Washington's Crossing, David Hackett Fischer

Regular readers of these reviews know that the dis-oriented author is a history buff. I have been reading the pantheon of the founding fathers and that reading has taken me afield into the French Revolution and the Scottish and Irish Renaissance. But no matter where I roam, my reading still takes me back to the founding of America. This time I read David Hackett Fischer's Pulitzer Prize winning, Washington's Crossing.

Perhaps it is a side effect of my politics. As I look at the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Federalist Papers, I ask myself what kind of men wrote these documents and formed this nation. What influences drove them. What books did they read, what science did they pursue, what did they believe and why did they do it.

In my pursuit of these questions this book is one of the best that I have read.

Before I read this book I read the excellent 1776 by David McCullough. McCullough's book described the pivotal year of 1776 but it was really a biography of George Washington. 1776 made an excellent introduction to Washington's Crossing.

In this book, Fischer starts with the fall of New York and focuses on the campaign of 1776 and 1777 in New Jersey. The book focuses on Washington's famous crossing of the Delaware as depicted int he iconic Leutze painting. With the successful crossing and the victories at Trenton and Princeton the tide of the war changed. Americans began to believe that they could win and the British began to believe that they could lose.

This book is different than many others I have read in that it gives equal time to the other two armies engaged in the war, the British and the Hessians. Until reading this book I really did not know how the Hessians came to be involved in the war. This book gave me a broader perspective of the New jersey campaign and the makeup of the American forces. Fischer describes many of the Continental and Militia units in detail. The book introduces many of the colorful figure at the company level — not just the generals.

This book is also notable for the extent of its appendices. I especially liked the one on Historiography. It discusses the different approaches taken by Historians in viewing an event like the Delaware Crossing and the New Jersey Campaign. I found the discussion enlightening and probably no surprise that I am a bit of a filiopietist

Washington's Crossing gets 5 of 5 dis-oriented smileys

Purchase Washington's Crossing from Amazon.com.