by David Hackett Fischer
USA, 2004
David Hackett Fischer's Washington's Crossing, like Jill Lepore's über-arresting The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity earlier in the year, is a timely reminder of just what I've been missing out on by doing so little history reading these days. I intend to rectify that in 2012. A superb narrative history of the New York and New Jersey campaigns in winter 1776-1777 when the fate of the young American republic was hanging in the balance, Fischer's Pulitzer Prize-winning work breathes frigid, lifelike life into Emanuel Leutze's famous Washington Crossing the Delaware portrait by combining a meticulously detailed battle chronicle with some marvelously understated writing about the American, British, and Hessian forces. The result is a reading experience which, while often rousing due to the story that's being told, succeeds as a result of a careful marshalling of the sources rather than a reliance on sensationalistic anecdotes. In a book that Fischer himself contends in his conclusion "is mainly about contingency, in the sense of people making choices, and choices making a difference in the world" (364), I'd like to single out a couple of notable examples of how the historian's own storytelling choices served him particularly well in this effort. First, I was delighted by Fischer's careful attention to regional differences among the American army and various state militias. In recounting a battle scene where a dense fog suddenly arose to provide unexpected cover for a U.S. retreat, for example, Fischer wryly notes: "New Englanders received this event as a 'providential occurrence.' Virginians regarded it as a stroke of fortune" (101). Secondly, Fischer's unobtrusiveness as a narrator makes you really take note on the infrequent occasions when he does command center stage. On Thomas Paine's publication of The American Crisis: "The first sentence had the cadence of a drumbeat. Even after two hundred years, its opening phrases still have the power to lift a reader out of his seat. 'These are the times that try men's souls,' Paine began. 'The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW deserves the love and thanks of man and woman'" (140). Having not yet even said anything about the complex but essentially favorable portrait of General George Washington that eventually emerges here, I'll merely confess that even this cynic was moved by one of the teachable moments that Fischer, a longtime professor at nearby Brandeis University, produced about the tribulations of Washington and his army near the end: "We celebrate 1776 as the most glorious year in American history. They remembered it as an agony, especially the 'dark days' of autumn" (363). Great stuff--and yet another resounding victory for real history over its watered-down progeny, historical fiction. (www.oup.com)
David Hackett Fischer
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