December 25 · This Day in America
The Revolution is nearly over, and it is losing. Enlistments expire in a week. The army is starving, barefoot, beaten across New Jersey. So on Christmas night, in a sleet storm off the ice-choked Delaware, George Washington loads 2,400 men, horses, and cannon into black Durham boats and orders them across. It takes eleven hours in the dark. Men march nine miles toward Trenton with rags on their feet, some leaving blood in the snow. The countersign passed down the column is Thomas Paine's: Victory or Death. This is the gamble that saves the war — not because the odds were good, but because a desperate man and desperate men decided the cause was worth the river. By dawn they are on the far bank, and history is about to turn on a single cold morning.
Source: www.mountvernon.org
Also on this day · 1868
On Christmas Day, lame-duck and impeached, President Andrew Johnson issues Proclamation 179 — a full, unconditional pardon for the offense of treason to "all and every person" who took up arms against the United States, including the Confederacy's highest leaders. The war had ended three years earlier. Radical Republicans were furious that forgiveness came as a gift rather than a reckoning. The argument over what a nation owes itself after a civil war did not end that day. It has not ended.
Source: www.presidency.ucsb.edu
“These are the times that try men's souls.”Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, December 1776