What happened when Washington crossed the Delaware?
On the night of 25 to 26 December 1776, George Washington led about 2,400 soldiers across the ice-filled Delaware River in a winter storm, marched on Trenton, New Jersey, and surprised its Hessian garrison at about 8 a.m., capturing roughly 900 men. Emanuel Leutze's 1851 painting of the scene, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is famous but wrong in many details.1
On the stormy night of 25 to 26 December 1776, George Washington took about 2,400 soldiers and 18 cannon across the ice-choked Delaware River from Pennsylvania to New Jersey. Seventy-five years later a German-American painter turned that night into one of the best-known pictures in America.2
Key points
- Why: beaten in New York, Washington needed a victory before many enlistments ran out at the end of December.3
- How: John Glover's Marblehead mariners ferried the army in Durham boats and ferries.4
- Result: the Hessian garrison at Trenton was overwhelmed and about 900 men captured.5
- The painting: Emanuel Leutze's canvas of 1851 hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; its flag, boat, light and ice are all wrong.6
Why did Washington cross the Delaware on Christmas?
Because time was running out. Beaten in New York and chased across New Jersey, his army was shrinking, and many enlistments expired at the end of December. A quick blow at the isolated Hessian post at Trenton could restore morale and keep men in the ranks. Christmas night was the date fixed after several councils of war.7
December 1776: the darkest weeks
Washington lost the Battle of Long Island in August 1776 and then New York City; in November the British took Fort Washington and Fort Lee, and the ragged army retreated across New Jersey into Pennsylvania. Days before the crossing Thomas Paine published The American Crisis, opening with "These are the times that try men's souls". The American Battlefield Trust says it was passed around the campfires; Washington Crossing Historic Park notes that nothing shows Washington ordered it read to the troops.8
The British had gone into winter quarters behind a chain of posts across New Jersey. Trenton was held by about 1,400 to 1,500 Hessians, German soldiers hired by Britain, under Colonel Johann Rall, worn out by weeks of militia raids. Warned of an attack, Rall built no defenses; "Let them come," he reportedly said.9
The plan: three crossings, one success
Colonel John Cadwalader, with about 1,800 Philadelphia militia and Continentals, was to cross near Burlington and pin the posts there; General James Ewing, with 800 to 1,000 Pennsylvania militia, was to cross at Trenton and hold the bridge over Assunpink Creek, the Hessians' escape route. Washington would cross with the main body at McConkey's Ferry and march south. Ice and the storm stopped both southern crossings.10
The night of 25 to 26 December
Most of the infantry crossed in Durham boats, high-sided freight craft about 40 to 60 feet long built to carry iron down the river; guns and horses went on flat ferries. The crews were Glover's Massachusetts seamen and local watermen, and Colonel Henry Knox brought 18 cannon over.11
The crossing began around 6 p.m. according to Washington Crossing Historic Park. A nor'easter drove snow and sleet into the men's faces; one soldier recorded that "it blew a perfect hurricane". The river here is about 300 yards wide, yet the operation ran about three hours late. Washington wrote that a retreat could not be made unseen, so "I determined to push on at all Events". The columns moved off at about 4 a.m..12
How many soldiers crossed the Delaware?
About 2,400, with 18 guns, according to Mount Vernon, Britannica and the American Battlefield Trust. The two southern forces, some 2,600 to 2,800 men together, never got across in strength.13
The march and the attack
The army marched about nine to ten miles south on icy roads in two columns: Major General Nathanael Greene's from the north, Major General John Sullivan's along the river road to cut the retreat. Washington's password for the night was "Victory or Death".14
They reached Trenton at about 8 a.m. on 26 December and took the garrison by surprise. Rall was mortally wounded, and the National Park Service survey says the Hessians surrendered within about an hour and a half. About 22 Hessians were killed and 83 wounded, and 800 to 900 were captured; no American was killed in the fighting. The fight is told in the Battle of Trenton; on 3 January 1777 Washington struck again at Princeton, and the Ten Crucial Days traces the whole campaign.15
Who painted Washington Crossing the Delaware?
