December 25 2023 Washington Crosses the Delaware: the Christmas Victory That Saved the American Revolution

We celebrate Christmas today as a universal secular holiday which has largely shed its historical legacies as a religious festival, like a serpent shedding its skin, or reawakened its ancient origins as a midwinter rite of renewal while accumulating layers of meaning which have now become traditional in our culture; the adornment of a sacrificial tree of life with beautiful decorations which once represented wishes and now confer status as tokens of wealth, the baking of idolatrous Gingerbread Men in mockery of the Biblical prohibition against human images which are eaten as parody of the substitutive sacrifice and ritual cannibalism at the heart of the myth of Christ, the figure of Santa Claus marketed by Coca-Cola but originating as a symbol of the hallucinogenic amanita muscara mushroom in the shamanic rites of the Sami people with their reindeer driven sleighs, feasting and gifts which echo the carnivalesque elements of the cult of Saturn and his proxy the Lord of Misrule, the annual family viewing of a performance of the Nutcracker Ballet which depicts the death of a child as a battle against mice and the journey of the soul through the gates of dreams as an American Book of the Dead, and listening to some of the most beautiful music ever written.

For myself and in the historical tradition of my family, Christmas Day has another meaning as well, for on this day in 1776 General Washington dreamed an impossible thing and made it real, and in his victory at the Battle of Trenton saved the American Revolution and reclaimed the idea of a free society of equals lost since the Fall of Rome.

Beyond the peculiarities of its historical stories, Christmas may come to mean one thing more to humankind, as it does for myself and the descendants of those who stood with Washington on that fateful day, or on any of countless other days throughout history and the world wherein a single individual, as flawed as any other, refused to submit to tyranny against impossible odds and in so doing changed the fate of humankind and won the hope of a better future for us all; so long as we remain Unconquered, the possibilities of becoming human are truly limitless.

On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”

To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”

“Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”

“That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”

Just so.

As I wrote in my post of July 4 2021, What Does Freedom Mean Now?; As we celebrate Independence Day, I offer you a meditation on the contradictions of power, the frailty of order, the illusion of authority, the relativity of truth and the falsification of history in service to power and authority in the form of a story, originally written as a demonstration of Gogol’s method of creating symbols and referential to Ionesco, Kafka, and Akutagawa.

It also contains a true retelling from my family history of a decisive moment when the fate of humankind hung in the balance, Washington’s crossing of the Delaware on Christmas of 1776, as related to me by my father and to him from his before from the witness of my ancestor, Henry Lale, who fought at his side.

A Declaration of Liberty

I woke that fateful morning, ready to join the other rhinoceroses on the parade ground, when fussing with the shiny bits on my uniform I chanced to meet my own gaze in the mirror, and to my horror discovered that my horn had gone missing.

It was a magnificent horn, a horn of vainglorious strutting, of midnight blue and royal purple like the stains of grandeur and of marvelous sins. In its place was this soft monkey nose, useless in butting heads; worse, someone might think it funny, and I’d have to bring the pain- but how to maintain order without a horn?

It was all the fault of the Devil Weed I had consumed the night before, in an excess of drunken salute to one of the original members of my command, lost in a nameless action in a fight for freedom the world will never know the true history of. Even his name is unknown, an identity assigned upon enlistment; we are the night watch, who hold an invisible line that others may sleep and live in happy ignorance of the chaos and relentless existential threats which surround us.

Throughout much of my life my nation has been the man to my left and the man to my right, fellow bearers of secrets; maybe I’ve been wrong about that.

As to the Devil Weed, it was grown from magic seeds, seeds of transformation, change, and renewal handed down, planted & re-harvested every few years, from the hand of George Washington to an ancestor of mine as payment for a wager just after crossing the Delaware on Christmas of 1776 under cover of night and a storm.

Washington had said, “We’ve eaten all the dogs, burned all the wood, and my balls are frozen to my last bit of lead shot. We can’t cross against the ice floes, and if we stay on this side of the river we die and the Revolution dies with us.”

