Founding Myths

by Ray Raphael

  Furthermore, to tell the complete Morristown saga would reveal that the soldiers’ hardships continued throughout the war, virtually unabated. Soldiers in the Continental Army never did receive the help they needed or the respect they deserved. To admit this would make the civilian population look bad. Why didn’t other patriots come to the aid of those who did the fighting?

  The story of Valley Forge, on the other hand, tells us what we want to hear. Supposedly, soldiers learned to behave themselves when Baron von Steuben whipped them into shape. There were no major uprisings. The troops were allegedly obedient and well behaved. They remained faithful to Washington when his command was challenged by intrigue. All this looks good.

  Also, Valley Forge and the American victory at Saratoga happened in close succession. From the storytelling point of view, this works well. Valley Forge was the “low point,” and Saratoga the “turning point,” of the Revolutionary War. (Strangely, the low point occurred shortly after the turning point, but this technical glitch is generally overlooked.) After Valley Forge, the darkest hour was supposedly over. Come spring, once the soldiers had proved their worth, their troubles subsided. This mythic tale is based on the classic image of seasonal renewal, not historical documentation. Although hardships continued and even worsened until the end of the war, and although mutinies became rampant, the Valley Forge story serves to suppress these later difficulties. Narratives can refer to “suffering soldiers” at a precise, well-defined time, without including the more serious uprisings that followed. By telling the story of the soldiers’ plight there, writers do not have to visit it later on, when a spirit of resistance swept through the Continental Army.

  Finally, Valley Forge makes for a powerful story because many soldiers died. In fact, the deaths were primarily due to camp diseases—cold and hunger took few lives—but that is rarely stated because disease evokes little sense of drama or patriotic sentiment. (More soldiers actually lost their lives because of disease than at the hands of the enemy during the Revolutionary War.37) Still, a death toll always helps a story along. The winter at Valley Forge was so severe, we are led to believe, that people actually perished because of it—and all without raising a fuss. Such patriots they must have been!

  CONSECRATED GROUND: THE STORY ENSHRINED

  Nobody celebrated Valley Forge during the Revolution itself. At the time, the sorry plight of soldiers at this winter camp was a guarded military secret—kept from the ears of the British, who might seize the moment to attack, and downplayed to the French, who might deny aid if they heard too much about the ragtag Continental Army. Just before Christmas in 1777, after setting up camp in Valley Forge, Washington told Congress, “Upon the ground of safety and policy, I am obliged to conceal the true State of the Army from Public view.” But the members of Congress, he confided, should be aware that there had been a “total failure of Supplies.” Conditions were so bad, he reported, that “we have . . . no less than 2898 Men now in Camp unfit for duty because they are bare foot and otherwise naked.”38

  Washington’s complaints to Congress, contained in his letters of December 22 and 23, 1777, comprise the basic documentation for the Valley Forge story, even though they were written just days after the army arrived there. Undoubtedly, Washington issued his bleak reports for a practical reason: he wanted to shock congressional delegates into action. The Commissary Department was in a state of collapse, unable to provide many essential items. Without “more Vigorous exertions,” he warned, “this Army must dissolve.”39 Writers often quote Washington’s solicitations as the definitive source on the suffering soldiers at Valley Forge, although most have chosen to ignore his repeated warnings that malcontents were on the verge of mutiny. Without his pleading words, geared for maximum effect, there would likely be no legend of Valley Forge. At Morristown, two years later, Washington painted an equally bleak picture, also geared for effect—but these words have been conveniently overlooked.

  After the war, as during the war, civilians chose not to harp on the sorry state of the Continental Army, whether at Valley Forge or Morristown. The very existence of the army was something of an embarrassment to many Americans, who opposed standing armies on republican principles. The decrepit state of this particular assemblage of lower-class men and boys was particularly shameful. If anybody had spun the Valley Forge tale back then, they would have been deemed unpatriotic.

  Postwar historians did not romanticize the winter camp at Valley Forge. David Ramsay (1789) devoted only one and a half sentences to Valley Forge in over seven hundred pages. Although William Gordon (1788) and John Marshall (1804) described the camp and cited Washington’s letters, they did not treat it as a defining moment in the history of the Revolution or claim that soldiers always endured their hardships in silence. In fact, Marshall emphasized that soldiers seized provisions from local farmers, and all the early historians included extensive discussions of the later mutinies, indications of the soldiers’ discontent.40

  In the early 1800s, some Americans began to focus on the notion of “patient suffering” and affixed this to a particular time and place: the 1777–1778 camp at Valley Forge. In 1805, more than a quarter of a century after the fact, Mercy Otis Warren described the condition of the troops in vivid detail:

  The resolution and patience of this little army surmounted every difficulty. They waited long, amid penury, hunger, and cold, for the necessary supplies. . . . Unprovided with materials to raise their cold lodgment from the ground, the dampness of the situation, and the wet earth on which they lay, occasioned sickness and mortality to rage among them to an astonishing degree.

