“Entire regiments were without shoes, and visitors were astonished to find half-naked and barefoot American sentries manning guard posts.”
It’s December of 1777. George Washington’s ragtag Continental Army, fresh from its failure to dislodge the British redcoats from Philadelphia, is forced to make camp in the remote Pennsylvania countryside. With dwindling supplies, little in the way of winter clothing and only the most basic of shelter, the next six months will represent one of the lowest points in America’s desperate bid for independence. With the rebellion teetering on the verge of unravelling, it will take all of Washington’s fortitude and leadership skills to keep his shivering and starving 12,000-man army (and the Patriot cause itself) alive during those long, dark and frigid months. At least, that’s how the story goes. Generations of Americans have been raised on tales of the hardship, suffering and sacrifice of that winter at Valley Forge. But of course, like all legends, the narrative many of us remember is riddled with falsehoods, distortions and outright myths. Now two author/historians, Bob Drury and Tom Clavin, have set out to disentangle the facts from the fiction in their new book Valley Forge. And not surprisingly, the truth is just as fascinating as the folklore. Below Drury and Clavin have assembled 10 remarkable facts about America’s famous winter of discontent. (MHN)
By Rob Drury and Tom Clavin
THE CONTINENTAL ARMY’S encampment at Valley Forge over the winter of 1777-1778 was the turning point of the American Revolution. Given the events of these extraordinary six months – and given how much most people do not know about Valley Forge – here are 10 facts about that fateful winter that are sure to surprise.
1. It wasn’t actually that cold
Nearly 250 years of legend have etched the impression of the winter of 1777-1778 as a perpetually snowbound season beset by bone-chilling temperatures. Though the occasional blizzard, ice storm, and scattered snow squalls were relatively common on the Valley Forge encampment, it was by historical standards a fairly mild winter for southeast Pennsylvania. Only twice did the mercury drop into single digits, on both occasions during the month of February. Counterintuitively, this meteorological phenomenon only added to the Continental Army’s suffering. The army’s commander-in-chief George Washington himself noted that consistently working and drilling in steady, below-freezing temperatures was preferable to slogging through an endless morass of slushy mud stippled with putrefying animal carcasses. Moreover, whenever the temperatures edged above freezing, which often occurred, the noxious veil of gasses escaping from the hundreds of starved horses buried in shallow graves hung over the camp like an illness.
While it is true that nearly 2,000 of Washington’s soldiers at Valley Forge died from exposure, disease, starvation, or some combination thereof, this was more from a lack of clothing to defend themselves against the ever-shifting elements. Entire regiments were without shoes, and visitors were astonished to find half-naked and barefoot American sentries manning guard posts in the rain wrapped only in tattered blankets and standing on their hats to keep their feet warm.
2. Black and white soldiers camped together at Valley Forge
Of the roughly 12,000 Continental Soldiers at Valley Forge, 750 were black. In fact, blacks made up some 20 percent of America’s colonial population in 1776; close to one-half million men, women, and children, 99 per cent of them enslaved. While Washington was of course aware of the loyalty and grit displayed by black volunteers who had fought for the colonial cause in and around Boston – by now most patriots were familiar with the heroics of Crispus Attucks, the fugitive slave who fell during the Boston Massacre and is considered the first casualty of the Revolution – the idea of arming black men weighed heavily on the erstwhile Virginia planter whose subconscious was so invested in the lore of slave uprisings. Yet fearing a wave of runaway slaves donning British uniforms in exchange for their freedom, Washington somewhat reluctantly implored the Continental Congress to allow “freemen” to be granted the right to fight for the cause. He was influenced mightily by the Rhode Island general James Varnum, who had raised a company of freed slaves who fought steadfastly during the battles of Brandywine Creek and Germantown. The delegates acquiesced, and over the course of the revolution some 5,000 black men enlisted in the Continental Army. In a footnote buried in the mists of time, the first casualty recorded at the Valley Forge winter encampment was a freeman from Connecticut’s 7th Regiment known to posterity only by his given name of Jethro.
