Dali House

The German Emmanuel Leutze created his best-known work 75 years after George Washington was ferried to victory at Trenton, New Jersey. Time and distance (Leutze did the painting in Dusseldorf) may be excuses for poor memory, but he was way over the top with this one.

It only bothers historians, really. The average viewer (and certainly most Americans) could care less that Washington in fact crossed the Delaware River in the dead of night in a furious snowstorm. Leutze, of course, was going for the old out-of-darkness-to-a-new-dawn effect, and actually painted the morning star directly above the lead poler, as if it’s the Wise Men at Christmas a-coming.

This little dinghy isn’t quite right either. The troops crossed in Durham boats, so called because they were normally used by the Durham Iron Works to transport pig iron. They had high sides and were 40 to 60 feet long, men using 18-foot “sweeps” to propel them.

The bloke who’s somehow managed to get his hands on a “Betsy Ross flag” six months before she dreamed it up is future president James Monroe, who did indeed cross the river that night, as a scout and trusted adviser to the general, but not likely in the same boat.

The man dragging away at the current and the ice floes by Washington’s knee is evidently the black patriot Prince Whipple, “born in Amabou, Africa, of comparatively wealthy parents”, who was shipped to America at age 10 to be educated, only to be promptly sold into slavery on arrival.

Fortunately he ended up in the hands of a General Whipple, who set him free during the war, but not before putting him in charge of a large sum of money to take from Salem to Portsmouth, a journey on which he predictably enough had to fend off some determined highwaymen.

There were a lot of black soldiers in the Marblehead Regiment that ferried the army across the Delaware, but not Prince Whipple, who was snug in Baltimore that night.

Leutze studied Washington’s uniform and sword at the Smithsonian, but beyond that let his imagination out for a stroll. Proof that that’s just fine with patriots, thankyou, is evident in the statue made from his painting, which today greets visitors at the scene of the river crossing.

The Delaware crossing on Christmas night, 1776, of course, culminated with 2,4000 American troops scaring the daylights out of 1,500 German mercenaries holed up in Trenton. The British, finding the colonial weather a bit much, eh wot, had left the Hessians to keep an eye on Washington while they looked for someplace warmer for the winter.

As David McCullough points out in “1776 – America and Britain at War”, things could have gone badly awry. Not only had Washington’s men taken much longer than planned to get across the river, potentially ruining a dawn surprise, his twin pincer forces hadn’t crossed at all. The ice was too packed up downstream, and the weather just too foul. They all went back to camp!

The stout general remains aglow in another “Washington Crossing the Delaware”, done about the same time by George Caleb Bingham, born in Virginia in 1811, lived and, in 1879, died in Missouri.

The apprentice cabinetmaker switched to oil paint after meeting an itinerant painter and was soon in the portrait business, while dabbling in politics. In Washington he painted Daniel Webster and other luminaries of the day.

Bingham too put a halo around Washington, typical of the melodrama beloved of his time and ours, and also sat him on his horse, which was even crazier than showing him standing up in the boat.

No matter how George got there, though, the job got done, right?