George Washington’s Heroism at Valley Forge
In the first episode of our miniseries on the Heroes of Valley Forge, we learn that it was during the Valley Forge encampment that Washington was first called the “Father of His Country.” It was there he embodied both the American government and the fight for independence.
Some people think there was a Battle of Valley Forge. There could well have been, because 2,000 American soldiers died there. Or what we know about Valley Forge is an illustration we saw in middle-school Social Studies textbooks, one that showed a few guys freezing in the snow and George Washington on a horse looking at a few guys freezing in the snow. The much bigger story of that event, told in my book Valley Forge written with Bob Drury, is that it was the turning point of the American Revolution. At no time before or after was the flame of independence flicker so slightly. If George Washington and his ragged, starving, and freezing Continental Army had not survived that horrific winter encampment, Great Britain would have won the war and the United States would have been stillborn.
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For the Americans, the Fall 1777 campaign had been one gut punch after another. That September, British troops paraded triumphantly through the streets of Philadelphia, having taken the young country’s capital city and sent into exile the few delegates left in the Continental Congress. Washington’s attempts to retake the city and administer the knockout blow, the cause of liberty so desperately needed, met with failure at the Battles of Brandywine and Germantown. Most humiliating was the Paoli Massacre, in which dozens of American troops were bayoneted by the British as they slept. When Washington’s men staggered into winter quarters at Valley Forge in Pennsylvania on December 19, they were a beaten army that could soon cease to exist.
“As the days dragged on, Washington periodically reined his horses by the road to linger and bear witness as his ghost of an army straggled past. First, the officers on horseback led their stumbling and footsore regiments, then the juddering baggage wagons, and finally the 400 or so ‘camp women’ with their untold children bringing up the rear. These were primal moments. As the commander in chief beheld so many of his soldiers, ‘without Cloathes to cover their makedness—without blankets to lay on—without Shoes,’ Washington later wrote. It must have crossed his mind that the preponderance of his hungry and half-clad were present in a great part out of great loyalty to him. Nor could the irony be lost on him that his days as the leader of this army might well be numbered, through either political perfidy or, as seemed more likely at the moment, the complete dissolution of his vagabond force” (pg 109).
Once in the encampment, Washington had his men build cabins to shelter them for when the worst of the winter arrived. This was not easily done because many of the men were too weak for the massive construction effort to house 12,000 men and they had few effective tools, like saws and hammers. Day after day they struggled until finally by Christmas most of the cabins were done. Just in time too, because their present for Christmas was a three-day snowstorm.
This had to be the worst holiday of George Washington’s life. In the days leading up to it, he felt abandoned by the Continental Congress, governors of states, and some friends who were beginning to call for his ouster. Most of all, though, he despaired for his men. Though most of his correspondence was dictated to his aides Alexander Hamilton and Tench Tilghman, late one night Washington himself wrote a plea to Henry Laurens, the new president of the undermanned Congress.
“He wrote that he was now convinced ‘beyond a doubt’ that unless Congress quickly complied with his requests, ‘unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place in that [supply] line, this army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these things. Starve, dissolve, or disperse, in order to obtain subsistence in the best manner they can.’
“Starve, dissolve, or disperse. It was the gauntlet thrown. At worse, it hinted at the elimination and possibly even the surrender of the Continental Army, and thus the end of the war with the British across the middle states. At best it invoked visions of armed and desperate men roaming the Pennsylvania country side, singly and in feral packs, scavaging by any means or manner for food and clothing. It was not difficult for the statesmen to imagine these troops eventually overrunning and tearing into the American storehouses in Reading and Easton, in Lancaster and York. It was precisely the image Washington meant to convey.
“George Washington’s ‘starve, dissolve, or disperse’ letter left American’s civilian authorities with little choice. They could accede to the commander in chief’s demands that they immediately recontruct his army supply chain under the supervision of a competent military officer. Or they could allow the revolution to teeter on the brink. It was a stark option” (pg 133).
It was on Christmas Day that Washington learned of the first death in camp. A black man named Jethro in a Connecticut regiment had died of exposure and malnutrition. Soon, many more joined him. Through the rest of December and January Continental Army soldiers died by the twos and three per day and then by the dozens. They died of disease, thanks to a combination of low resistance to various diseases and the lack of any medical care and medicines. They died of starvation, as the flow of supplies to Valley Forge slowed to barely a trickle. They died of exposure to the cold and snow and freezing rains. Some, exhausted and made hopeless by the horrid conditions, simply gave up.
A Continental Army surgeon summed up the situation: “‘I am sick—discontented—and out of humour. Poor food—hard loding—cold weather—fatigue—nasty cloathes—nasty cookery-—vomit half my time—smoak’d out my senses—the devil’s in’t—I can’t Endure it—why are we sent here to starve and Freeze—Here all Confusion—smoke and cold—hunger and filthyness. A pox on my bad luck'” (pg 104).
It should be pointed out that one of the major myths about Valley Forge is that men died because it was the worst winter of the Revolutionary War. It was not. The weather that winter was typical for southeast Pennsylvania, no better and no worse. But the nightmarish conditions Washington and his soldiers experienced was because the supply system had completely broken down because of lack of wagons and horses, corruption by government officials, and attacks by the British. Worse, many farmers surrounding Valley Forge chose to sell their harvest to the British in Philadelphia because they paid real money as opposed to worthless Continental scrip. American soldiers starved while the British soldiers were warm and well-fed.
The depth of Washington’s despair was reached in mid-February, when he did not know if he or his army could survive another day.
“One legendary tale in particular limns Washington’s emotional state during that February, petically throwing his near despair into relief. Perhaps, skeptics charge, a bit too poetically. As the story is told, one night the young Quaker Issac Potts was riding near the house his sister-in-law had rented to Washington, when we spied a solitary figure kneeling in a glade of crooked timber. Potts dismounted, tied his horse to a sapling, and quietly appraoched the scene. In the pale moonlight he recognized the obeisant man as Washington. The general’s sword lay in the snow to one side, his cocked hat to another. He was praying aloud, Potts reported ‘to the God of the Armies, beseeching [him] to interpose with his Divine aid, as it was ye Crisis, & the cause of the country, humanity & of the world.’
“The scene so struck the Tory-leaning Potts that he galloped home and told his wife that if the Continental Army’s commander in chief could conduct himself as both a soldier and a Christian, he could too. He declared for the Whig cause on the spot. The fact that Pott’s revelation came to light only some 38 years after the fact, when his family’s pastor passed on the description of the incident to Washington’s biographer Parson Mason Weems, has led most historians to view the recollection with with suspicion. It was Weems, after all, who invented the fable of a young Washington unable to lie about chopping down a cherry tree” (pg 239-240).
How did the Continental Army survive? A combination of factors. One was Washington appointed Nathanael Greene, his most trusted and experienced general, to command the supply system, and his integrity and energy transformed it. In March, finally, adequate food began to arrive. The softening temperatures of spring cracked the ice and melted the snow and gave the soldiers hope. And we can’t underestimate the phrase, “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” The soldiers who emerged from the encampment at Valley Forge had a newfound confidence that they could not be defeated, and that included facing the British in a new military campaign. And they would be successful.
