Valley Forge: The Making of Washington’s Army

The winter at Valley Forge is generally regarded as the low point of America’s Revolutionary War: an exhausted, defeated army, lacking food, clothing and shelter, huddled beside flickering campfires, warming themselves against the freezing cold.   

The image is accurate — it was a miserable time for the Continental Army and for its commander, George Washington  — yet that’s only half of the story. The other half is a tale of an army’s rebirth and renewal. If that sounds like a description of an American miracle, it very nearly was. 

Here’s how it happened. 

In the fall of 1777, Washington’s forces had been badly mauled by a powerful British army at the battles of Brandywine and Germantown. As winter loomed, Washington had no choice but to order a winter encampment laid-out on a barren field twenty-two miles west of Philadelphia, an area named for a nearby ironworks — Valley Forge.

By mid-December, his army of some twenty thousand men had begun their march to their new encampment and started building crude cabins to shelter themselves from the elements. 

But they were in short supply of everything, and Washington warned the Continental Congress that “this army must inevitably be reduced to one… of these three things; starve, dissolve, or disperse.”

Watching the painful march of his soldiers to the new camp grounds, Washington later said that “through want of shoes and stockings, and the hard frozen ground, you might have tracked the army…by the blood of their feet.”

Worse than physical misery, Washington’s army harbored ambitious officers who imagined that they were better material for commanding this army than Washington himself, and politicians in the Continental Congress who were willing to listen to them whisper behind Washington’s back. Desertion and sickness may have thinned the army’s ranks by as much as two-thirds.

Above all, there was always the threat of the British army, spending a comfortable and well-fed occupation in the warmth of Philadelphia, waiting for the Continental Army to disintegrate and bring an end to the American Revolution. 

But that was not to be the end.

Washington proved to be a shrewd political tactician, and with the friendship of the Continental Congress’s president, Henry Laurens, Washington outmaneuvered any would-be schemers and replacements and persuaded a visiting Congressional committee to become his strongest advocates. 

And despite the desertions and sickness, a stubborn remnant of the army’s rank-and-file remained steadfast.  

At the same time, Washington gathered around him a group of young officers – the gifted artillery officer Alexander Hamilton, the headstrong cavalryman “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, the 19-year-old marquis de Lafayette, one of the wealthiest aristocrats in France but who nevertheless declared his dedication to “the happiness of mankind, the prosperity of freedom, and the glory of what they call in France, my new country – AMERICA.”

Alongside them, Washington also recruited a talented core of senior generals – Nathanael Greene, “Mad” Anthony Wayne, Henry Knox -- who were utterly devoted to both Washington and the American cause. 

Among his most valuable accessions was the Prussian drillmaster, Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, who passed himself off as a former lieutenant-general in the army of the famous Prussian monarch, Frederick the Great (but who was really just a discharged captain).

The Continental Army had never had a common or consistent pattern of drill for marching or maneuvering. Von Steuben roared, stamped, and fussed his way through a new drill scheme with a select “model company,” who then took the new drill lessons back to their original commands, and brought the entire army together as a single, efficient fighting machine.

But the most important rejuvenation of the army began in France. Convinced at last that the American war represented an opportunity for France to even old imperial scores with Britain, the court of Louis XVI entered into an open alliance with the Continental Congress in February, 1778.

French money, French supplies, and French weapons now flowed freely into the hands of Washington’s army. Absentees returned and new recruits joined to re-fill Washington’s units. The British, realizing that they could not conduct a successful war in north America while their other colonies in the West Indies were open to French attack, abandoned Philadelphia in mid-June, 1778.

Washington’s army marched out of Valley Forge in pursuit of the British, and handed them a stinging defeat at Monmouth Court House. That was the best marker of how dramatically the army had improved.

No great battle was fought at Valley Forge. And yet, a very real victory was won there. What could have been the end of the Continental Army became — through Washington’s leadership (and some good fortune) — a new beginning. That’s the real story of Valley Forge. 

I’m Allen Guelzo, professor of Humanities at the University of Florida, for Prager University.