3. The officers with Washington were surprisingly young
Washington was 45 years old when his army encamped at Valley Forge, yet several of the general’s closest aids and advisors would probably still be in college today had they lived today. The Marquis de Lafayette was 19 years old when he landed on American shores in the summer of 1777 to volunteer his services to the nascent United States. Washington’s chief aide-de-camp Alexander Hamilton was but 22 when he stood by his commander in chief’s side during that miserable winter. And Hamilton’s closest friend John Laurens, another of the commander in chief’s adjutants, turned 23 just weeks before the Continental Army limped into Valley Forge. The childless Washington considered this triumvirate as the sons he never had.
4. The encampment had more inhabitants than most American cities
With 12,000 soldiers, hundreds of camp followers and more than 2,000 hasility erected huts and cabins, the camp at Valley Forge would overnight become the seventh-largest metropolis in the nascent United States. It was also for a time the de facto capital of the country. With a rump faction of Congress virtually unable to function while in exile in York, Pennsylvania, Washington and his staff would temporarily assume the awesome responsibility of keeping the wheels of governance turning until the elected civilians could resume their leadership roles. The general and his staff corresponded with state governors and legislators, senior military officers stationed throughout the former colonies, congressional delegates, and even Ben Franklin and other American diplomats abroad.
5. Valley Forge became a hotbed of intrigue and treachery
While at Valley Forge, Washington was in danger of being deposed and replaced as commander in Chief of the Continental Army. Following the Horatio Gate’s astounding defeat of a large British expeditionary force at the Battle of Saratoga in early October, 1777, there was a concerted and vicious back-channel effort among a bevy of statesmen led by the Massachusetts congressmen John Adams to demote Washington and install Gates at the head of the army. Gates and his supporters within both Congress and the military were not averse to what the Washington loyalist Alexander Hamilton labeled the “execrable coup d’état.” To that end, while Washington worked tirelessly to keep his army from either dissolving or perishing at Valley Forge, Gates assiduously worked behind the scenes to undermine him in the field. Only Washington’s superior political instincts, heretofore vastly underrated, allowed him to maintain his position as he deftly outmaneuvered the Gates cabal with a series of actions that rallied an influential faction of statesman and military officers to his side.
6. Valley Forge would offer a glimpse into the future of naval warfare
Despite being more than 60 miles inland from the Atlantic, Valley Forge saw the culmination of the world’s first submarine warfare program. A year earlier, the American inventor David Bushnell had used a one-man, propeller-driven submersible — dubbed the Turtle — to attempt to sink the British fleet’s flagship in New York Harbor. Bushnell used his contraption to secretly attach a watertight keg of black powder, known as a “torpedo,” to the hull of HMS Eagle. Although attack failed and the Turtle was destroyed by enemy cannon fire, Washington borrowed the torpedo idea during his time at Valley Forge. On Jan. 6, 1778, the general ordered a slew of waterproofed barrels filled with explosives to be floated down the Delaware River toward the British warships docked at Philadelphia’s piers. The so-called “Battle of the Kegs” failed, but to this day the name David Bushnell claims worldwide approbation as “The Father of Submarine Warfare.”
7. Greed was one of the biggest killers
Despite the manifest starvation that felled so many Americans at Valley Forge – more deaths recorded than any battle during the Revolutionary War – there was an abundance of food in the Pennsylvania counties adjacent to the winter encampment. In what Washington considered a bitter paradox, what he referred to as his “soldiery” should have had much greater access to the agricultural resources of the countryside surrounding to Valley Forge. The bountiful fields of Chester, Montgomery, and Bucks counties in particular had produced crop yields in 1777 that were the highest in a decade. But local farmers, millers, and merchants much preferred to smuggle their goods into British-occupied Philadelphia in exchange for pound sterling and sometimes even gold as opposed to the nearly worthless Continental scrip. Moreover, the Americans’ utter dearth of wagons to carry provisions to their camp made superfluous any agreements they might secure on credit from patriotic farmers.
