by Sarah Vowell
Valley Forge, here they come. About twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia, the new camp featured the natural defensive barriers of the Schuylkill River and its tributary Valley Creek, plus high ground in the form of a pair of hills, Mount Misery and Mount Joy. It was close enough to the occupied capital to deter Howe’s forces from pillaging the countryside with abandon but far enough away from the enemy to regroup in peace, or at least to see them coming. Not that that would be an issue. The Brits would be too busy playing cards at City Tavern to bother slogging through the snow to harass Camp Crummy. The patriots’ more daunting enemies, however, were happy to make the trip; influenza, dysentery, typhus, and typhoid were more industrious winter soldiers than the ones answering to William Howe.
On December 19, Washington led his men there. One of them, seventeen-year-old Private Joseph Plumb Martin, had scrounged up a scrap of rawhide and sewed himself a pair of moccasins, “which kept my feet (while they lasted) from the frozen ground.” Though his homemade footwear chafed his ankles, he wrote, “the only alternative I had, was to endure this inconvenience or to go barefoot, as hundreds of my companions had to, till they might be tracked by their blood upon the rough frozen ground.”
An indignant Washington wrote to a friend of witnessing “men without Cloathes to cover their nakedness—without Blankets to lay on—without Shoes, by which their Marches might be traced by the Blood from their feet.”
If it seems like it couldn’t have gotten much worse than the iconic Valley Forge visual of bloody footprints in the snow, according to Lafayette, it was: “The soldiers lived in misery; they lacked for clothes, hats, shirts, shoes; their legs and feet black from frostbite—we often had to amputate.” Bloody feet were preferable to no feet.
Congressman Henry Laurens, a Washington sympathizer, wrote to a friend back home in South Carolina, “General Washington complains of the want of many essential articles for the army. He is the most to be pitied of any man I know.”
Private Martin reported, “We arrived at the Valley Forge in the evening; it was dark; there was no water to be found, and I was perishing with thirst.” Failing to find any food or water, he confessed, “I felt at that instant as if I would have taken victuals or drink from the best friend I had on earth by force.” Spotting some fellow soldiers pass by his tent with canteens full of water, he asked for some, and they refused. He asked for directions to the water, but they were too disoriented in the darkness to point the way. Finally, Martin paid them his last three pence for a sip.
In a message published in the March 1950 issue of Boys’ Life magazine, Governor James H. Duff of Pennsylvania welcomed the forty thousand Boy Scouts who would be pitching their tents at Valley Forge at the upcoming National Boy Scout Jamboree, claiming the boys would “take away from Valley Forge a greater understanding of what makes America the greatest nation in the world today.”
The scouts who convened at Valley Forge spent the Fourth of July with General Dwight Eisenhower. George Washington, Ike told them, “seemed deserted by the Continental Congress . . . He lost, from starvation and freezing, during that winter, more than three thousand”—it was actually closer to two thousand—“out of his tiny army.” Washington’s task—his “burden,” Eisenhower called it—was “hearing the pitiful cries of the suffering and witnessing the despair in the eyes of the dying.”
If anyone personified “what makes America the greatest nation in the world today” five years after V-E Day, it was Eisenhower. And he tried, for a moment, to hint at the truth: that what happened during that winter at Valley Forge was an embarrassment, a monstrous administrative and humanitarian fiasco, a self-inflicted wound.
When Lafayette wrote his letter to Washington worrying that America could lose the war not at the hands of the redcoats but rather “by herself and her own sons,” he might not have been referring solely to the Conway cabal. He may have also had in mind the observable fact that the military, congressional, and state bureaucracies responsible for supplying the common soldiers with luxuries like food, water, and shoes were, to use an acronym coined by the grunts of Ike’s war, FUBAR.
Any elected officials tempted to crow about how Valley Forge teaches the lesson of “what makes America the greatest nation in the world” would do well to page through E. Wayne Carp’s sobering study of the administrative history of the Revolutionary War, To Starve the Army at Pleasure, a three-hundred-page summary of the biblical proportions of the plagues of locusts and darkness unleashed by the American powers that be on the patriot foot soldier.
