by Ron Chernow
Washington opted for a spot that was fated to become hallowed ground: Valley Forge, a windswept plateau, twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia, that he would depict as “a dreary kind of place and uncomfortably provided.” 3 With its open, rolling fields and woods, the encampment stood a day’s march from Howe’s army and was therefore safe from surprise raids. In theory, it sounded like a promising place. Its high ridges would afford excellent defensive positions; its nearby woods would supply plentiful timber for fuel and construction; abundant local agriculture would nourish his army; and the nearby Schuylkill River and Valley Creek would provide pure water. What should have been an ideal resting place became instead a scene of harrowing misery.
Even before Washington arrived there, the Pennsylvania legislature had the cheek to criticize him for taking his men into winter camp, as if he were retiring into plush quarters. “I can assure those gentlemen,” Washington wrote testily, “that it is a much easier and less distressing thing to draw remonstrances in a comfortable room by a good fireside than to occupy a cold bleak hill and sleep under frost and snow without clothes or blankets. However, although they seem to have little feeling for the naked, distressed soldiers, I feel superabundantly for them and from my soul pity those miseries which it is neither in my power to relieve or prevent.”4 This was a new voice for Washington, reflecting a profound solidarity with his men that went beyond Revolutionary ideology and arose from the special camaraderie of shared suffering.
Already on the icy road to Valley Forge, Washington had spotted streaks of blood from his barefoot men, portending things to come. He slept in the upstairs chamber of a compact, two-story stone mill house built by Isaac Potts, whose iron forges lent the place its name. The commander in chief worked in a modest downstairs room with a fireplace. So meticulous was Washington in his respect for private property that he rented the quarters instead of seizing them. The premises were so cramped that one observer recalled Washington’s family as “exceedingly pinched for room.”5 Many aides slept jammed together on the floor downstairs. To provide extra space, Washington added an adjoining log cabin for meals.
With the treasury bankrupt, Washington experienced a grim foreboding that this winter would mandate stringency far beyond anything yet endured. In general orders for December 17, he suggested that the impending winter might call for preternatural strength and vowed to “share in the hardship and partake of every inconvenience” with his men.6 Whatever his failings as a general, Washington’s moral strength held the shaky army together. His position transcended that of a mere general, having taken on a paternal dimension. “The people of America look up to you as their father,” Henry Knox told him, “and into your hands they entrust their all, fully confident of every exertion on your part for their security and happiness.” 7
The first order of business, Washington knew, was to erect warm, dry huts. To set an example, he slept in a tent as the camp succumbed to a building craze; regiments broken into squads of twelve soldiers chopped wood and made huts for themselves. Cleverly, Washington injected a competitive element into the operation: he would pay twelve dollars to the squad that completed the first hut and a hundred dollars to anyone who devised a way to roof these structures without consuming scarce wood. As the men hewed their houses with dull ax blades, they nonetheless seemed cheerful and hardy. “I was there when the army first began to build huts,” wrote Thomas Paine. “They appeared to me like a family of beavers: everyone busy, some carrying logs, others mud, and the rest fastening them together.”8 Within a month a makeshift village, more than two thousand log cabins in all, materialized from the havoc.
Forming parallel avenues, the huts were small, dark, and claustrophobic; a dozen men could be squashed into spaces measuring fourteen by sixteen feet, with only six and a half feet of headroom. Narrow bunks, stacked in triple rows, stood on either side of the door. Many soldiers draped tents over their huts to keep at bay the sharp wintry blasts. While officers had the luxury of wooden floors, ordinary soldiers slept on dank earth. As more trees were felled for shelter and firewood, the campgrounds grew foul and slippery with mud. Dead horses and their entrails lay decomposing everywhere, emitting a putrid stench into the winter air.