And Henry my ancestor said “If you go I’m coming with you, but who will come with us? Do these men have another fight in them? Frozen, starving, too many barefoot in the snow, with one man in three in hospital and unfit for duty? Whoever isn’t drowned or crushed by the ice landing a ten mile night march through ice and snow to the enemy, and then an attack on a fortified garrison with neither powder nor ammunition? I’ll bet you we can’t cross that river and survive, and I’ll buy a night at the best whorehouse in Philadelphia for the whole army if you can pull that off.”

Everything became still as the attention of the whole camp was riveted.

Washington stood, naked but for a red blanket he had wrapped about himself like a toga, and for long moments met the eyes of his men. “Done, and I’ll give you and every man with us a pouch of George’s Own Devil Weed if we live to celebrate. Starved, frozen, and down to the last bullet, I’ll still take that bet. We are no longer ragged misfits and outcasts begging scraps from our masters feet like dogs; from this moment forward we are not colonial subjects divided against each other by a distant empire but Americans united in our Liberty.”

There were cheers, but not yet a race to the boats. They really were starving and frozen, and for many the coming fight would be down to the knife and tomahawk. So Washington put in his set of false teeth, the pointy cannibal ones made by the Indians he once lived among who taught him how to fight and how to lead. He grinned his terrible grin, and said, “Imagine the Hessians at Trenton, eating and drinking their way through winter with storehouses full of everything we need, firewood, food, fine boots and woolen uniforms, guns and powder, all waiting for men bold enough to take them. Warm they are, with fat goose and roast beast. I’m coming to dinner with the enemy. Who’s coming with me?”

And they rose cheering, and followed him into folly and into glory. Victory or Death, Washington’s password at the Battle of Trenton, became our family motto ever after; certainly it described the conditions of the fight, of the Revolution, and of the fragile nature of liberty and America.

But there were other stories, things no one made a heroic painting of to hang in a national gallery, both of our origins and throughout our history. Sometimes because the cover story is so much better than the truth, as with the abominable and tragic fate of Amelia Earhart; and sometimes because the truth is ambiguous and a relativistic multiplicity which depends on who’s telling it, a Rashomon Gate which transforms us as we go through.

Liberate the Dominican Republic with only a printing press, a radio station, and an airplane to drop leaflets, with the loss of a single foreign national and no American casualties, weighed against the countless deaths of the landing at Inchon? Wonderful. But who can really claim a monster like Trujillo as a friend, as we had for decades before?

Often it is also horrible, something necessary to survival which betrays the ideals and goals we work to achieve and protect, an accommodation with evil. And it is this last category of secrets which provides leverage for our enemies, propagating outward across time like the leprous tracks of an invisible and malign corruption.

Our lives have reflected one another, Henry and I, the revolutionary and the secret agent, as in a dark mirror. We cannot escape each other.

My ancestor helped win the Revolutionary War and create America; I helped bear the message of that Revolution to unknown shores as a Promethean fire and seeds of transformation, among many other things.

The dream of America; a free society of equals, Liberty, Equality, Truth, and Justice, a firewall against tyranny and fascism, a new idea of humankind in which no one is better than any other by reason of birth and the age of inequalities is ended, free from colonialism and empires, from slavery and identitarian nationalisms of blood, faith, and soil, and all the kings and tyrants toppled from their thrones. All too often revolutionary struggle has been corruptive of its own ideals, heroes become tyrants, and Liberation becomes imperial conquest.

The American Revolution, an anti-colonial struggle against an Empire and the system of aristocracy, and the tidal wave of revolutionary struggles it unleashed to reimagine and transform the world and human being, meaning, and value in thousands of myriads of mutinies and rebellions of the new Humanist order against the old Authoritarian paradigm, in every corner of the earth and among all its peoples, a glorious Liberation of the infinite possibilities of becoming human.

