by John McPhee
I do not know from what cause this alarming deficiency, or rather total failure of supplies, arises; but, unless more vigorous exertions and better regulations take place in that line immediately, this army must starve, dissolve, or disperse.
On February 12, one general at Valley Forge (James Varnum) wrote this memorandum to another general at Valley Forge (Nathanael Greene):
The country in the vicinity of the camp is exhausted. There cannot be a moral certainty of bettering our circumstances, while we continue here … I have from the beginning viewed this situation with horror! It is unparalleled in the history of mankind to establish winter-quarters in a country wasted and without a single magazine … There is no alternative, but immediately to remove the army to places where they can be supplied, unless effectual remedies can be applied on the spot.
On February 16, General Washington wrote from Valley Forge to Governor George Clinton, of New York:
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. Naked and starving as they are, we cannot enough admire the incomparable patience and fidelity of the soldiery, that they have not been ere this excited by their suffering to a general mutiny and dispersion. Strong symptoms, however, of discontent have appeared in particular instances.
The symptoms had begun to appear within days of the army’s arrival. As officers moved about the camp, hut doors would open a crack and the voices of troops would call from within, “No bread, no soldier.”
Washington to Clinton, continued:
Our present sufferings are not all. There is no foundation laid for any adequate relief hereafter. All the magazines provided in the States of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, and all the immediate additional supplies they seem capable of affording, will not be sufficient to support the army … When the before-mentioned supplies are exhausted, what a terrible crisis must ensue, unless all the energy of the continent shall be exerted to provide a timely remedy!
Numbers varied across the months, but something like twelve thousand men were encamped there—about three-fourths of the entire Continental army. They could eat a drove of cattle in minutes. They required, but were not receiving, a hundred barrels of flour a day. Typical Fahrenheit temperatures in late December and well into the new year ranged from six to thirty-six.
The scene was set for the spring migration of 1778, the run of the savior shad from Delaware Bay through Philadelphia and on up the Schuylkill to Valley Forge, the deliverance of embryonic America, the finest hour of the founding fish. The British certainly sensed as much. Specifically to cut off the shad run, they stretched a barrier seine across the Schuylkill near Philadelphia. Whatever color your coat was, for anybody on an eastern river there was ample precedent for high expectation. In the winter of 1773, for example, a settlement called Wyoming, on the North Branch of the Susquehanna River, was all but famished out of existence. The “History of Wyoming, In a Series of Letters from Charles Miner to his son William Penn Miner, Esq.” reports the outcome:
Never was an opening spring, or the coming of the shad, looked for with more anxiety, or hailed with more cordial delight. The fishing season, of course, dissipated all fears, and the dim eye was soon exchanged for the glance of joy and the sparkle of pleasure, and the dry, sunken cheek of want assumed the plump appearance of health and plenty.
Barrelled salt shad had been a common provision for American troops. In May, 1776, Lieutenant Samuel Hunter wrote from Fort Augusta, on the West Branch of the Susquehanna: “I have ordered some People that lives nigh the Great Island to preserve shad and barrel them up for the use of the Militia that will be stationed there this summer.” According to A. J. McClane’s “The Encyclopedia of Fish Cookery,” “thousands of barrels of shad fed colonial troops in White Plains in 1776.” Sylvester Judd notes that “some thousands of barrels of shad were put up in Connecticut for the troops.” Harry Emerson Wildes writes in “Valley Forge”:
So hungry were the soldiers that when supplies trickled into camp the men pounced upon the food without waiting to cook it. “I found a barrel of shad,” wrote one hungry militiaman, “and voraciously fell to eating them raw and I thought them the best I had ever eaten.”
From the War Office, in York, on March 24, 1778, General Horatio Gates wrote to commissary Colonel Henry Hollingsworth a letter that included this sentence:
The Board are pleased to hear of your success with dried herring but have been informed dried shad are better.
The famine of Valley Forge, in 1778, was not alleviated by 1777 shad arriving in barrels. Nor, in fact, did it end as a result of the 1778 spring migration. When you read the narrative as it is commonly presented—“then, dramatically, the famine completely ended; countless thousands of fat shad …”—you are reading what the historian Wayne Bodle has called “the providentialist canard.” The hunger crisis at Valley Forge reached its nadir in the last two weeks of February and the first days of March, when the shad were at Cape May, waiting for things to warm up. In Valley Forge, nothing was warming up. It was intensely cold and snowy in late February. In Philadelphia, a temperature reading on March 4th was seven degrees. On March 5th at Valley Forge, the river was frozen over. In days that followed, supplies arrived, the men were fed, the crisis passed. The emotive account of the nation-saving shad is a tale recommended by everything but sources.
Bodle, a professor of American History at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, is the author of “The Valley Forge Winter: Civilians and Soldiers in War” (Penn State Press, 2002). Easygoing and giftedly verbal, he is now in his middle fifties. His name is pronounced like “modal.” His Valley Forge book evolved from his doctoral dissertation for the University of Pennsylvania, which in turn evolved from research he did for the federal government. In the nineteen-seventies, after the National Park Service took over from the State of Pennsylvania the site of the 1777—78 winter encampment, they hired Wayne Bodle and Jacqueline Thibaut, who were then graduate students, to write a Valley Forge Historical Research Report, which was completed in 1980. It is three volumes long. When I first got in touch with Bodle, in 1998, he said that fresh shad in all likelihood were consumed by soldiers at Valley Forge in the weeks before they broke camp in June, but that “the large and providentially early run is a legend not supported by a single document.” There is no record of shad in the river during the “discrete periods of intense starvation,” or, for that matter, throughout the easier days of spring, albeit if shad were there the soldiers would almost certainly have eaten them, and shad would have been “an invisible part of the substratum of the nutritional comfort in April and May.”
John Joseph Stoudt’s “Ordeal at Valley Forge” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963) gives a day-by-day chronicle of the weather. On the 6th of March, floating ice is in the river. On the 7th, the channel flows between shelves of ice coming out from the two sides. March 12th is “hot.” On March 13th, “verdure” appears. March 14th and 15th are “very warm … uncommonly warm.” That kind of warmth will drive shad upstream, but not so far so fast. On March 21st, “the false spring is over.” On March 22nd, there is “ice an inch thick.”
Washington’s headquarters at Valley Forge were in a fieldstone house near a creek where it entered the river. He could look down a short modest slope and see the flowing Schuylkill. What was he thinking—this commercial shad fisherman who in one season had netted nearly eight thousand shad? He could not have helped but imagine and anticipate the shad run. Or so it seems. In that small stone house—twenty-five by thirty feet—Washington spent an hour each morning over breakfast with his wife in one of three upstairs bedrooms, then went downstairs to his desk next to the Officers’ Workroom, where twenty subordinates, crammed around several tables, helped produce a lot of letters. The subordinates wrote drafts. Washington revised the drafts. They were copied with quill pens. Then he signed them. Among his drafters was Alexander Hamilton. In
the months of March and April, Washington wrote in this manner upwards of thirty thousand epistolary words, including many an eloquent diatribe against the dearth of food and supplies. (Visiting the headquarters with me one winter day in 2001, Wayne Bodle said, “The Continental army is the first bureaucratic entity in America and they use a lot of paper. Washington is ready to deal with the devil, if he has to, in order to keep the food flying.”) Nowhere in those thirty thousand words does the general mention the Schuylkill River shad run.
On March 26th, in British Philadelphia, a British army surgeon named Charles Blagden ended a newsy letter to a friend in London, saying, “The shad is just beginning to appear in the rivers here.” Blagden seems to be the best source, and possibly the only source, on the military relevance of shad in the Schuylkill in 1778. I learned of Blagden’s correspondence as a result of reading “Valley Forge: Pinnacle of Courage,” by John W. Jackson (Thomas Publications, Gettysburg, 1992). “A bonanza that eased the food supply for the troops in the spring of 1778 was the large quantity of shad that was taken from the Schuylkill River,” the author said. I wrote to him and asked his source, which was not given in the book. His widow replied, “In the Valley Forge book, information came from New York Public Library—Letters of Charles Blagden, April 20, 1778.” The April 20th letter includes the fact that the British in Philadelphia did what they could to impede the shad run, but if Dr. Blagden ever described the extent to which the effort was successful the description is not preserved. The seine goes across the river. Extrapolation begins there, but not on the part of Blagden, who says nothing else about the 1778 migration, and seems a little more interested in the natural history than the wartime history of the fish:
During this month a pretty large species of Clupea, called a shad, runs up the Rivers Delaware & Schuylkill in prodigious numbers. It has already proved a very seasonable relief to the inhabitants of this town. However, lest our enemies should receive as much if not more advantage from this benefit of nature, we have passed a seine across the Schuylkill, to prevent the fish from getting up that river, upon the banks of which Mr. Washington’s army is encamped. I will take some pains to learn how far this precaution is found effectual. It is nearly as good a fish as the Severn shad, & very much resembles it; but having lost that part of my System of Nature, I cannot say whether it be the true Alosa or not; however, I hope to send or bring you a specimen, & very much wish it may be the latter.
At Valley Forge on April 9, 1778, the air was raw and cold. April 13th was “sultry.” April 20th was “rather cold.” Washington remained full of complaint. On April 21st, he wrote to John Banister, Delegate in Congress: “No history now extant can furnish an instance of an army’s suffering such uncommon hardships as ours has done … without clothes … without blankets … without shoes … without provisions … marching through the frost and snow.” By May 6th—“a brilliantly clear, warm day”—the spawning season seems to have arrived for good. Whether the shad arrived with it is a matter of supposition. Surely the British net would not have stopped them all. As Wayne Bodle conjectures, shad almost certainly were consumed to some extent by the Continental army, for the army was there beside the Schuylkill during the entire migration period. Dr. Blagden, in Philadelphia, notes on May 22nd that “the run of shad has considerably lessened, & will soon cease entirely.” But there is no documentation of the shad that reached Valley Forge, let alone of their numbers. There is nothing but the history books.
David G. Martin, “The Philadelphia Campaign: June 1777— July 1778”:
The meat shortage did not begin to ease up until spring, and was not eliminated until the local shad run on the Schuylkill came as a godsend in April.
Donald Barr Chidsey, “Valley Forge” (Crown, New York, 1959):
The river ran shallow, and it was possible for cavalrymen to ride right up the middle of it, almost knee-to-knee. Each carried a cut bush with which he beat the water. At the narrowest point, Pawling’s Ford, just outside of camp a little north of headquarters, where the Perkiomen Creek emptied into the Schuylkill, nets had been spread. The fish swam in, got caught by the gills, and couldn’t get back. There were thousands of them, more and more coming all day, every day, all night too, for weeks … For almost a month the whole camp stank, and men’s fingers were oily. In addition, barrels had been held in readiness, and hundreds of these were filled with salted shad for future consumption.
John W Jackson, “Valley Forge: Pinnacle of Courage”:
Inhabitants for miles around gathered on the banks of the river with branches of bushes, stakes and a variety of tools to march abreast upstream driving the hapless shad before them. Others on horseback cornered them in a fenced enclosure embedded in the river bed.
Of the innumerable newspaper and magazine pieces that have picked up the theme one from the other, here are just two examples.
Pat Camuso, The River Reporter, Narrowsburg, New York:
Washington’s army was saved (and perhaps the great American Revolution as well) by the Susquehanna River’s spring shad run after winter starvation nearly killed his troops and the American Revolution with them.
Steve Quinn, In-Fisherman magazine:
Rations dwindled and soldiers were driven to scavenge … Morale ebbed … Provisions were nearly gone by the end of March, with little hope of finding food … Huge schools of migrating shad suddenly appeared, to feed the men and rekindle the revolutionary fire in their hearts. Although the soldiers reportedly grew weary of their shad diet, their assault on Philadelphia forced the British to evacuate in June 1778, and the tide of the war swung in favor of the Revolutionaries.
On Presidents’ Day, 2002, television’s History Channel presented “Save Our History: Valley Forge.” Scenes of buildings in present disrepair. Scenes of archaeologists meticulously digging. A happy scene far into the film showing actors, dressed as Valley Forge troops, wolfing down food. “The American army’s luck was changing for the better now, in significant ways,” the narrator said. “Just months earlier, they had almost been starving. Now, huge amounts of food came to them, almost like in a Biblical miracle.” The film then cut to a head-and-shoulders shot of Roger Mc-Grath—“Author/Historian”—who said, “Late in the winter, early in the spring, of 1778, was a tremendous run of shad up the Schuylkill River that was intercepted with nets by the troops, and tens of thousands of fish headed upstream; and they feasted on these fish for a month. It almost seemed a sign of God’s omnipotence, something of Biblical proportions.”
On Presidents’ Day, 2002, those archaeological digs in progress among the cabin sites of Valley Forge were in the second of several projected years. In offal and garbage pits, a great many food remains had been uncovered. Bones of cattle and pigs, mainly. No deer bones. No rabbit bones. No fish bones.
In 2000, Wayne Bodle sent me an article from a recent issue of Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies. Called “Fish or Foul: A History of the Delaware River Basin Through the Perspective of the American Shad, 1682 to the Present,” the article was by Charles Hardy III, of West Chester University, near Philadelphia. Hardy’s piece was thoroughly researched, with a huge bibliography. It was attractively written, and represented, at the very least, many months of work. Nonetheless, he did write:
Confronted by famine and starvation in the early years of settlement, the colonists, as the Indians before them, learned to preserve and husband food sources for the long winters. For human purposes anadromous species such as salmon and shad are by far the most important finfish. A migratory fish run concentrates a huge biological mass from the vast expanse of an ocean into a narrow geographical zone. Arriving in late March or early April, shad were one of the first food sources to relieve the shortages of the preceding winter. Indeed, Nathan Hale asserted that it was an uncommonly early run of the shad in the spring of 1778 that saved Washington and his troops camped in Valley Forge!
Some years before, Hardy had produced a public-radio documentary called “The Return o
f the Shad,” in which the narrator said, “It was the early appearance of the shad in the spring of 1779 [sic] that may well have saved our nation in its most trying hour.” At which point the apparent source, Max Hezelguesser—a dyed-in-the-wool-shirt Delaware River shad fisherman, a member of the Delaware River Shad Fishermen’s Association, and, it goes without saying, a reader whose eye had often been caught by anything at all about shad—came on and said:
In the time of the Revolutionary War the troops were very depressed in the winter of whatever at Valley Forge. They were starving and they were hungry and they were beaten down, ready to go home, and that would have been the end of it. The shad run for some reason started three weeks early in the Schuylkill River … The word got to the troops. They took horses. They pulled trees into the shallow water and really scooped them together and they filled barrels and barrels and barrels of shad. They filled their stomachs. They felt good. They had the strength and the power to keep going. And this was in a letter that Nathan Hale wrote to somebody. And you know, be it at all true, that ought to be the American fish.
In a note accompanying the piece from Pennsylvania History, Wayne Bodle said, “The providentialist canard from Valley Forge pops up again, I suppose inevitably. I have come across it in a variety of versions over the years, although never in one quite this bizarre. Hale, of course, died on Long Island in September of 1776.”