“Historians agree,” notes Carp, “that the major cause of the dearth of food at Valley Forge was not its scarcity—crops were abundant that year—but the lack of wagons to transport it to camp.” And even if there had been enough wagons, there were not enough drivers. “The duty,” Nathanael Greene wrote of the thankless hardship of traversing bad roads in bad weather, “is disagreeable in itself.”
Turf wars among Congress and state and local authorities contributed to the chaos. Carp notes, for instance, that a shipment addressed to General Washington of much-needed “clothing earmarked for Continental troops was discovered stored at Fishkill,” and the Fishkill Committee of Safety swiped it for New York recruits to wear.
These and other administrative challenges were made worse at Valley Forge because Quartermaster General Thomas Mifflin, the head of the supply corps, resigned his post in October 1777, two months before the army moved there. Mifflin, a Pennsylvanian, quit in a huff because Washington let his hometown of Philadelphia fall to the British. “Though General Washington repeatedly urged Congress to appoint a successor,” writes Carp, “it did not fill the post until 2 March, 1778. The delay of nearly five months”—coinciding with winter at Valley Forge—“almost proved fatal to the Army.”
When I visited Jefferson’s Monticello, I took a tour of Mulberry Row, the plantation’s slave quarters. The guide listed the weekly food rations for an adult male slave—two gallons of cornmeal, a half pound of pork or beef, four to five salted fish, a bit of molasses—making the point that it wasn’t enough to live on, hence the slaves’ need for personal vegetable gardens to supplement their caloric intake just to survive. Seemed like half the people on my tour shook their heads about what a shame it was to have to spend all day out in the fields only to trudge home to do more gardening—and it was. But I couldn’t help wondering if the grunts at Valley Forge, with their chronically empty stomachs, would have envied Jefferson’s half-full slaves.
There is a saying about supply lines attributed to both Frederick the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte: “An army marches on its stomach.” My money’s on Napoleon, if only because after he invaded Russia, his cavalry had to shoot its horses to eat as food.
In 1777, the Continental Army was two years old. The officers and politicians supplying the soldiery were no more experienced at getting blankets to the troops than the troops were at standing in a line and fending off Cornwallis and his veteran regulars, fighters well clothed and well fed through an efficient supply system whose kinks had been worked out over generations. And just as the troops at Valley Forge were about to undergo a serious program of self-improvement, so would patriot logistics. Not that this progress was going to bring back to life the two thousand corpses who would never march out of there come summer.
I would like to see the calamity at Valley Forge as just the growing pains of a new nation. It has been a long time since the men and women serving in the armed forces of the world’s only superpower went naked because some crooked townies in upstate New York filched their uniforms. But there’s still this combination of governmental ineptitude, shortsightedness, stinginess, corruption, and neglect that affected the Continentals before, during, and after Valley Forge that twenty-first-century Americans are not entirely unfamiliar with.
While I was reading To Starve the Army at Pleasure, the Veterans Affairs secretary was forced to resign after the revelation of widesp
read mismanagement of VA hospitals, including, CNN reported, “at least 40 U.S. veterans [who] died waiting for appointments at the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care system, many of whom were placed on a secret waiting list.”
I’m not just thinking of the Pentagon’s blunders, though. I’m thinking of how the noun “infrastructure” never appears in an American newspaper anymore without being preceded by the adjective “crumbling.” Or how my friend Katherine, a public high school English teacher, has had to pay out of her own pocket for her classroom’s pens, paper, paper clips, thumbtacks, and, she says, “chalk when I run out,” chalk being the one thing her school system promises to provide its teachers for free.
It’s possible that the origin of what kept our forefathers from feeding the troops at Valley Forge is the same flaw that keeps the federal government from making sure a vet with renal failure can get a checkup, and that impedes my teacher friend’s local government from keeping her in chalk, and that causes a decrepit, ninety-three-year-old exploding water main to spit eight million gallons of water down Sunset Boulevard during one of the worst droughts in California history. Is it just me, or does this foible hark back to the root of the revolution itself? Which is to say, a hypersensitivity about taxes—and honest disagreements over how they’re levied, how they’re calculated, how that money is spent, and by whom. The fact that the Continental Congress was not empowered to levy taxes was the literal reason for the ever-empty patriot coffers. More money would have helped, but it wouldn’t have entirely solved the problems of a loosely cinched bundle of states trying to collaborate for the greater good.