For all its esprit de corps, the Continental Army was soon reduced to a ghastly state, its soldiers resembling a horde of unkempt beggars. Men dined on food called “fire cakes,” crude concoctions of flour and water that were cooked on hot stones. Some days they couldn’t scrape together any food at all. Dr. Albigence Waldo of Connecticut limned the horror:Poor food—hard lodging—cold weather—fatigue—nasty clothes—nasty cookery—vomit half my time—smoke out of my senses—the devil’s in it—I can’t endure it . . . There comes a bowl of beef soup—full of burnt leaves and dirt, sickish enough to make a Hector spew . . . There comes a soldier, his bare feet are seen through his worn-out shoes, his legs nearly naked from the tattered remains of an only pair of stockings; his breeches not sufficient to cover his nakedness; his shirt hanging in strings; his hair disheveled; his face meager; his whole appearance pictures a person forsaken and discouraged.9
The universal misery didn’t spare officers, who suffered along with their men. One Frenchman strolling through camp caught glimpses of soldiers who “were using as cloaks and overcoats woollen blankets similar to those worn by the patients in our French hospitals. I realized a little later that those were officers and generals.”10 Some desperate soldiers tore canvas strips from tents to cobble together primitive shirts or shoes. The misery reached straight into Washington’s headquarters. “I cannot get as much cloth as will make clothes for my servants,” Washington wrote, “notwithstanding that one of them that attends my person and table is indecently and most shamefully naked.”11 One wonders whether this referred to the trusted Billy Lee. Exacerbating the clothing shortage was a dearth of wagons. To cart supplies around camp, men were harnessed to carriages like draft animals, saddled with yokes. Hoping to ameliorate the situation, Congress, at Washington’s behest, soon appointed Nathanael Greene as the new quartermaster general, an office that had been negligently administered by Thomas Mifflin. At first Greene resisted the appointment, grumbling that “nobody ever heard of a quartermaster in history,” but he submitted to his fate and brilliantly helped the Continental Army avoid starvation as he redeemed his own reputation.12
Part of Washington’s inspirational power at Valley Forge came from his steady presence, as he projected leadership in nonverbal ways that are hard for posterity to re-create. Even contemporaries found it difficult to convey the essence of his calm grandeur. “I cannot describe the impression that the first sight of that great man made upon me,” said one Frenchman. “I could not keep my eyes from that imposing countenance: grave yet not severe; affable without familiarity. Its predominant expression was calm dignity, through which you could trace the strong feelings of the patriot and discern the father as well as the commander of his soldiers.”13
One of the most durable images of Washington at Valley Forge is likely invented. After his death Parson Mason Weems, who fabricated the canard about the cherry tree, told of Washington praying in a snowy glade. A well-known image of Washington, done by Paul Weber and entitled George Washington in Prayer at Valley Forge, depicts Washington praying on his knees, his left hand over his heart and his open right hand at his side, pointing to the earth. Washington’s upturned face catches a shaft of celestial light. The image seems designed to meld religion and politics by converting the uniformed Washington into a humble supplicant of the Lord. The reason to doubt the story’s veracity is not Washington’s lack of faith but the typically private nature of his devotions. He would never have prayed so ostentatiously outdoors, where soldiers could have stumbled upon him.
While Washington was somewhat insulated from the camp’s noisome squalor in the Potts house, the despondent men ventilated their grievances. As he strode past the huts, he heard them grumbling inside, “No bread, no soldier!”14 On better days, they would bur
st into a patriotic tune called “War and Washington.”15 At one point a knot of protesters descended on his office in what must have seemed a mutinous act. Washington undoubtedly bristled at their disruptive presence. Nonetheless, when the men said they had come to make sure Washington understood their suffering, he reacted sympathetically. This man of patrician tastes had learned to value ordinary soldiers. “Naked and starving as they are,” he wrote, “we cannot enough admire the incomparable patience and fidelity of the soldiery.”16
That the Continental Army did not disintegrate or revolt en masse at Valley Forge is simply astonishing. When Dr. Benjamin Rush toured the camp, General Sullivan lectured him, “Sir, this is not an army—it is a mob.”17 It shows the confidence that Washington produced in his men that they stuck by him in this forlorn place. Nor did he achieve popularity by coddling anyone, for he inflicted severe floggings on men caught stealing food. “The culprit being securely lashed to a tree or post receives on his naked back the number of lashes assigned to him by a whip formed of several small knotted cords, which sometimes cut through his skin at every stroke,” wrote Dr. James Thacher, who described how men survived this ordeal by biting on lead bullets—the origin of the term “biting the bullet.”18 Governed by a powerful moral code and determined to maintain some semblance of military discipline amid woeful conditions, Washington perpetuated his ban on cards, dice, and other forms of gambling.
Perhaps most frightful at Valley Forge were the rampant diseases that leveled 30 percent of the men at any given time. Many underwent amputations as their legs and feet turned black from frostbite. Owing to pervasive malnutrition, filthy conditions, and exposure to cold, scourges such as typhus, typhoid fever, pneumonia, dysentery, and scurvy grew commonplace. Dr. Benjamin Rush deplored the army hospitals, located outside the camp, as gruesome sties, overcrowded with inmates “shivering with cold upon the floors without a blanket to cover them, calling for fire, for water, for suitable food, and for medicines—and calling in vain.”19 By winter’s end, two thousand men had perished at Valley Forge, mostly from disease and many of them in the warm spring months. “Happily, the real condition of Washington was not well understood by Sir William Howe,” wrote John Marshall, “and the characteristic attention of that officer [i.e., Washington] to the lives and comfort of his troops saved the American army.”20
On December 23, with the situation deteriorating daily, Washington rushed an urgent message to Henry Laurens, warning that the Continental Army would “starve, dissolve, or disperse” without more food. To illustrate, he related a frightening anecdote of an incident the day before when he had ordered his soldiers to pounce on British soldiers scouring the countryside for forage. The operation was scuttled because his men were too enervated from lack of food to carry out the mission. Washington testified that there was “not a single hoof of any kind to slaughter and not more than 25 bar[re]ls of flour!” He made the astonishing prediction that “three or four days [of] bad weather would prove our destruction.”21 In heartbreaking fashion, he evoked an army devoid of soap; men with one shirt, half a shirt, or no shirt at all; nearly three thousand unfit for duty for lack of shoes; and men who passed sleepless nights, crouched by the fire, for want of blankets.
Ever since the war started, Washington had saved his laments for Congress, even though much of the real power resided with the states. But he was reluctant to appeal to the states, lest he seem to circumvent Congress or violate military subordination to civilian control. Now, in desperation, he began to issue circulars to the states, which gave him license to rail against the rickety political structure that hampered his army. That November Congress had completed drafting the Articles of Confederation, creating a loose confederacy of states with a notably weak central government. Dreading the hobgoblin of concentrated power, states shrank from levying taxes and introducing other measures to aid the federal war effort. Washington was dismayed that the states now shipped off their mediocrities to Congress while more able men stayed home “framing constitutions, providing laws, and filling [state] offices.”22 A leitmotif of his wartime letters was that the shortsighted states would come to ruin without an effective central government. Increasingly Washington took a scathing view of lax congressional leadership.
The Christmas dinner at Valley Forge was an austere one for Washington and his military family, who shared a frugal collation of mutton, potatoes, cabbage, and crusts of bread, accompanied by water. The liquor shortage produced the worst grumbling among the officers. Sometime around the Battle of Brandywine, Washington had lost his baggage, with its complement of plates, dishes, and kitchen utensils, and he now made do with a single spoon. He experienced no self-pity, however, so woebegone was the comparative plight of his men. On the last day of the year, he compressed the suffering of Valley Forge into a single piercing cry: “Our sick naked, our well naked, our unfortunate men in captivity naked!”23
What made Valley Forge so bitterly disenchanting for Washington was that selfishness among the citizenry seemed to outweigh patriotic fervor. In choosing winter quarters at Valley Forge, he had surmised, correctly, that the surrounding countryside possessed ample food supplies. What he hadn’t reckoned on was that local farmers would sell their produce to British troops in Philadelphia rather than to shivering patriots. Some of this behavior could be attributed to blatant greed and profiteering. But prices also soared as the Continental currency depreciated and an inflationary psychology took hold. Holding a debased currency, the patriots simply couldn’t compete with the British, who paid in solid pounds sterling. “We must take the passions of men as nature has given them,” Washington wrote resignedly. “. . . I do not mean to exclude altogether the idea of patriotism . . . But I will venture to assert that a great and lasting war can never be supported on this principle alone.”24 Washington presented a rare case of a revolutionary leader who, instead of being blinded by political fervor, recognized that fallible human beings couldn’t always live up to the high standards he set for them. Though often embittered by the mercenary behavior of his countrymen, he tried to accept human nature as it was. He believed that many Americans had expected a speedy end to the conflict and, when the first flush of patriotism faded, were governed by self-interest. In 1778 there were far more political fence-sitters than in the giddy days after Lexington and Concord.
By late January Washington was so enraged about farmers engaging in contraband trade with the enemy that he issued orders “to make an example of some guilty one, that the rest may be sensible of a like fate, should they persist.”25 Many farmers tried to bypass restrictions by having women and children drive food-laden wagons to Philadelphia, hoping American sentries wouldn’t stop them. Nothing short of the death penalty, Washington insisted, would terminate this reprehensible practice. Finally, he saw no choice but to sabotage American mills turning out supplies for the enemy and sent teams of soldiers to break off the spindles and spikes of their water wheels. With a beef shortage looming, he had Nathanael Greene and almost a thousand men fan out across the countryside and confiscate all cattle and sheep fit for slaughter. As word of the operation spread, farmers hid their livestock in woods and swamps. Despite such draconian measures, Washington warned that his army still stared at starvation: “For some days past, there has been little less than a famine in camp. A part of the army has been a week without any kind of flesh and the rest three or four days.”26
At Valley Forge, Washington composed numerous screeds against American greed that make uncomfortable reading for those who regard that winter as a purely heroic time. Seeing the decay of public virtue everywhere, he berated speculators, monopolists, and war profiteers. “Is the paltry consideration of a little dirty pelf to individuals to be placed in competition with the essential rights and liberties of the present generation and of millions yet unborn?” he asked James Warren. “ . . . And shall we at last become the victims of our own abominable lust of gain? Forbid it heaven!”27 Washington himself could be a hard-driving businessmen, y
et he found the rapacity of many vendors unconscionable. As he told George Mason, he thought it the intent of “the speculators—various tribes of money makers—and stock jobbers of all denominations to continue the war for their own private emolument, without considering that their avarice and thirst for gain must plunge everything . . . in one common ruin.”28
Besieged by critics, heartsick at the shabby state of his troops, and angry at congressional neglect and the supine behavior of the states, Washington refused to abandon his army and again deferred a visit to Mount Vernon. Martha did not arrive at Valley Forge until early February. Right before Christmas she had suffered the grievous loss of her younger sister and best friend, Anna Maria Bassett. Death had been omnipresent for Martha, who had now lost a husband, a father, five siblings, and three of her four children. Whether her second husband would survive this interminable war remained an open question. A touching condolence note to her brother-in-law, Burwell Bassett, shows that her mind was darkly tinged with thoughts of mortality. Anna “has, I hope, made a happy exchange and only gone a little before us,” she said of her sister. “The time draws near when I hope we shall meet, never more to part . . . I must [own] to you that she was the greatest favorite I had in the world.”29 She pleaded with Burwell to send his ten-year-old daughter Fanny to Mount Vernon. “If you will let her come to live with me, I will, with the greatest pleasure, take her and be a parent and mother to her as long as I live.”30 Bassett complied, and Fanny came to occupy a special place in Martha’s affections.
While wishing to join her husband at Valley Forge, Martha was temporarily detained at Mount Vernon by the birth of her second grandchild to Jacky’s wife on New Year’s Eve 1777. Though Washington understood the reason for her delay, he pined for her presence. The long winter journey on bumpy, frozen roads must have taxed Martha to the utmost. When she arrived at Valley Forge, the soldiers cheered her, but she was taken aback by her husband’s humble quarters, somber mood, and frayed nerves. “The General is well but much worn with fatigue and anxiety,” she confided to a friend. “I never knew him to be so anxious as now.”31