A turning of the tides which changed the order of the world, and the consequences of the triumph of liberty over tyranny in the end of the age of kings and the fall of colonial empires, and its echoes in our victory over fascism in the Second World War, the emergence of an American imperial global hegemony and dominion, and the Fall of the Soviet Union. None of these things happened in the way you have been told.

If I could go back to the beginnings of things, to the Original Lie that founded America as a free society of equals without changing its systems of unequal power and the consequences and events that tipped the balance of the world toward fascism, could all the wrongs that came after be redressed? From the failure to renounce slavery and bring a reckoning to inequalities in the leveling of all social classes and of patriarchy, the centralization of authority to a carceral state of force and control from the Whiskey Rebellion onward, the rise of imperial global dominion and wars for control of strategic resources and the elite hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege, the history of America has been one of the subversion of democracy by forces of unequal power behind the smoke and mirrors of America as a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights, and a beacon of hope to the world.

Could we win back our freedom, Truth, Justice, and the American Way, redeem the promise of a free society of equals, and relight the torch of Liberty?

So I scribbled a note retiring my captaincy in the Deniable Forces of the secret police, stepping through the mirror into the monkey world and transforming as I had so many times before, though never before alone.

I had some wrongs to put right.

And here are some thoughts of mine on the subject of Liberty; Manifesto for Bearers of the Torch of Liberty:

To all those who like myself prefer to run amok and be ungovernable to the alternative of submission to authority, who align on the side of Prometheus, rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses, I offer here a manifesto for bearers of the Torch of Liberty.

As I wrote in my post of March 28 2019, in the wake of the Christchurch white supremacist terror and the direct threat of a copycat atrocity against our local mosque here in Spokane; I’ve thought about the origins of evil, of violence and power in the relationships between fear, anger, hate, and other negative emotions as illnesses, for a long time now and in many roles and contexts.

Here are some things I have learned:

First, the process by which violence operates as a system is the same for all spheres of action and levels of scale; within personal and social contexts and in intimate relationships and families as well as nations and historical civilizations.

The precondition of violence as hate crime, and of both tyranny and terror,

is overwhelming and generalized fear as shaped by submission to authority.

Structures and figures of authorized power feed on fear and hate, grow stronger by the cycle of power and violence and the negative emotions and forces of darkness to which they give form and through which they subjugate others.

We must question, challenge, mock, and subvert authority whenever it comes to claim us. For there is no just authority.

Victory or Death; so said George Washington at the Battle of Trenton of the Revolution against tyranny and the idea that some persons are by right of birth better than others.

Victory or Death; so must we ever answer tyrants and those who would enslave us.

Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free; let us answer tyranny with resistance, control with anarchy and civil disobedience, conformity with transgression, and division with solidarity.

Let us answer hate with love and fear with our faith in each other; let us reach out across our boundaries and become better than we now are, let us join together and break the chain of lies which binds us through our most atavistic passions to enslavement by authority and addiction to power.

Let us dethrone authority and abandon power over others for an empowered self-ownership of identity; that we may reinvent how to be human as autonomous individuals, through and for one another in glorious diversity, democracy, and a free society of equals.

Let us be Bringers of Chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.

As written by Heather Cox Richardson in her wonderful daily newsletter of December 19 2021; “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

These were the first lines in a pamphlet called The American Crisis that appeared in Philadelphia on December 19, 1776, at a time when the fortunes of the American patriots seemed at an all-time low. Just five months before, the members of the Second Continental Congress had adopted the Declaration of Independence, explaining to the world that “the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled…do…solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.”

The nation’s founders went on to explain why it was necessary for them “to dissolve the political bands” which had connected them to the British crown.

They explained that their vision of human government was different from that of Great Britain. In contrast to the tradition of hereditary monarchy under which the American colonies had been organized, the representatives of the united states on the North American continent believed in a government organized according to the principles of natural law.

