Valley Forge

Valley Forge: The Crucible of an Army and a Nation

When the ragged columns of the Continental Army began filing into the rolling hills along the Schuylkill River on December 19, 1777, they were not marching toward a battle. They were marching toward something far more uncertain — a winter encampment that would test whether the American cause could survive its own internal failures. Valley Forge was never the site of a major engagement with the British. No grand charge or dramatic siege took place on its frozen ground. Yet what happened there over the course of six brutal months proved more consequential than many of the war's pitched battles. It was at Valley Forge that a demoralized, starving, and politically fractured army was remade into a disciplined fighting force capable of winning a war against the most powerful empire on earth.

The decision to encamp at Valley Forge, a modest iron-forging community roughly eighteen miles northwest of British-occupied Philadelphia, was George Washington's, and it was controversial from the start. The Continental Army had just endured a punishing autumn campaign season. The defeats at Brandywine in September and Germantown in October had failed to prevent the British under General William Howe from capturing Philadelphia, the seat of the Continental Congress. Members of Congress had fled to York, Pennsylvania, and public confidence in Washington's leadership was eroding. Some in Congress and even within the officer corps whispered that other generals — particularly Horatio Gates, the hero of Saratoga — might be better suited to command. This political intrigue, known to history as the Conway Cabal after the Irish-born French officer Thomas Conway who helped foment it, shadowed Washington throughout the winter. Though the conspiracy never coalesced into a formal plot to remove him, it reflected a genuine crisis of confidence in the American high command at the very moment the army settled into its winter quarters.

Washington chose Valley Forge for strategic reasons. The site offered defensible high ground between the Schuylkill River and Valley Creek, close enough to Philadelphia to monitor British movements but far enough to avoid a surprise attack. Interested parties had suggested other sites for an encampment, including Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Wilmington, Delaware.

Following the inconclusive Battle of Whitemarsh from December 5–8, however, increasing numbers of officers and politicians began to appreciate the need to defend the greater Philadelphia region from British attack. Pennsylvania's political leaders had pressured Washington to keep his army in the field rather than withdraw to more distant and comfortable quarters, and Valley Forge represented a compromise — a position that was militarily sound, if logistically grim. Washington's chief engineer, French Brigadier General Louis Duportail, diligently planned the American encampment around Valley Forge's natural defensive features, designing a series of fortified redoubts and entrenchments, though much of the planned interlocking defensive works remained unfinished by spring. The landscape was heavily wooded, which provided timber for shelter, but little else. There were no existing barracks, no prepared supply depots, and no infrastructure to support an army of approximately twelve thousand men. In addition to the soldiers, approximately 500 women and children accompanied the army to Valley Forge.

The first task was survival, and it began with construction. Washington ordered the building of over a thousand log huts, each designed to house twelve soldiers, arranged in orderly rows along company and regimental lines. The specifications were precise: fourteen feet by sixteen feet, with fireplaces and doors. Despite commanders' attempts at standardization, the huts varied in terms of size, materials, and construction techniques. Military historian John B. B. Trussell Jr. writes that many squads "dug their floors almost two feet below ground level" to reduce wind exposure, while some huts had thatched straw roofs and others consisted of brush, canvas, or clapboards.

The suffering that followed was staggering, though not quite in the way popular mythology suggests. Historians note that the winter of 1777–1778 was relatively mild, and not the harshest winter of the Revolutionary War — that distinction belongs to the Morristown encampment of 1779–80. However, the Valley Forge encampment took place during the Little Ice Age, a period of widespread cooling that lasted from around 1300 to 1850.

Rather than bitter cold and snow, the weather fluctuated often between rain and snow. The real enemy was not the weather but the catastrophic breakdown of the army's supply chain. Throughout the winter, patriot commanders and legislators faced the challenge of supplying a population the size of a large colonial city. In May and June 1777, the Continental Congress had authorized the reorganization of the supply department, but implementation of those changes never fully took effect because of the fighting surrounding Philadelphia. Consequently, the supply chain had broken down even before the Continental Army arrived at Valley Forge, in large part due to neglect by Congress, so that by the end of December 1777 Washington had no way to feed or adequately clothe the soldiers.

Washington calculated that at least a third of his men had no shoes. On February 16, 1778, Washington wrote to New York Governor George Clinton in desperation: "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 for three or four days. Naked and starving as they are, we cannot enough admire the incomparable patience and fidelity of the soldiery."

Valley Forge had higher mortality than any other Continental Army encampment, and even any military engagement of the war.

An estimated 1,700 to 2,000 soldiers died from disease, possibly exacerbated by malnutrition and cold, wet weather.

Camp records indicate that two-thirds of the deaths happened during the warmer months of March, April, and May, when soldiers were less confined to their cabins. The most common illnesses included influenza, typhus, typhoid fever, and dysentery — conditions most likely exacerbated by poor hygiene and sanitation at the camp.

That winter, starvation and disease killed nearly 2,000 soldiers and perhaps as many as 1,500 horses.

Washington also confronted a resurgence of smallpox, a scourge that had haunted the Continental Army since the war's beginning. Despite having ordered mass inoculation of his troops in January 1777, smallpox broke out again at Valley Forge. An investigation uncovered that 3,000–4,000 troops had not received inoculations despite having long-term enlistments. Washington ordered inoculations for any soldiers vulnerable to the disease. The procedure was risky — inoculation involved deliberate exposure to the virus and left men temporarily weakened and contagious — but Washington recognized the greater danger of inaction. If the British caught wind that large numbers of American soldiers were laid up in bed with smallpox, it could be the end. Washington insisted on secrecy, writing, "I need not mention the necessity of as much secrecy as the nature of the Subject will admit of."

When the Continental Army marched out of Valley Forge in June 1778, they had completed what historians have called "the first large-scale, state-sponsored immunization campaign in history."

Among the army's unsung participants were the women who followed the troops. In December 1777, a return for the main army at Valley Forge showed a total of 400 women present, or one woman for each forty-four enlisted men.

Women followed the army to be with their husbands and contributed actively to the cause. The women present at Valley Forge included hundreds of enlisted men's wives who followed the army year round, and