Valley Forge Was a Winter of Hunger That Turned Farmers Into an Army

There is no battle at Valley Forge. No flag goes up on a hill, no general shouts a famous line, no charge breaks anything. And yet it may be the single most important place in the story of how America became a country, because it is where an army decided to remain an army.

Most of us picture Valley Forge as a frozen painting: bare feet in the snow, a general kneeling in prayer. The reality is more useful. It was a winter of administrative failure, cold, disease and hunger, followed by a spring of drill, discipline and good news. It is a story about what happens when a free people's government cannot feed its own soldiers, and about what the soldiers did about it. Let me walk through it in order.

Where the Army Came From

By December 1777 the Continental Army had been beaten more often than it had won. Washington had lost the battles of Brandywine on September 11 and Germantown on October 4, and on September 26 British troops under General Howe had marched into Philadelphia, the capital of the rebellion. The Continental Congress had fled, first to Lancaster and then to York, Pennsylvania.

There was one great bright spot. In October the northern army had forced the surrender of General Burgoyne's army at Saratoga. But Saratoga was far away, and the main army under Washington had to find a place to spend the winter within reach of the British in Philadelphia, close enough to protect the countryside and far enough to avoid a surprise. Washington chose Valley Forge, about eighteen miles northwest of the city, on high ground above the Schuylkill River. The army marched in on December 19, 1777.

The numbers are worth stating carefully. The army that arrived is usually put at around 12,000 men. By the standard estimate, roughly 1,700 to 2,000 of them died over the winter, and most of those deaths came from disease rather than combat. Take those figures as the accepted scholarly range, not as precise counts.

The Shortages and the Disease

The first task was shelter. The men built log huts, about a dozen to a hut, and worked at it through the first weeks of the encampment. Until the huts were done, many slept in the open or in tents in December weather.

Then came the real problem. It was not that the country lacked food. Pennsylvania was one of the richest farming regions in America. The problem was that the army could not get the food to the camp, and could not pay for it when it did.

Here the structure of the government is the villain. In 1777 the United States had no constitution that gave the central government power to tax. Congress had drafted the Articles of Confederation and sent them to the states, but they would not be ratified until 1781. Congress could request money from the states, and the states could ignore the request, which is the same arrangement a teenager has with a household budget, minus the curfew. It printed paper currency that lost value as fast as it printed it. The commissary department, run by men who were often underpaid, quarrelling or resigning, could not keep the supplies moving. Farmers near the camp, who had views about paper money that any modern retiree would recognize, preferred to sell to the British in Philadelphia, who paid in hard coin, rather than take the Continental paper.

So the soldiers ate what was left. The staple was firecake, flour and water baked on a hot stone. Some days there was nothing. Clothing was worse: many men were without shoes and blankets, and some had so little clothing that they could not take their turn on guard duty. Disease followed. Typhus and typhoid fever, dysentery, and the other camp illnesses did most of the killing in the huts and the makeshift hospitals.

On December 23, 1777, Washington wrote to Congress and spelled out the danger plainly. He warned that unless a change came quickly, the army would "starve, dissolve, or disperse" to find its own subsistence. That is a commander writing to his government about the possibility that his army would simply fall apart, and he said it in a letter that would be read in a room full of the men who controlled the purse.

What Washington Did and Did Not Do

It matters what Washington did not do, because it is the hinge of the story. He did not march on Congress. He did not seize the food supply by force, though some of his officers urged tougher measures. He did not make a deal with the British. He wrote letters, pressed Congress, sent out foraging parties under orders to pay or give receipts, and held the army together by the force of his own example.

Remember what the Constitution later wrote into its text: the President is commander in chief, and Congress holds the power of the purse, to "raise and support Armies." That division, civilian control over a military that must be funded by civilians, was a lesson the Revolution was learning the hard way. A general who could have turned an army into a threat to the legislature chose instead to plead with it. That is a form of restraint we will see again in his later career, a story I tell in George Washington Gave Up Power Twice and Changed What Leaders Could Be.

Congress and the Supply Failure Stated Fairly

Here is the strongest defense of Congress, and a conservative who cares about the Founding should state it fairly. Congress was a body of delegates from thirteen sovereign states, with no executive and no power to raise taxes directly. It was fighting a war with a government designed to be weak, because the colonists had just rebelled against a government that was strong. Their fear of centralized power was reasonable. It was the right fear, drawn from the right lesson. Nobody who has just fought a war against a king's overreach wants to build a new king.

Now here is the answer, in three points.

1. Weakness has a price, and soldiers pay it. A government that cannot tax cannot supply an army, and the cost of that design flaw was paid in the huts at Valley Forge, not in the committee rooms at York.
2. The fix was not a stronger tyrant but a better structure. The Founders learned the lesson. The Constitution of 1787 gave Congress the power "To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States," and it did so within a government of enumerated powers, with checks, a separated executive and a Bill of Rights to follow. The answer to a weak government was a limited but capable one. See Few and Defined, the Promise About Federal Power in Madison's Federalist 45.
3. The army's endurance gave the delegates a reason to draft it. The experience of the war, and of this winter in particular, was one of the arguments the framers carried into the convention in Philadelphia ten years later.

That is the sober lesson for conservatives: limited government is not weak government. It is government that does a few things, does them well, and answers for them.

Nathanael Greene Fixes the Wagons

In the middle of the crisis Washington asked a trusted general to take on the least glamorous job in the army. Nathanael Greene, a Rhode Islander who had fought at Trenton and Brandywine, was named quartermaster general in March 1778. He did not want the job. He wanted a combat command, and he said so. He took it anyway, with the stated purpose of keeping the army moving, and he turned out to be superb at it.

A quartermaster's job sounds dull until you consider what it controls: wagons, horses, forage, tents, tools and the roads. Greene reorganized the department, built up a network of agents and magazines, and worked to turn paper into actual deliveries. Supplies began to arrive in far greater volume in the spring. The credit for the army's recovery goes to many hands, but it is fair to say that the army that marched out of Valley Forge in June was fed because a general agreed to do a thankless job well. I would put that on the short list of lessons the military still teaches: logistics wins wars.

Steuben and the Drill

Now to the part that changed the army. In late February 1778 a Prussian-trained officer arrived at camp with letters of recommendation from Benjamin Franklin in Paris. He was Baron Friedrich von Steuben, and he spoke little English. He had no great battlefield command behind him, but he knew how a European army was trained, and he saw immediately what was missing.

The Continental Army had brave men and a shortage of uniform training. Regiments marched differently. Soldiers handled their muskets in different ways. There was no standard manual of arms, no standard way to move a body of men from a column into a line of battle. The result was that in a real fight, the army struggled to turn what it had into power on the field.

Steuben's method was practical. He began by training a model company of about a hundred men picked from the army, who would learn the drill and spread it through the regiments. He taught the same movements, in the same words, to everyone. He did not stand apart. He drilled the men himself, in the open, and by most accounts he did it with a ferocious, comic energy that the soldiers came to love. The drill covered loading and firing, marching in column and wheeling into line, and use of the bayonet, which the Continentals had often lacked confidence with.

He also wrote it down. His manual, the Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States, was approved and published in 1779 and used by American forces for decades. Troops called it the Blue Book. It laid out camp sanitation, the placement of latrines away from the kitchens, the duties of each rank and the drill itself. Some of those instructions look humble. Disease had killed more men than the British that winter, and clean camps were a form of military power.

If a federal agency had hired him, the onboarding paperwork alone would have outlasted the winter. Think about what this was. An officer from another country, on the basis of a letter from a diplomat, walked into a half-starved army and told ordinary Americans how to become professionals. The Continentals listened. That is a trait of free men that European monarchs rarely credited: a volunteer who sees the point of discipline will take it up more completely than a conscript who only fears it.

The French Alliance and the Spring

Good news arrived in May. On February 6, 1778, American commissioners in Paris, including Benjamin Franklin, had signed a treaty of alliance and a treaty of amity and commerce with France. The news reached the army in early May, and on May 6 Washington ordered a celebration, a parade and a feu de joie, a running fire of muskets down the lines and back, with cheers for the king of France and for the United States.

The alliance had many causes. Franklin's diplomacy was one. The victory at Saratoga, which showed the French that the Americans could win, was another. But the lesson for readers who like their history clean is this: the alliance with France followed the army's showing, not the other way around. A country gets friends when it proves it is worth backing. For where that road led, see Yorktown in October 1781 and How a French Fleet Helped Trap Cornwallis.

The British, meanwhile, were reconsidering. Howe was replaced as commander by Sir Henry Clinton, and with France in the war, Britain decided to pull its army out of Philadelphia and consolidate in New York. In mid-June, the British marched out of the city across New Jersey.

Monmouth: The Test of the Spring

Washington's army began leaving Valley Forge on June 18, 1778, with the rest following the next day, and went after the column. The two forces collided at Monmouth Court House, New Jersey, on June 28, on a day of brutal heat. The battle started badly, with an American advance under General Charles Lee falling back. Washington rode up, took control, rallied the retreating troops and re-formed the line. The Continentals held under artillery fire and repeated assaults, and by evening the British broke off and continued their march to New York.

Monmouth was not a decisive victory. The British were not destroyed. But the Continentals stood in a pitched battle against the regulars, in open ground, and did not break. Six months earlier that would have been in doubt. The change was the drill, and the food, and the sense of being an army. When the British slipped away at night, it was the Americans who held the field. The army that had been dying in its huts was now able to fight the king's troops to a standstill, and there it would remain a force the British had to count in every plan.

What Perseverance Meant

Thomas Paine had written, in the first Crisis, that "These are the times that try men's souls." For the full treatment of that essay and the freezing army it was read to a year earlier, see Thomas Paine's The Crisis and the Words Read Aloud to a Freezing Army. Valley Forge was the next trial, and a harder kind. It had no attack to give it purpose, only endurance.

Three virtues stand out, and they are worth naming in plain words because they are the ones a republic needs.

Patience. Washington did not look for a victory that winter. He looked for survival and improvement. A leader who can set a target for the spring and hold to it through a bad winter is rare, and he did it in a place where the news was bad every week.

Self-government. The soldiers could have gone home. Many were enlisted for terms and could have walked away, and some did. Most stayed. They were citizens in arms, and the army was held together by consent as much as by command. That does not make it soft. It makes it free.

Willingness to learn. The army accepted a foreign drillmaster and a manual, and it came out better. A free people's strength is not that it already knows everything. It is that it can be taught.

If you want the other two winters that Americans have used to measure what endurance costs, compare Bastogne and the Chosin Reservoir in Valley Forge, Bastogne and Chosin as Three Winters That Tested Americans.

The Case in Brief

1. The Continental Army entered Valley Forge on December 19, 1777, and its suffering came from a government with no power to tax and a supply system that did not work, not from a lack of food in the country.
2. Washington answered by pleading with Congress, not by threatening it, and so kept the principle of civilian control that the Constitution would later write down.
3. Nathanael Greene fixed the wagons and Baron von Steuben fixed the drill, and the army that marched out in June was a different instrument from the one that marched in.
4. The French alliance followed the army's showing, and Monmouth on June 28, 1778 proved the Continentals could stand against the regulars in the open.
5. The lesson for citizens is that limited government should be capable, a free people can be taught, and liberty is held by people who stay when staying is hard.

What you can do: look up the Constitution's Article I, Section 8 on the powers to tax and to raise and support armies, read it with your family, and then call your House member's office with one question about how the military is funded.