The Continental Army broke camp at Whitemarsh on December 11 and crossed a raft bridge spanning the Schuylkill the next night. In an odd counterpoint to the maxim that history is written by the victors, even the most meticulous scholars and researchers have never been able to establish exactly how many soldiers George Washington led from Whitemarsh in late 1777. The consensus puts the total at somewhere between 11,000 and 14,000. As it was, all of these troops and most of their officers had no idea as to their destination.
After a brief skirmish with a startled British foraging party led by Gen. Cornwallis, the battered column of Continentals spent the next week following the cobblestoned road west, descending deeper into the dank and rugged defile that the original Welsh settlers, the most numerous in any of the 13 colonies, called the Gulph—“valley” or “glen” in their home language. By day sheets of cold rain blew sideways beneath vivid bursts of cloud-shrouded lightning and turned the road into a trail of mud. Come sunset the downpours froze into a wet, heavy snow that virtually interred the men, Brueghel’s peasants bathed in a Rembrandt’s gloom. During preparations for the battle that did not occur at Whitemarsh, most of the army’s tents had been sent north for safekeeping. Now, canvas strips sliced from the remaining few became the raw material to fashion makeshift shirts, shoes, and stockings. “A cavalcade of wild beasts” was how Joseph Plumb Martin described himself and his compatriots, their personal Via Dolorosa traced across the landscape by the trails of blood left by the thousands of barefoot men. At one point he and his company managed to run down a scrawny cow that was immediately killed and skinned, its untanned hide fashioned into crude moccasins.
But the march was most miserable for the long roster of sick and wounded. Because of a shortage of wagons—fewer than 40 were on hand for the entire army—most of the injured were either carried on improvised stretchers or supported by strong shoulders. Influenza, typhus, typhoid, dysentery, and scurvy were only just beginning their winter sweep through the ranks, and the dreariness of the landscape was aptly described by the Connecticut surgeon Albigence Waldo as “a place where nothing appears pleasing to the Sicken’d Eye & Nauseating Stomach.” Despite his prolific journal entries, not much is known of the 27-year-old Waldo’s personal life other than that, as he wrote, he had left behind “a good and loving wife” and his “pretty children” in Putnam, Connecticut. Waldo was attached to the 1st Connecticut Infantry Regiment, the unit Gen. Huntington had led south from Peekskill three months earlier, and his diary entries provide an invaluable snapshot of Continental Army operations through the fall and winter of 1777 and 1778. Waldo was a sturdy campaigner and an ardent revolutionary, but by December even the indefatigable surgeon wrote like a man slowly perishing. Waldo stretched the horizons of his vision to recall and lament the mouthwatering “fine stock of provisions, hens, turkeys, pigs, ducks, wine and cider” available aboard the packet he had served on, plying the Hudson River. He could not help ruing the “wiffling wind of fortune” that bore upon it the “disappointments, anxieties, and misfortunes” bracing the American force. Perhaps it was because someone had stolen his shoes.
Whatever the case, as Waldo and his fellow soldiers slogged forward he was far from alone in considering the army’s dire circumstances. As scant rations had been issued since the breaking of camp at Whitemarsh, anyone lucky enough to have snatched a turnip or an ear of winter corn from the fields along the route devoured it raw. At night, gazing about over the thousands of campfires that blackened their faces and stung their eyes, the wraithlike soldiers could not have helped concluding that they resembled nothing so much as what one future historian would deem “the relics of an army.”
As the mass movement neared Valley Forge on December 18, a messenger from York arrived with news that Congress had declared this a national day of “Thanksgiving and Praise” in honor of the victory at Saratoga. With the Continental Army having lurched a mere six miles in six hours, Washington halted the march outside a country inn named in honor of the king of Prussia. It had stopped snowing, and the night felt as if it were holding its breath as chaplains conducted services before the regiments and brigades. Following the devotions, while his soldiers gathered damp twigs to light feeble fires, Washington and his senior officers lumbered into the tavern, where a painting of the dashing and victorious Frederick the Great seemed to mock them.
Washington recognized that the announcement of a day of thanks was a shot across his bow from the faction of delegates cozying up to Gen. Gates. Nevertheless he ordered his commissary officers to drain their kegs, slaughter their last drift of hogs, and literally scrape the bottoms of their flour barrels to provide some of the troops a meager celebratory feast of beer, ham, and bread. Others, like Joseph Plumb Martin, made do with half a gill of rice and a tablespoon of vinegar to ward off scurvy. Such a feast, he wrote, was complemented by “a leg of nothing and no turnips.” Since mid-October the commander in chief had been a supplicant before both Congress and Pennsylvania’s state authorities in a determined attempt to keep his army supplied. Now, two months later, the consequences of the delegates’ failure to heed his warnings were manifest in the bobtail force that limped toward Valley Forge like a line of tattered scarecrows.