Such a government rested on the “self-evident” concept “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Governments were created to protect those rights and, rather than deserving loyalty because of tradition, religion, or heritage, they were legitimate only if those they governed consented to them. And the American colonists no longer consented to be governed by the British monarchy.

This new vision of human government was an exciting thing to declare in the heat of a Philadelphia summer after a year of skirmishing between the colonial army and British regulars, but by December 1776, enthusiasm for this daring new experiment was ebbing. Shortly after colonials had cheered news of independence in July as local leaders read copies of the Continental Congress’s declaration in meetinghouses and taverns in cities and small towns throughout the colonies, the British moved on General George Washington and the troops in New York City.

By September, the British had forced Washington and his soldiers to retreat from the city, and after a series of punishing skirmishes across Manhattan Island, by November the Redcoats had pushed the Americans into New Jersey. They chased the colonials all the way across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania.

By mid-December, it looked bleak for the Continental Army and the revolutionary government it backed. The 5000 soldiers with Washington who were still able to fight were demoralized from their repeated losses and retreats, and since the Continental Congress had kept enlistments short so they would not risk a standing army, many of the men would be free to leave the army at the end of the year, further weakening it.

As the British troops had taken over New York City and the Continental soldiers had retreated, many of the newly minted Americans outside the army were also having doubts about the whole enterprise of creating a new, independent nation based on the idea that all men were created equal. Then, things got worse: as the American soldiers crossed into Pennsylvania, the Continental Congress abandoned Philadelphia on December 12 out of fear of a British invasion, regrouping in Baltimore (which they complained was dirty and expensive).

“These are the times that try men’s souls.”

The author of The American Crisis was Thomas Paine, whose January 1776 pamphlet Common Sense had solidified the colonists’ irritation at the king’s ministers into a rejection of monarchy itself, a rejection not just of King George III, but of all kings. In early 1776, Paine had told the fledgling Americans, many of whom still prayed for a return to the comfortable neglect they had enjoyed from the British government before 1763, that the colonies must form their own independent government.

Now, he urged them to see the experiment through. He explained that he had been with the troops as they retreated across New Jersey and, describing the march for his readers, told them “that both officers and men, though greatly harassed and fatigued, frequently without rest, covering, or provision, the inevitable consequences of a long retreat, bore it with a manly and martial spirit. All their wishes centered in one, which was, that the country would turn out and help them to drive the enemy back.”

For that was the crux of it. Paine had no doubt that patriots would create a new nation, eventually, because the cause of human self-determination was just. But how long it took to establish that new nation would depend on how much effort people put into success. “I call not upon a few, but upon all: not on this state or that state, but on every state: up and help us; lay your shoulders to the wheel; better have too much force than too little, when so great an object is at stake,” Paine wrote. “Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it.”

In mid-December, British commander General William Howe had sent most of his soldiers back to New York to spend the winter, leaving garrisons across the river in New Jersey to guard against Washington advancing.

On Christmas night, having heard that the garrison at Trenton was made up of Hessian auxiliaries who were exhausted and unprepared for an attack, Washington crossed back over the icy Delaware River with 2400 soldiers in a winter storm. They marched nine miles to attack the garrison, the underdressed soldiers suffering from the cold and freezing rain. Reaching Trenton, they surprised the outnumbered Hessians, who fought briefly in the streets before they surrendered.

The victory at Trenton restored the colonials’ confidence in their cause. Soldiers reenlisted, and in early January, they surprised the British at Princeton, New Jersey, driving them back. The British abandoned their posts in central New Jersey, and by March, the Continental Congress moved back to Philadelphia. Historians credit the Battles of Trenton and Princeton with saving the Revolutionary cause.

There is no hard proof that Washington had officers read The American Crisis to his troops when it came out six days before the march to Trenton, as some writers have said, but there is little doubt they heard it one way or another. So, too, did those wavering loyalists.

“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered,” Paine wrote in that fraught moment, “yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.”

What is to be done? Alice Slays the Jabberwocky: