Published By: American Enterprise Institute
Available from:
The Revolutionary Transformation of the Art of War
Affiliation: Executive Director of the George C. Marshall Foundation as well as the Director of the Marshall Library on the campus of the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia
Venue: United States Military Academy in West Point, New York.
Excerpt:
Tonight we meet at “the river and the rock.” Completed under the eye of General Washington, this largest American fortress of the Revolution frustrated British hopes of controlling the Hudson and splitting off the New England colonies from the rest of America.
Triumphant even in the face of treason, West Point is a fitting place for an assessment of the change in warfare that occurred during the American and French revolutionary era, 1775-1802.
As we approach the 200th anniversary of the War for Independence, we shall retell myths, legends, and solemn truths. One of the myths of the Revolution is that Frederick the Great of Prussia described the fighting by Washington’s forces around Trenton and Princeton in the period from December 25, 1776 to January 4, 1777 as the most brilliant campaign in the history of warfare. This appeared only as “it is said” in Bernard Lossing’s 1859 volume on the war. It was disproved in a series of scholarly articles around the turn of the century and supposedly finished off conclusively by Major General Francis V. Greene in 1911.
But it still survives.
The myth persists because the great European commander of the period should have praised one of the key campaigns of the war. Trenton and Princeton were the signal that the Continental Army had come of age and was in the war to stay. Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill had been unexpected acts of defiance, but they had been followed by poor troop performance and defective generalship which had forced the American withdrawal in late 1776 with considerable losses from New York to the temporary safety of New Jersey.
Almost discredited at Christmastime, Washington faced the fact that most of the members of his Continental Army, weakened and confused, would soon leave him when their terms expired at the end of the year. Cinderella’s prospects near the stroke of midnight could not have been more disheartening. So the so-called “American Fabius,” heir to a generation of orthodox military solutions, placed his career on the line. In an almost hopeless situation he decided to use his troops while there was yet time. The weather was abominable, the odds extreme, the river virtually impassable because of the ice. A more cautious man would have stayed in winter quarters.
For his crossing of the Delaware he had the assistance of Captain John Glover’s Marblehead regiment whose boatmen had already helped to evade the British in the retreat from Long Island. During the cold and stormy night of December 25th he crossed the river, perhaps not so grandly as Leutze has portrayed him, but perkily at least, in a scene so clearly made for Hollywood that no motion picture of the event has ever been convincing. Shortly after daybreak, he arrived at Trenton to awaken Colonel Rall and his Hessians. The enemy was surprised — whether because of Christmas Eve frivolities too long extended or the customary hard drinking of the commander does not matter — and most members of the garrison were taken prisoner. Slipping back across the river, Washington reformed his troops and returned to Trenton a few days later.
Nettled, Cornwallis gathered his forces and declared that he had trapped the fox. With stratagems worthy of Ulysses, Washington left his campfires burning and marched off to Princeton for a surprising victory there before the British commander could bring up his troops. With promises of extra pay and perhaps some eloquent persuasion, he had kept his vanishing Continentals the vital days necessary for a stunning victory. The victory was not enough to turn the tide or to avoid a troubled winter. But it comforted patriots to feel that well-fed and well-liquored gentlemen in comfortable London clubs recognized that the surprising performances of the colonists at Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill were not flukes. And there was ground for hope. Yet so slender was the margin — as later shown at Valley Forge and Morristown — that one can understand why Washington and other sons of eighteenth-century rationalism could find explanation of their narrow escapes only in the hand of Providence.
Frederick could not have been expected to applaud a type of fighting so different from the eighteenth-century variety in which he excelled. A monarch who had made war his main pursuit preferred the careful course of eighteenth-century battles to the sudden improvisations being carried out by half-trained civilians under generals not of noble birth.
He would have been less pleased had he known that this war began the quarter-century that would transform the type of conflict of which he was the great master and challenge the type of troops and training with which he had won his great reputation.