  Warren was perhaps the first to use this experience as a key characteristic of the Revolution:

  We have seen through the narrative of events during the war, the armies of the American states suffering hunger and cold, nakedness, fatigue, and danger, with unparalleled patience and valor. A due sense of the importance of the contest in which they were engaged, and the certain ruin and disgrace in which themselves and their children would be involved on the defeat of their object, was a strong stimulus to patient suffering.41

  Any “murmurs” of discontent, she concluded, were quickly quieted by “an attachment to their commanding officers, a confidence in the faith of congress, and the sober principles of independence, equity and equality.”

  To the actual troops encamped at Valley Forge, the phrase “confidence in the faith of congress” would have appeared as a joke in bad taste. Congress failed to pay them as promised, let alone feed and clothe them, and soldiers resented this bitterly. Yet Warren chose to paint a cozy picture: the bedraggled army and Congress united in common cause. Ironically, the “patient suffering” story demonstrated unity between soldiers and civilians; in truth, the suffering of the soldiers was directly attributable to lack of civilian support, and this caused no end of ill feeling.

  As the notion of “patient suffering” caught on, it attached to the camp at Valley Forge. When David Ramsay came out with his Life of George Washington in 1807, he included a much more extensive treatment of Valley Forge than he had in his earlier history.42 In 1808, in the sixth edition of his immensely popular Life of Washington, Mason Weems told a new tale: the commander in chief, while alone in the woods at Valley Forge, was seen kneeling in prayer.43 For more than a century, this pious image would be repeated again and again, testimony to the faith of the man, the army, and the nation.

  After thirty years, civilians no longer perceived the fighting men of the Continental Army as a threat. Quite to the contrary: in the military mobilization that culminated in the War of 1812, patriotic writers and orators found it convenient to extol the virtues of the men who had prevailed in the Revolutionary War. In his July 4, 1812, oration to Congress, Richard Rush praised the “noble achievements” of Revolutionary soldiers, and he then i
nsisted that Americans not “dishonor” their memory by failing to answer the current call to arms.44

  Veterans who were once scorned suddenly found they were being celebrated. The sites of their brave deeds were consecrated, and this brought Valley Forge into play. The May 1812 issue of Virginia’s Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal suggested that Valley Forge be sanctified as “classic ground to posterity” because of the “toil” and “sufferings” which the soldiers had experienced there.45 Morristown, its legacy clouded by mutinies, was not similarly consecrated—“patient suffering” could not be attached to such a place.

  Revolutionary War veterans naturally welcomed the change of attitude and gave it a practical turn. Yes, they had suffered patiently—so now, at last, they should be recompensed. Calling forth memories of mutinies, at this juncture, would have been counterproductive. Vets pushed hard to receive pensions, and in 1818, forty years after the camp at Valley Forge, Congress finally allocated money to Revolutionary soldiers who could show proof of both service and need.

  From that point on, the patient suffering of the soldiers at Valley Forge became a common refrain in most American histories. Salma Hale, in his 1822 history written for schoolchildren as well as adults, romanticized the experience of the soldiers at Valley Forge: “They passed the winter in huts, suffered extreme distress from want of clothing and of food, but endured their privations without a murmur. How strong must have been their love of liberty?”46 Charles Goodrich, writing in 1823, contrasted the Continental Army at Valley Forge with the British army in Philadelphia: “While the defenders of the country were thus suffering and perishing, the royal army was enjoying all the conveniences which an opulent city afforded.”47 This disparity between dedicated Americans and decadent Englishmen played well to a patriotic audience.

  By the middle of the nineteenth century, scarcely a person was left alive who could accurately remember the severities of “The Hard Winter of 1780.” In Revolutionary mythologies, the blizzards and biting cold of that winter were conveniently pushed back in time two years, to coincide with the camp at Valley Forge—the “severe winter of 1777 and ’8,” it was called. A newspaper in 1848 reported with an air of authority that this had been “one of the most rigorous winters ever experienced in this country. . . . So intently cold was the weather and so exhausted the soldiers when they commenced their march toward Valley Forge, that some were seen to drop dead under the benumbing influence of the frost.”48

  In 1851, Benson Lossing’s travelogue of Revolutionary historic sites gave Valley Forge top billing:

  Valley Forge! How dear to the true worshiper at the shrine of Freedom is the name of Valley Forge! There, in the midst of frost and snows, disease and destitution, Liberty erected her altar; and in all the world’s history we have no record of purer devotion, holier sincerity, or more pious self-sacrifice, than was there exhibited in the camp of Washington. The courage that nerves the arm on the battlefield, and dazzles by its brilliant but evanescent flashes, pales before the steadier and more intense flame of patient endurance, the sum of the sublime heroism displayed at Valley Forge. And if there is a spot on the face of our broad land whereon Patriotism should delight to pile its highest and most venerated monument, it should be in the bosom of that little valley on the bank of the Schuylkill.49

  Here was the Valley Forge story full blown, much as we know it today.

