By George Will
Saturday, April 09, 2016
Princeton, N.J.
— One of history’s most important battles happened here on a field you can walk
across in less than half the 45 or so minutes the battle lasted. If George
Washington’s audacity on January 3, 1777, had not reversed the patriots’
retreat and routed the advancing British, the American Revolution might have
been extinguished.
Yet such is America’s neglect of some places that sustain
its defining memories, the portion of the field over which Washington’s
nation-saving charge passed is being bulldozed to make way for houses for
faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). To understand the gravity of
this utterly unnecessary desecration, you must understand the astonishingly underestimated
Battle of Princeton.
In December 1776, the Revolution was failing. Britain had
sent to America 36,000 troops — at that point, the largest European
expeditionary force ever — to crush the rebellion before a French intervention
on America’s behalf. Washington had been driven from Brooklyn Heights, then
from Manhattan, then out of New York. The nation barely existed as he retreated
across New Jersey, into Pennsylvania.
But from there, on Christmas night, he crossed the
Delaware River ice floes for a successful 45-minute (at most) attack on
Britain’s Hessian mercenaries at Trenton. This was Washington’s first victory;
he had not been at Lexington, Concord, or Bunker Hill. Trenton would, however,
have been merely an evanescent triumph, were it not for what happened ten days
later.
On January 2, 1777, British General Charles Cornwallis
began marching 5,500 troops from Princeton to attack Washington’s slightly
outnumbered forces at Trenton. Washington, leaving a few hundred soldiers to
tend fires that tricked Cornwallis into thinking the patriot army was encamped,
made a stealthy 14-mile night march to attack three British regiments remaining
at Princeton. They collided on this field.
The most lethal weapons in this war were bayonets. The
British had them. Few Americans did, and they beat a panicked retreat from the
advancing steel. By his personal bravery, Washington reversed this and led a
charge. An unusually tall man sitting on a large white horse, he was a clear
target riding as close to British lines as first base is to home plate.
Biographer Ron Chernow writes that, at Princeton, Washington was a “warrior in
the antique sense. The eighteenth-century battlefield was a compact space, its
cramped contours defined by the short range of muskets and bayonet charges,
giving generals a chance to inspire by their immediate presence.”
When the redcoats ran, the British aura of invincibility
and the strategy of “securing territory and handing out pardons” (Chernow) were
shattered. And the drift of American opinion toward defeatism halted.
In his four-volume biography of Washington, James Thomas
Flexner said: “The British historian George Trevelyan was to write concerning
Trenton: ‘It may be doubted whether so small a number of men ever employed so
short a space of time with greater and more lasting effects upon the history of
the world.’ But such would not have been the result if Washington had not gone
on to overwhelm Princeton.”
This ground, on which patriots’ blood puddled on that
20-degree morning, has been scandalously neglected by New Jersey. Now it is
being vandalized by the Institute for Advance Study, which has spurned a $4.5
million purchase offer — more than $1 million above the appraised value — from
the invaluable Civil War Trust, which is expanding its preservation activities
to Revolutionary War sites.
In today’s academia there are many scholars against
scholarship, including historians hostile to history — postmodernists who think
the past is merely a social construct reflecting the present’s preoccupations,
or power structures, or something. They partake of academia’s preference for a
multicultural future of diluted, if not extinguished, nationhood, and they
dislike commemorating history made by white men with guns. The IAS engaged a
historian who wrote a report clotted with today’s impenetrable academic patois.
He says we should not “fetishize space,” and he drapes disparaging quotation
marks around the words “hallowed ground.”
The nation owes much to the IAS, which supported Albert
Einstein, physicist Robert Oppenheimer, and the diplomat and historian George
F. Kennan. It is especially disheartening that a distinguished institution of
scholars is indifferent to preserving a historic site that can nourish national
identity.
The battle to save this battlefield, one of the nation’s
most significant and most neglected sites, is not yet lost. The government in
today’s Trenton, and in the city named for the man who won the 1777 battle,
should assist the Civil War Trust.
No comments:
Post a Comment