Emanuel Leutze (1816 to 1868), born in Schwäbisch Gmünd and raised in Philadelphia, painted it in Düsseldorf. He began in 1849, after the failed European revolutions of 1848, which he had supported, hoping the American story would inspire reform at home. According to Washington Crossing Historic Park, American tourists and art students served as models. The landscape painter Worthington Whittredge posed for both Washington and the steersman, according to the National Academy of Design and the State Department's Art in Embassies program.16
The first version, lost in the Second World War
A fire in Leutze's studio damaged the first version in 1850. Restored, it went to the Kunsthalle in Bremen and was destroyed there by Allied bombing in the Second World War; Washington Crossing Historic Park names a Royal Air Force raid on 5 September 1942.17
The second, full-size version, dated 1851, was shown in New York that autumn and then in the Rotunda of the Capitol. It measures 149 by 255 inches (378.5 by 647.7 cm), about 12 by 21 feet, and John Stewart Kennedy gave it to the Met in 1897.18
Was the Washington Crossing the Delaware painting accurate?
Not in its details: Washington Crossing Historic Park calls it arguably the least accurate depiction of the crossing, though the historian David Hackett Fischer argues that its larger themes are true to the event.19
- The flag: the Stars and Stripes was adopted only on 14 June 1777, about six months later.20
- The boat: the real Durham boats were roughly three times the size of Leutze's rowboat.21
- The light: the army crossed at night in a snowstorm, not under a dawn sky.22
- The river and the ice: Leutze modeled the river on the Rhine; its upended blue ice differs from the flat white ice of the Delaware.23
- The pose: standing looks reckless, but most men in Durham boats stood, since there were no seats and the bottoms were wet.24
- James Monroe: the officer with the flag is traditionally Monroe, but according to the park he crossed with William Washington of the 3rd Virginia, not with the commander in chief.25
- The face: Washington, then 44, looks older because Leutze worked from Houdon's likeness of 1785.26
Who is in the boat?
Fischer reads western riflemen in hunting shirts and deerskin leggings, a recent Scottish immigrant in a Balmoral bonnet and farmers from Pennsylvania and New Jersey in broad-brimmed hats. At Washington's knee rows a Black soldier; the park links him to Leutze's abolitionism and notes that Glover's regiment was integrated. He is often called Prince Whipple, but the park finds no documentation that Whipple was at the crossing. In The Met's audio guide the Mohawk historian Scott Manning Stevens sees a Native American at the stern, says "Leutze wants to paint our better angels" and notes that every part of society is aboard except women.27
Before Leutze: Thomas Sully's Passage of the Delaware
According to Mount Vernon, the earliest known painting of the crossing is Thomas Sully's The Passage of the Delaware of 1819. Sully shows the moment before: Washington calm on a white horse on the Pennsylvania bank, above the action rather than in the boat.28
How each side remembers the night
For Americans the crossing became a founding legend; the National Park Service survey calls it a carefully planned stroke that rescued a waning cause. For the Hessians, Trenton was a humiliation with its own myth, that the garrison was drunk after Christmas. There is no evidence for it; the park suggests it may come from a British officer who later called Rall a drunkard, and points instead to exhaustion. In Germany the painting was read in the light of 1848, in America as a patriotic icon, and Stevens recalls that Washington's later campaign against the Haudenosaunee earned him a name meaning "destroyer of villages".29
Where did Washington cross the Delaware? The site and the painting today
He crossed at McConkey's Ferry, in today's Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania, and landed on the New Jersey bank by the old ferry house. Both banks are state parks: Washington Crossing Historic Park in Pennsylvania and Washington Crossing State Park in New Jersey. A Christmas Day reenactment of the crossing takes place each year at the Pennsylvania park.30
Leutze's painting hangs in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; from 1952 it spent almost two decades on loan to the Pennsylvania park.31
