George Washington took about two thousand troops across two major rivers as a tactical move. Both times he was headed into New Jersey. But only one of those crossings gets much attention, which we’ll talk about in the last week of this show.

That would be his crossing the Delaware River from Pennsylvania into Trenton. But there was also a crossing of the Hudson River, from New York into Fort Lee. So how come the Delaware gets so much attention and the Hudson doesn’t?

First off, you have that famous painting. That’s got to be a big piece of it. There are no images that I could find depicting the crossing of the Hudson; in fact the image I used in today’s cover art is the British troops making their crossing on November 19^th. But the other thing is, crossing the Delaware was a tactical move as part of a sneak attack on Trenton that turned into a huge victory for the Continental Army. (oops, spoiler alert.) Crossing the Hudson was a tactical retreat. Running away isn’t going to look very heroic.

(Fun Fact: that 1851 painting of Washington’s crossing is actually one of three. The original painting was part of an art collection in a German museum, and it was unfortunately destroyed in a British bombing raid in 1942, during World War II. The other two, made around the same time, are slightly different in size. One is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the other was auctioned off in 2022 and is now in private hands.)

This is the stuff I think about sometimes.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed