US History - Revolutionary War

[jerseydevil]

Originally posted by mithrand1r
I am sure you are refering to I-195 (Which crosses the State of NJ from Trenton (in the West) to Exit 98 of the Garden State Parkway (in the East) instead of I-95 (I will not bother with where I-95 traverses the state since it is a bit complicated).

I make the same mistake all the time saying I-195 instead of I-95.

yeah - 195 - not 95.

Radagast - as Valandil pointed out - he was general - but he was in charge of the armies. I had never heard of field marshall being used in terms of any American Army not even during the Revolution. We had General Washinton, General Lee, General Benedict Arnold and several others. But Washington was the commander of the Revolutionary armies and over all the other generals (but he was not a five star).

Here is the thing about the painting of "Washington Crossing the Delaware" as it is explained in "Washington Crossing" the book.

...The painting is familiar to us in a general way, but when we look again its details take us by surprise. Washington's small boat is crowded with thirteen men. Their dress tells us that they are soldiers from many parts of America...One man wears the short tarpaulin jacket of a New England seaman; we look again and discover he is of African descent. Another is a recent Scottish immigrant, still wearing his Balmoral bonnet. A third is an androgynous figure in a loose red shirt, maybe a woman in man's clothing, pulling at an oar.

At the bow and stern of the boat are hard-faced western riflemen in hunting shirts and deerskin leggings. Huddled between the thwarts are farmers from Pennsylvania and New Jersey, in blanket coats and broad-brimmed hats. One carries a countryman's double barreled shotgun. The other looks very ill, and his head is swathed in a bandage. A soldier beside them is in full uniform, a rarity in this army; he wears the blue coats and red facings of Haslet's Delaware Regiment. Another figure wears a boat cloack and an oiled hat that a prosperous Baltimore merchant might have used on a West Indian voyage; his sleeve reveals the facings of Smallwood's silkstocking Maryland Regiment. Hidden behind them is a mysterious thirteenth man. Only his weapon is visible; one wonders who might have been.

The dominant figures in the painting are two gentlemen of Virginia who stand tall above the rest. One of them is Lieutenant James Monroe, holding a big American flag upright against the storm. The other is Washington in his Continental uniform of buff and blue. He holds a brass telescope and wears a heavy saber, symbolic of a statesman's vision and a soldier's strength. The artist invites us to see each of the soldiers as an individual, but he also reminds us that they are in the same boat, working desperately together against the wind and current. He has given them a common sense of mission, and in the stormy sky above he painted a bright prophetic star, shining through a veil of cloud.

...Washington Crossing the Delaware, painted by Emanuel Leutze in 1850...hangs today in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Visitors...are startled by it's size, twelve feet high and twenty feet wide.

The artist was a German American immigrant of strong liberal democratic principals, who returned to his native land and strongly supported the Revolutiions of 1848. In the midst of that struggle Emanuel Leutze conceived the idea of a painting that would encourage Europe with the example of the American Revolution.

In 1848 and 1849, Leutze began to work on the great canvas. An early study survives...It is painted in strong primary colors, bright with hope and triumph. After he started, the European revolutions failed, but the artist kept working on his project in a different mood. The colors turned somber, and the painting came to center more on a struggle than triumph. Leutze recruited American tourists and art students in Europe to serve as models and assistants. Together they finished the painting in 1850.

Just after it was completed, a fire broke out in the artist's studio, and the canvas was damaged in a curious way. The effect of smoke and flame was to mask the central figures of Washington and Monroe in a white haze, while the other men in the boat remained sharp and clear. The ruined painting became the property of an insurance company, which put it on public display. Even in it's damaged state it won a gold medal in Berlin and was much celebrated in Europe. It became part of the permanent collection of the Bremen Art Museum. There it stayed until September 5, 1942 when it was destroyed in a bombing raid by the British Royal Air Force, in what some have seen as a final act of retribution for the American Revolution.

Emanuel Leutze painted another full-sized copy, and sent it to America in 1851, where it caused a sensation.

...American iconclasts made the painting a favorite target. Post-modernists studied it with a skeptical eye and asked, "Is that the way that American history happened? Is it a way that history ever happens? Are any people capable of acting in such a heroic manner?"...On National Public Radio in 2002, commentator Ina Jaffe argued at length that Emanuel Leutze's painting bore little resemblance to "histrorical reality," and she recited a long list of its "historical flaws."...

The debunkers were right right about some of the details in the painting, but they were wrong about others, and theyy rarely asked about the accuracy of its major themes. To do so is to discover that the larger ideas in Emanuel Leutze's art are true to the history that inspired it. The artist was right in creating an atmosphere of high drama around the events. To search the writings of the men and women who were there (hundreds of first hand accounts survive) is to find that they believed the American cause was very near collapse on Christmas nigth 1776. In five months of heavy fighting after the Declaration of Independence, George Washington's army had suffered many disastrous defeats and gained no major victories. It had lost 90 percent of its strength. The small remnant who crossed the Delaware River were near the end of their resources, and they believed that another defeat could destroy the Cause, as they called it. The artist captured very accurately their sense of urgency, in what was truly a pivotal moment for American History....

...He [Emanuel Leutze] represented something os its nature in his image of George Washington and the men who soldiered with him. The more we learn about Washington, the greater his contribution becomes, in developing a new idea of leadership during the American Revolution. Emanuel Leutze brings it out iin a tension between Washington and the other men in the boat. We see them in their diversity and their stubborn autonomy. These men lived the rights they were defending, often to the fury of their commander-in-chief. The painting gives us some sense of the complex relations that they had with one another; and also with their leader. To study them with their general is to understand what George Washington meant when he wrote, "A people unused to restraint must be led; they will not be drove." All of these things were beginning to happen on Chirstmas night in 1776, when George Washington crossed the Delaware. Thereby hangs a tale.