8. There were more desertions at Valley Forge than at any other period during the Revolution
Before even reaching the winter encampment, Washington was already vociferously complaining to his brigadiers about the number of “summer soldiers” simply vanishing from his army’s ranks. Once the encampment was established, those desertions multiplied daily, reaching such epic proportion that the commander-in-chief was forced to issue a series of General Orders threatening his junior officers with dismissal if they failed to convene multiple daily roll calls – the only way, he felt, to ensure that men abandoning their posts could not get too far before specially-designated mounted units could round them up and return them. Yet despite the most recidivist offenders being hanged in the camp’s parade grounds, still they left.
It was not unusual for regimental commanders to find scores of grumbling soldiers outside their huts threatening to desert en masse “for want of victuals.” Loyalist spies stationed along the Hudson Highlands spotted so many New Englanders simply walking home that they (mistakenly) warned the British in New York that the Continentals might be massing for a rearguard surprise attack on the city. “The spirit of desertion never before rose to such a threatening height as at the present time,” an alarmed Washington wrote to the Continental Congress. Come the spring of 1778, the combination of death and “self-granted furloughs” had reduced the commander in chief’s force to barely 8,000 able-bodied men.
9. Immigrants at Valley Forge saved the army
Foreign soldiers were equally as important to the survival and ultimate victory of the Continental Army as were America’s homegrown officers. Another of the more enduring myths of the American Revolution is that of the musket-wielding Minuteman blending into a copse of woods and firing into the squared ranks of attacking redcoats. In fact, it was the Continentals’ utter disregard for the linear tactics of what military experts of the era called “fire discipline” that nearly doomed their fight for independence. This discipline, gradually infused into the Continental Army at Valley Forge almost solely by the Prussian volunteer Count Friedrich von Steuben, demanded that infantry battalions on the march be able to change formations while maintaining cohesion and wheel in unison to form battle lines – a concept quite foreign to American units, who tended to march in Indian-file.
Further, von Steuben drilled into each solder that a successful outcome in battle required each man to hold until so ordered even in the face of closing bayonet charges or if the man next to him was torn to pieces by cannon fire. The Continentals on the other hand, particularly the state militias early in the war, had a tendency to cut and run at the first glint of the cold steel of a massed British bayonet charge. With Washington’s enthusiastic blessing, von Steuben completely overhauled the Continental Army through a series of intense, non-stop drilling and training exercises over the Valley Forge winter that allowed the newly-minted American army to become a match for the military might of the British Empire.
Von Steuben was not alone in his contributions at Valley Forge. Much as Washington depended on Lafayette’s sound advice, he relied upon Lafayette’s fellow Frenchman the military engineer General Louis du Portail to erect the defensive parapets that girded Valley Forge and the Polish Count Casimir Pulaski to transform his motley collection of mounted mail riders and scouts into a coherent American cavalry. Pulaski, like scores of other foreigners including the hulking Bavarian volunteer General Johann de Kalb, would ultimately sacrifice their lives for the cause of America’s independence.
10. Valley Forge saw the first official celebration of Washington’s birthday
Sunday, Feb. 22, 1778 dawned dank and chill in southeast Pennsylvania. A week earlier the camp’s larders had run out of food, and seven days with no rations had not only again raised the prospect of famine, but had lent the winter cantonment the trappings of a refugee camp. Nonetheless, that evening as Washington, his wife Martha, and his closest aids choked down a meager supper of spoiled meat and hickory nuts, a fife and drum corps from Pennsylvania’s Philadelphia regiment appeared outside the small farmhouse that Washington used as his headquarters to serenade him with an impromptu birthday concert. Though Washington retired to bed without acknowledging the players – he feared that the tribute was too reminiscent of the British custom of military bands honoring the king on his birthday – Martha Washington managed to scrape up 15 shillings with which to thank the bandleader.
Bob Drury is the author/coauthor of Valley Forge. He has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Men’s Journal, and GQ. He is currently a contributing editor and foreign correspondent for Men’s Health. He lives in Manasquan, New Jersey.
Tom Clavin is the author/coauthor ofValley Forge. For 15 years he wrote for The New York Times and has contributed to such magazines as Golf, Men’s Journal, Parade, Reader’s Digest, and Smithsonian. He is currently the investigative features correspondent for Manhattan Magazine. He lives in Sag Harbor, New York.
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