Washington Crosses the Delaware

December 1776. We declared a nation in July; by now the King's army has run us across New Jersey in rags. Half of us have no shoes. Our enlistments end on the last day of the year — and so, everyone whispers, does the war. By the fire, an officer reads Paine aloud: these are the times that try men's souls.

By December 1776 Washington's army had retreated across New Jersey to the Delaware. Enlistments expired 31 December. 250 years ago.

Then the order comes down, and it sounds like madness. On Christmas night we will recross the Delaware — the river running thick with ice — and march nine miles to Trenton, to fall on the Hessians at first light. The watchword is handed man to man: Victory, or Death.

Washington planned a surprise night crossing and dawn attack on the Hessian garrison at Trenton. The password was 'Victory or Death.'

The storm comes with the dark — sleet, then snow, then a wind off the river like a blade. Marblehead fishermen work the long boats across, threading the ice floes, while we stand jammed shoulder to shoulder with the horses and the guns. It takes all night to put the army over.

On the night of 25 December, in a nor'easter, Col. John Glover's Marblehead mariners ferried ~2,400 men, horses, and 18 cannon across the ice-choked Delaware.

On the far bank we form up and march — two columns, nine miles through the black and the drifts. The sleet freezes on our muskets. Two men lie down in the snow and do not get up again. We keep the powder dry under our coats and pray the storm hides us the whole way.

The army marched ~9 miles to Trenton in a brutal storm; two soldiers froze to death on the road. The weather helped conceal the approach.

Eight in the morning, and Trenton is asleep. We come out of the storm into the streets before they can form. Our cannon sweep the length of the town; the Hessians stumble from their quarters into a fire they cannot answer. Their commander, Rall, falls from his horse, mortally hit.

The Americans attacked around 8 a.m. on 26 December, catching the Hessian garrison unprepared. Cannon commanded the main streets; Col. Johann Rall was mortally wounded.

It is over in less than an hour. Near nine hundred Hessians lay down their arms — a whole garrison, taken. We have lost only a handful, and not one killed in the fighting, they say. Frozen, starving, written off for dead, we have won.

In under an hour, ~900 Hessians were captured. American combat losses were negligible — a stunning, near-bloodless victory.

The news runs through the colonies like fire through dry grass. Men who were going home in six days stay. A week later we beat them again at Princeton. The cause that was dying in the snow is alive — because a beaten army rowed across a frozen river and dared to turn around.

Trenton, followed by Princeton on 3 January 1777, revived American morale and enlistments and reversed the collapse of 1776.

They will paint us one day, standing tall in the boat with the flag streaming — and they will get the details wrong. It was night, and sleet, and terror, and we hunched down against the ice. But they will get the meaning right. This was the night the revolution refused to die.

Emanuel Leutze's famous 1851 painting romanticizes the crossing. The reality — a night storm, ice, and desperation — turns 250 in 2026.