Washington Crossing the Delaware

What factors impact who wins a battle?

The number of soldiers on each side is important. So are the weapons. And strategy. But there’s another factor, which the generals have no control over: the weather.

A storm can change the course of a battle, and the course of history, too. That’s what happened on December 26, 1776.

Dark Days

In December of 1776, George Washington’s Continental Army arrived in Philadelphia. They had just lost four battles in a row to the British army and were forced to retreat a hundred miles from New York through New Jersey to Pennsylvania.

The army was falling apart. Over the previous months, most of the soldiers had gone home: for some, their enlistment time was up; others deserted the army when they just couldn’t take the terrible conditions any longer. They were suffering from ragged uniforms, lack of shoes and blankets, no food, and the frigid cold of winter.

As Washington wrote: “To see men without clothes… without blankets to lay on, without shoes by which their marches might be traced by the blood from their feet… marching through frost and snow and taking up their winter quarters within a day’s march of the enemy, without a house or hut to cover them till they could be built…”

How did they keep from giving up, and then go on to win the war? What inspired them?

Washington, the Leader

Part of the answer is George Washington himself. Washington was a charismatic figure, a born leader.

Most of his men were farmers and fishermen. They came ready to fight, but they needed someone to train them and show them how. Washington was that man, an experienced soldier. He wasn’t the only soldier in America at the time, but there was nobody like him.

He stood out in a crowd. The patriot Benjamin Rush said that Washington had “so much dignity” that you would pick him out “as a general and a soldier from among 10,000 people. There is not a king in Europe that would not look like a chamber servant by his side.”

He was also a great horseman. When he rode down the street in Boston or Philadelphia, it was, wrote historian David Hackett Fischer, like “a one-man parade,” and people would stop to watch him go by.

Washington was far from perfect. He lost many battles. He had a bad temper, and wasn’t always able to control his anger, especially when people disagreed with him.

But in battle, he was calm and fearless; and throughout the war — which lasted 8 years – he never gave up.

Except, that is, when he almost did, at the crossing of the Delaware.