  By the centennial celebrations in 1876, Valley Forge had become ingrained in the national consciousness. In step with the times, the local community prepared to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the Continental Army’s winter camp of 1777–1778. But what kind of celebration would be appropriate to honor the miserable time at Valley Forge, allegedly the lowest point in the history of the Revolutionary War?

  A summer solstice party, of course. On June 19, 1878, thousands of locals joined with national celebrities to revel on the anniversary of “evacuation day,” the breaking of camp. Capitalizing on the momentum, the Centennial and Memorial Association of Valley Forge gathered funds to purchase Washington’s headquarters, a fixed point where tourists could pay their respects. In the years to follow, additional sites were preserved or restored, and in 1893 Valley Forge became a state park. On “evacuation day” of 1917, the federal government added its stamp of approval with the dedication of the National Memorial Arch, and on July 4, 1976, the day of the nation’s bicentennial celebration, the state park was transformed into the Valley Forge National Historical Park, a shrine that remains to this day the destination point for over one million patriotic pilgrims every year.50

  In the years following the bicentennial, a new wave of scholars challenged the “patient suffering” theme. In academic circles, this threatened the traditional telling of the Valley Forge story, but there was has been little carryover into popular history or textbook renderings. Every text at every level of education must say something about Valley Forge; by contrast, Morristown is still rarely mentioned. In some texts, Valley Forge now plays an even larger role. Conveniently inverting the discussions of Saratoga and Valley Forge to make the timing work, and borrowing the term “hard winter” from the true hard winter at Morristown, which it never discusses, one college text presents a double-page feature entitled “A National Community Evolves at Valley Forge.” This section concludes: “The glue that held Americans together during the long struggle was the sense of national community that emerged in places like Valley Forge during the winter of 1777.”51 That Valley Forge was “the glue” holding people together through the remaining years of the war would be big news for Americans at the time, who did their best to ignore and even suppress the experience. True, soldiers thought of themselves in more national terms after that, but nobody else did. The mistrust between soldiers and civilians only heightened at Valley Forge, leaving the nation more disjointed than ever. It was a winter to be forgotten, not remembered.

  The Valley Forge story lives on. Although Mason Weems’s tale about Washington praying in the woods is no longer repeated as fact, and although blacks and Indians are now included among the barefoot soldiers, the broad strokes remain the same. When told to children, the story features the cruel hand of Nature; when told to adults, it sometimes lays the blame on Congress as well as Nature—but in either case, the soldiers proved their patriotism through patient suffering, and the values celebrated are passive obedience and blind devotion. These were deemed prime virtues in the early stages of American nationalism, and they are still seen as virtues in some modern states—but why us, and why now? In a modern democracy, such passivity seems oddly out of sync.

  From the beginning, Revolutionary soldiers exhibited the freedom they were fighting for. Understandably, this caused their officers some concern. The rebel soldiers “carry the spirit of freedom into the field, and think for themselves,” complained General Richard Montgomery, one of the leaders of the Quebec expedition. Montgomery could not understand why troops called “a sort of town meeting” every time a maneuver was planned. “The privates are all generals,” he reported.52 From a military point of view, this excessive spirit had to be reined in, at least to some extent. But it never disappeared, nor should it have. Supposedly, Americans cherish initiative and independence, but the traditional Valley Forge saga belittles these values; by contrast, the true story of soldiers in the Continental Army embraces them. Throughout the Revolutionary War, soldiers considered their circumstances, weighed the available options, made decisions, and took actions they deemed appropriate. Behaving like good, patriotic citizens, they made their needs known and stood up for their rights. They did not suffer in silence—instead, they devised means to make things better. They did whatever they needed to do to keep themselves alive, fed, and able to carry on.

  WISE MEN

  “
Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was great from the moment he wrote it.”

  Thomas Jefferson Writing the Declaration of Independence.

  Painting by Howard Pyle, 1898.

  6

  JEFFERSON’S DECLARATION

  Since the Declaration of Independence was undeniably a great document, we naturally assume that only a great mind could have created it. That mind supposedly belonged to Thomas Jefferson, the genius of the Revolution. Jefferson’s image has suffered of late because DNA evidence suggests he fathered children with his slave, Sally Hemings—but few question the quality or cogency of his thinking, or the belief that only a man of Jefferson’s intellectual caliber could have drafted the momentous document that set us apart as an independent nation.

  In Liberty! Thomas Fleming notes that Jefferson did not boast about his authorship of the Declaration of Independence. The document contained no “new principles or new arguments,” Jefferson admitted. Instead, it was “intended to be an expression of the American mind.” Too much “modesty,” Fleming complains. There was no “American mind” at the time. The Declaration, despite Jefferson’s disclaimers, was all his own doing: “Jefferson poured into it his experience as an opponent of aristocratic privilege in Virginia,” Fleming argues. Only Jefferson could have said the things he did. The visuals accompanying the text underline his thesis: we see a portrait of Jefferson brooding over a candlelit draft, followed by a facsimile of the draft itself, with many of Jefferson’s deletions and additions.1