On Christmas in 1776, with the Continental Army at its lowest ebb, George Washington stood on the icy banks of the Delaware River and launched a last-ditch effort to keep the American Revolution alive. He ordered his ragged, under-supplied soldiers into a flotilla of shallow freight boats and ferries, and began a hazardous crossing into New Jersey, fighting a severe winter storm and a river clogged with floating ice. About 2,400 men followed him, pushing with aching slowness through the freezing wind and snow.

Washington’s army was battered from months of defeat. British regulars had driven them from New York, morale was near collapse, and enlistments were about to expire. The patriot troops, a British officer reported in a dispatch a few days earlier, were in wretched condition — “dying of cold, without blankets, and very ill supplied with provisions.” Some soldiers lacked even shoes. The cause of American liberty, always a long shot, teetered on the brink.

The plan Washington conceived was audacious: After crossing the river, he and his men would march 9 miles to launch a surprise attack on the enemy garrison at Trenton, which was manned by 1,500 Hessian mercenaries — German troops in the pay of King George. Fortunately, the town hadn’t been fortified, and British officers were so sure no one would attack over the holiday that they spent Christmas night drinking and playing cards.

At dawn the next morning, the Americans struck. The Hessians, unprepared and disorganized, were routed. Washington’s men captured nearly 900 prisoners along with artillery and other provisions.

From a strategic point of view, the Battle of Trenton was a minor affair. But Washington’s unexpected victory, followed by another at Princeton a week later, revived American morale and marked a psychological turning point in the fight for independence.

The story of the Delaware crossing has become legend, rooted in the peril of that Christmas night and the surprise of the morning that followed. But its significance goes beyond the drama of the event itself. It helps explain why the Revolution survived — and what the struggle still tells us about leadership, resolve, and the ideals on which the country was founded.

One enduring lesson of the Delaware crossing is about leadership at the edge of failure. By Washington’s own admission, the cause looked lost. “I think the game is pretty near up,” he wrote to his brother a few days earlier. Retreat would have been understandable — even advisable. Instead, the American commander chose to go into action.

Too often great leadership is conflated with a vigor born of confidence or optimism, but Washington had neither. What he did possess was the clarity to see that inaction would be fatal and that when circumstances are dire enough, risk can be the least dangerous option. For Washington, David Hackett Fischer wrote in his acclaimed account, “a vital part of leadership was the ability to persist in what one believed to be the right way.” The Christmas crossing was a calculated refusal to accept defeat simply because defeat appeared likely.

The second lesson is no less important. Washington crossed the Delaware with boats, muskets, and cannon — but also with some of the most galvanizing words in American history. On Dec. 23, Washington’s men gathered to listen to a reading of Thomas Paine’s just-published essay, “The American Crisis,” which began: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

Paine said he wrote his essay in order that “the country should be strongly animated.” His message electrified Americans and became a rallying cry among the troops. Two days later, their spirits revived by Paine’s reminder of the justice of their cause, they crossed the Delaware with their commanding general.

Finally, the crossing of the Delaware stands as a rebuke to the easy cynicism about America’s founding that has become so fashionable. We are often told that the Founders’ ideals were merely ornamental — slogans masking self-interest or racial hypocrisy. But men don’t march barefoot for miles, leaving bloody footprints in the snow, if empty slogans are all their cause amounts to.

Whatever their flaws, the revolutionaries of 1776 acted on the conviction that certain principles were worth everything they had. The crossing was not a myth polished by later generations. It was a desperate, dangerous act undertaken by people who believed their fight for independence justified, as John Adams wrote, all “the Toil and Blood and Treasure that it will cost.”

Today, when confidence in the country’s future feels strained and foreboding about where we are headed is hard to escape, the story of the Christmas-night crossing of the Delaware offers perspective. It reminds us that the American experiment has survived moments when collapse seemed imminent. With the right leaders and the right convictions, earlier generations changed the course of human events.