Whatever the actual root of our centuries-old, all-American inability to get our shit together, no one can deny that the flinty survivors of Valley Forge embodied another national trait that every man, woman, and child in this republic is supposed to have: backbone, self-reliance, grit. An attribute that comes in handy in this less-than-public-spirited republic the Continentals were fighting to bring about.
As Theodore Roosevelt recalled of his asthmatic childhood, “I was nervous and timid. Yet reading of the people I admired,” including, he says, “the soldiers of Valley Forge . . . I felt a great admiration for men who were fearless and who could hold their own in the world, and I had a great desire to be like them.” Roosevelt grew up to be a more nuanced, competent president than that quotation implies. For all his rough-riding talk about the strenuous life, as a chief executive he operated under the assumption that perhaps the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 might help a man hold his own in the world by making sure that even the most macho carnivore’s bloody lunch comes out of a more hygienic slaughterhouse. Roosevelt somehow figured out how a manly American can try to live up to the Continentals’ fortitude while at the same time becoming an elected official who tried to nurture a less fatal, more humane bureaucracy than the one responsible for the death toll at Valley Forge.
When Eisenhower gave his pep talk to the outdoorsy children camped at Valley Forge in 1950, he told them that in understanding the horrors of what went on there, “We turn to our own problems of today with increased confidence.” Which is a stately way of saying that the only way to handle modern life’s little setbacks in light of two thousand people being killed off in the winter of 1777 by starvation, disease, and administrative incompetence is to suck it up, men. (A mind-set consistently lampooned in the post-Vietnam era: “Sergeant, I think it’s a bad idea to march today,” said the army private played by Bill Murray in the 1981 film Stripes. “This is the cold and flu season.”)
“Here at Valley Forge,” Eisenhower said, “every relic, every monument assures us that even hunger, pain, nakedness and indescribable hardship cannot wholly dishearten those whose spirit is steeped in faith and in loyalty to a lofty purpose.” A lesson, no doubt, some of the younger scouts would learn the hard way later on when squaring off against the stubborn idealists in the Vietcong.
Lafayette, astonished by the fortitude he witnessed at Valley Forge, reported that “the sacred fire of liberty burned on.” Not that he could explain it. “The strength of that army,” he wrote, “never ceased being a mystery.”
“Military camp? More like a refugee camp,” whispered my friend Wesley, the aforementioned musician and novelist husband of Abbey the sort-of-Quaker, as we watched a grim film of shivering, bedraggled Continental soldiers chopping down trees in a windy, frozen landscape. Shown in the visitor center at Valley Forge National Historic Park, the movie features the melody of a forlorn flute warbling under a narrator’s bleak descriptions: The routine of winter grew tiresome for the cold, hungry troops . . . Sickness reached epidemic proportions, fueled by poor sanitation and damp, overcrowded quarters.
A few weeks after we went to Valley Forge, Wes mentioned, “That movie, with its endless shots of someone preparing a saucepan of gruel, has somewhat haunted me. If I want to try and make myself laugh, I imagine my life being directed by that terrible director of that terrible movie.” I think the director’s name was the Second Continental Congress?
The place itself, all green pastures, wide vistas, and blue sky, made less of an impression on Wes. Partly because ours was a cheerful outing on a nice spring day, but mostly because now Valley Forge is a national park, not a hellhole. In fact, according to the National Park Service, it “contains the largest area of meadows in southeastern Pennsylvania,” making the park’s five square miles “a refuge for grassland-dependent animals across the entire region.”
Wes, an Englishman, finds the pleasant, pastoral terrain familiar, even homey.
