You enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art and head to the American Wing. Enter Gallery 760, look up, and it pretty much smacks you in the face. The painting is 21 feet wide and 12 feet tall. It features a boatload of men crossing a river choked with ice. And standing tall at the bow, framed against a heroic sky, is General George Washington.

Now, that’s not historically accurate, and it wasn’t meant to be. “Washington Crossing the Delaware” was painted in Germany in 1851 by Emanuel Leutze, and his intent was to create an allegory of the American Revolution, in support of liberal democracy everywhere. And so Leutze’s crossing features dramatic sunlight streaking through the clouds, instead of happening as it really did, in the dead of night. The river is modeled on the Rhine, not the Delaware. The vessel is not a heavy Durham boat like Washington used, and it would not have been capable of holding so many passengers. The featured American flag did not yet exist when the Crossing actually happened. And the crew is a contrived cross-section of America, including a western rifleman, two farmers, some sailors, a Scottish immigrant, a Native American, and one rower who just might be a woman. Most notably, sitting right in front of Washington and straining at his oar, we see… a black man.

When Americans first got a look at the painting, they asked themselves, “Whoa, wait, could THAT be right?” The country was on the verge of the Civil War, so the idea that a black man helped Washington cross the Delaware was highly provocative. In 1855, a northern abolitionist named William Nell claimed it was true. In his book, Colored Patriots of the Revolution, he documented African American soldiers who had fought in the war. He argued that the man in the boat was none other than Prince Whipple, an African American soldier who was known to have fought at the Battles of Rhode Island and Saratoga. Nell’s claim was largely accepted, and for years, folks who wanted to argue for the dignity and rights of blacks would use Prince Whipple to support their case.

Well, it turns out that Nell’s claim isn’t true. A deeper investigation into Prince Whipple has proven he was indeed at Rhode Island and Saratoga, but he wasn’t with Washington at the Crossing and the subsequent Battle of Trenton. So he couldn’t have been in that boat. Which makes the presence of a black man in Leutze’s boat as contrived as the presence of the frontiersman, or the woman.

Unless…you go a little further. In the years since Nell wrote his book, researchers have taken on the very difficult challenge of identifying the soldiers who fought in the Revolution, and they have determined that perhaps 8% of Washington’s entire army was black or mixed-race. Of the American army that fought at Trenton, twenty soldiers may have been black and two certainly were: Jacob Francis of Amwell, NJ and Oliver Cromwell of Black Horse, NJ.  The specific regiment that rowed Washington across the Delaware to get to Trenton were a group of sailors from Marblehead, MA, and two of them were listed as “free men of color”: one named Joe Brown and the other simply Romeo. (Since they were “free men,” we also know that they were voluntarily risking their lives for a cause that they knew might not guarantee freedom to men like themselves, but they fought nonetheless.)

In the end, we may never know exactly who was in the boat with Washington. But we do know that when Washington crossed the Delaware, many African-American soldiers went with him.

That black man in the front of Emanuel Leutze’s boat earned his right to be there.

He is a symbol, and representative of dozens who really were there, who rowed, who marched, and fought of their own free will.

They helped save the Revolution, and ensure the future of democracy.