and the victory over the Hessian garrison there.  Here is one image of one of the Durham boats being ferried across, filled with soldiers, and oared by the Colonel John Glover's Marbleheaders (in the red caps).

The narrator's concluding remarks stated that with the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781, the war ended in 1781.  This, of course, was not quite correct; the war continued until 1783 and Washington remained concerned that it might still be lost.  People who think the entire British army surrendered at Yorktown forget that New York, Charleston and Savannah were still occupied by significant numbers of British troops.  While the British loss at Yorktown caused the downfall of the North government and seriously hurt the British army, both sides had lost significant armies to surrender earlier in the war--the Americans at Forth Washington (New York) and at Charleston, and the British at Saratoga.  I do not raise all this to quibble as such; Yorktown was a decisive victory and led to the political will on the British side towards peace.  But the headline style way that history is presented, and the less than superficial understanding of Americans, is problematic, even in casual contexts.  These things have a way of sticking.

The reenactors deserve great credit for making history accessible and visible.  Still, there remains no substitute for presentation of history with integrity and attention to facts.  I saw a trailer playing in the movie theater this week that highlighted the History Channel's forthcoming series that basically casts Revolutionary leaders as moving from rogues to rebels to heroes.  Perhaps good marketing strategy, but this constant recasting of historical figures to make them fit contemporary "understandings" or notions of "narrative" and "political correctness" is disturbing.  A photographer is always safest returning to the negative; when they work off prints they are working off edited information.  The more we move from fact to narrative, the more we lose history.  Like a jpeg file that ultimately loses information if it is opened too many times, so, too, does our understanding dissipate if we try to "retell" what happened on the basis of preset dispositions.

Weather and the Revolution

Many are familiar with the suffering of the Continental troops at Valley Forge; in actuality, the winters spent by the troops in Jockey Hollow were worse.  On Christmas Day, 1776, Washington led his men across the Delaware River near the marker shown below.  We are looking across from New Jersey to Pennsylvania.

This was taken on February 16, showing the river frozen over.  Whether a river froze or not was a strategic consideration that affected a defensive posture or the possibility of attack.  On February 18, 1776, Washington wrote the Continental Congress of the possibility of an attack on Boston: "The late freezing Weather having formed some pretty strong Ice from Dorchester point to Boston neck, and from Roxbury to the Common, thereby affording a more expanded and consequently a less dangerous Approach to the Town, I could not help thinking, notwithstanding the Militia were not all come In, and we had little or no Powder to begin our Operation by a regular Cannonade and Bombardment, that a bold and resolute assault upon the Troops in Boston with such Men as we had (for it could not take many Men to guard our own Lines, at a time when the Enemy were attacked in all Quarters) might be crowned with success . . . "

It is always worth remembering in this age of remote control drones, and high tech weaponry, the role of weather in war in general and the Revolution in particular.  This was predominantly a land war, and even at that, mainly fought by foot soldiers, with limited cavalry involvement.  When a river froze, a significant defensive feature was removed and an offensive advantage presented.

Washington's Crossing Reenactment, December 25, 2013

In temperatures ranging from 17 to 22 degrees, a hardy crowd turned out to watch the even hardier reenactors interpret the most iconic moment in American history, the crossing of the Delaware River by General George Washington on Christmas Day, leading to the successful attack on Trenton on December 26, 1776.

Here is the man himself, in the third of three boats that crossed today:

The river is as impressive in winter, even without the ice, and we get some sense of scale as the first boat makes its way across from Pennsylvania to New Jersey:

They would march along this road, still preserved in Washington Crossing Park in New Jersey, now called Continental Lane.

At the time, they left bloodstains in the snow.  This remains hallowed ground.

The Continental Lane and Contemporary Political Arrogance

Although I have lived in central New Jersey virtually entire life and made many visits to Washington's Crossing State Park, I never actually walked along the Continental Lane, the road on which Washington's troops marched after the Christmas night crossing in 1776.  Here is a view of one segment in the park:

David Hackett Fischer, in his book Washington's Crossing, describes the road as "climb[ing] upward through a dark wood, similar to a sweep of woodland that stands there today." Some 2400 officers and troops crossed to this point; the troops split into two forces under Nathanael Greene and John Sullivan, with the former more inland and Sullivan closer to the river as they approached Trenton.

The troops were ill, poorly clothed, hungry.  We know there were soldiers with no shoes whose bleeding feet left paths in the snow.  We know that many who enlisted in the Continental Army were from the bottom of the economic ladder.  We know that many of Washington's soldiers were incapacitated  and could not make the crossing; many others had died before the battle from illness.  And yet, those that remained, made that march on that bitter, sleeting night.

To understand how this country survived the defeats of 1776 and how the war was saved, walk the Continental Lane, particularly on a cold day.  Listen to the sounds of your footsteps and be alone with your thoughts.

Today we have political leaders who treat $1,000,000 with less respect and concern than the rest of us treat a penny.  They fly with entourages around the world; a recently reported stay of the vice-president for one night in London came in at around $500,000.  The lectures and the rhetoric are belied by a political class obsessed with itself, with its power and preservation of same.  We barely finished the 2012 elections when literally the next day we were into the 2014 season and already planning not only 2016 but 2020 and beyond.  Meanwhile, real people in this country are living and dying, struggling to survive and get on.  The rhetoric is not enough.  Do we really remember where we came from?

Every representative and senator should be made to walk the Continental Lane as a requirement to service.  They should be made to feel the same ground beneath their feet that absorbed the blood of real people who made this country happen.  There is no better reality check than that, to restore a sense of proportion and remove the insulation and arrogance that seems now to mark an increasingly out of touch political class.

The Veterans of the Revolution

With Memorial Day approaching, I visited some of the local spots where American Revolutionary War soldiers are buried.  At the Princeton Battlefield, there is the mass grave that includes British soldiers.  But in some of the churchyards, we find the individual graves, and at Washington's Crossing on the Pennsylvania side, there is the row of graves of "unknown soldiers."

This is the grave of an unknown soldier who died in camp, before the march on Trenton.  When I see a grave like this, and consider the individual buried here, I experience an overwhelming sadness.  Here was a man, a unique human being, born in all the pain of childbirth his mother experienced, someone who experienced infancy, a childhood.  We can know nothing of his life because we cannot know him.  Was he missed? Mourned in absentia? What made him join the Continental Army? Dead by December 1776--had he fought at the Battle of Brooklyn in August? Had he killed? What jokes did he enjoy? How did he sound when he laughed? 

Howard Peckham's study of American casualties, The Toll of Independence, estimates American camp deaths at 10,000.  Total "probable deaths in service," including the camp deaths, killed in battle, and death as prisoners of war, totals 25,324.  Here is one.