“I’m from Hastings,” he says. “The nearest train station to where I lived is called ‘Battle.’” As in the Battle of Hastings of October 14, 1066, when forces commanded by the Norman duke soon to be nicknamed William the Conqueror defeated the army of King Harold II of England, who was killed that day, supposedly by being shot through the eye with an arrow or by being dismembered, or both.
Wes describes his boyhood landscape, like Valley Forge, as “a lot of empty land requiring a lot of imagining” in order to picture the place as it must have looked on that violent day almost a thousand years ago.
This all reminds me of how flummoxed I was when I read that Eisenhower retired in a house adjacent to the battlefield at Gettysburg. Wouldn’t a general who had orchestrated so much carnage, I wondered, want to get as far away from bloodstained ground as he could? Then I went to Gettysburg. Most of it looks like a soccer field. I’m not using my imagination. I actually witnessed children playing soccer there. To find out about the fifty thousand men whose lives were lost or ruined in 1863 on what are now wide, welcoming expanses of grassland, the tourist (or the goalie) needs to read the National Park Service’s signs.
Wes lives in nearby Mt. Airy, a stone’s throw from Germantown. He has been to Cliveden, the impenetrable house where the Brits shot down so many rebels in the battle there in 1777. But he does seem more impressed that Germantown was the home of free jazz keyboard player and bandleader Sun Ra.
Because Wes lived in Brooklyn for many years, to him “Lafayette” was just the name of the subway stop at Lafayette Avenue. At his request, I rattled off the highlights of Lafayette’s bio. He responded, “So you’re writing about a Frenchman who got muddled up in a war on a continent far away from where he was from against a country very close to where he was from? It’s like somebody from Ukraine battling Russia in Brazil.”
I thought it would be fun to visit a Revolutionary War hotspot with a Brit, just to rub it in that we won, but Wes seemed too hazy on the subject to taunt. Afterward, we were talking about the park’s grand triumphal arch, erected in 1917, which is inscribed with the names of Generals Lafayette, Greene, and De Kalb. He referred to it as “that big monument thing with all the Brooklyn streets.”
I asked him if, when he was a boy in England, he had heard of Valley Forge. He said he had, but not at school. “There was a show on TV about Bob Hope entertaining the troops,�
�� he recalled. “Bob Hope said something like, ‘Despite what you’ve been told, I did not entertain the troops at Valley Forge.’
“Do not underestimate my ignorance about a war we were not really taught in England,” he continued. “We concentrated on the wars we won—the First World War, the Second, the Tudors. Nobody taught me American history. Well, maybe a bit when we studied the Georges—there was always trouble off-stage in America. To us it was just the loss of a colony.”
I guess the moral of that story is that no matter how many fireworks we set off to celebrate our forefathers throwing off the yoke of their colonial overlords, the overlords’ descendants can’t be bothered to remember, much less care, because they’re still dining out on thwarting the Spanish Armada.
• • •
“It is a camp, in the centre of woods, fifteen hundred leagues from you,” Lafayette wrote to his wife, Adrienne, from Valley Forge. He mentioned that the Frenchman he had asked to bring her the letter would describe the rustic circumstances her husband had chosen to endure, instead of returning home to the comforts and pleasures of Paris, and how “honour alone told [him] to remain”: “My presence is more necessary at this moment to the American cause, than you can possibly conceive,” he wrote, given “some powerful cabals” plotting against Washington, who “would feel very unhappy if I were to speak of quitting him.”
Despite all the challenges Washington had to deal with in designing and overseeing the construction of Valley Forge as Christmas came and went, his critics in the army and the Congress had not quieted down.
Inspector General Conway showed up at the camp, raring to inspect. Washington quickly sent him packing, explaining to Congress that he gave Conway the cold shoulder for the simple reason that “my feelings will not permit me to make professions of friendship to a man I deem my enemy.”
Adding to Washington’s torments, the Congress also rejiggered what had previously been a congressional committee, the Board of War. They appointed to it Washington’s antagonists, Generals Horatio Gates and Thomas Mifflin, the officer gunning for Washington’s job and the former quartermaster general enraged that Washington lost Philadelphia, respectively.