As the days dragged on, Washington periodically reined his horse to the side of the road to linger and bear witness as his ghost of an army straggled past. First the officers on horseback leading their stumbling and footsore regiments, then the juddering baggage wagons, and finally the 400 or so “camp women” with their untold children bringing up the rear. These were primal moments. As the commander in chief beheld so many of his soldiers “without Cloathes to cover their nakedness—without blankets to lay on—without Shoes,” it must have crossed his mind that the preponderance of his hungry and half-clad men were present in great part out of personal loyalty to him. Nor could the irony have been lost on him that his days as the leader of this army might well be numbered, through either political perfidy or, as seemed more likely at the moment, the complete dissolution of his vagabond force. By the same token, one cannot help wondering if any of the young troopers he now gazed down upon, their listless eyes sunk deep into gaunt faces, reminded him of the defiant youth who over two decades earlier had undertaken his own hazardous missions into the wilderness on behalf of an empire that was now his sworn enemy.
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In many ways the parallels are striking. Just as Washington’s first command in the Revolutionary War had driven the British from Boston, to worldwide acclaim and astonishment, so his initial military foray in the French and Indian War had resulted in a measure of international fame. It had occurred in 1753, when the 21-year-old Virginian was dispatched into the vast hinterlands west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Washington had volunteered to carry a letter from Virginia’s royal governor addressed to the commander of the French troops currently occupying and fortifying territory in the wild Ohio Country. The communiqué informed the French that they were trespassing on ground claimed by “His Britannic Majesty” and were to depart forthwith. Though the French, in effect and politely, laughed off the English king’s pretensions and sent Washington on his way, he had served as the vehicle for the firing of the first, symbolic shot of the French and Indian War.
Upon Washington’s return to Richmond, his journal from the expedition was published by a local newspaper. Its tales—of settlers murdered and scalped by marauding Indians, of Alleghany mountain passes traversed through waist-deep snow, of fording icy rivers that froze the legs off pack horses—caused an immediate sensation in the colonies. When the narrative was reprinted by newspapers and magazines from London to Edinburgh, the adventures of the young fourth-generation colonial planter were suddenly the talk of Great Britain’s salons and coffeehouses. More important, the travelogue shone light on a trait Washington would cultivate for the rest of his military and political career—“that of a man of action,” as his biographer Joseph Ellis writes, “determined to tell us what he did, but equally determined not to tell us what he thought about it.”
Yet just as Washington’s success in Boston in 1776 was followed by catastrophe in New York and—after a brief respite at Trenton and Princeton—by bitter disappointments and recriminations in the aftermath of Brandywine, Paoli, and Germantown, so too did the trajectory of his early military career take a sharp downward turn. In the years following his successful foray into the Ohio Country, Washington, by now an officer in the Virginia militia, was twice more involved with excursions to dislodge the French from the British-claimed territory. Each ended in a fiasco. He led the first mission, which resulted not only in the rout of his rum-soaked militiamen, but also in charges that he had allowed the small band of Indian allies who accompanied him to kill a French nobleman on a diplomatic mission. During the latter expedition he was attached to a much larger army of British regulars charged with capturing Fort Duquesne, a sturdy redoubt the French had constructed at the confluence of the Alleghany, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers where Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, now rises. The bulk of the Crown forces, unaccustomed to the forest-fighting techniques adopted by the French from their Indian allies, were wiped out with brutal efficiency. Nearly every officer around Washington was killed; he escaped with bullet holes in his hat and in his coat. Thereafter he told friends that he felt as if “Providence was saving him for something larger.”
Washington could take small solace from the plaudits he received for rallying the few survivors into an orderly retreat. He was now considered an assassin in France, and in Virginia his luster was badly tarnished. As a Richmond newspaper editorial coolly observed, although Washington may have acquired “a high Reputation for Military Skill, Integrity, and Valor; Success has not always attended his Undertakings.” For the rest of his life he could never erase from his memory the wails of the wounded or the images of the dead scalped by the enemy’s own Indian accomplices. Nor would he ever forget the wily guerrilla tactics that had vanquished the British force. If he could not bring his compatriots back to life, he could ensure that any soldiers serving under his future command would be well versed in bush-fighting techniques.
Back home at Mount Vernon, Washington began to apply these lessons. At just 23 he was charged with raising a colonial regiment from the primarily Anglo-Saxon and Celtic immigrants pouring into Virginia. The company he recruited and trained, the historian Ellis notes, “combined the spit-and-polish discipline of British regulars with the tactical agility and proficiency of Indian warriors.” Although by this point the major campaigns of the French and Indian War had gravitated farther north, Washington’s Virginia Blues—named after the indigo uniforms that he had personally designed—honed their expertise patrolling the homestead-dotted Shenandoah Valley west of the Blue Ridge that was subject to frequent French-directed Indian attacks.
Each of the Virginia rangers, as he called his enlisted men, was issued a detailed battle plan that Washington had written himself. Based on his earlier experiences, it addressed a variety of contingencies. If his men were ambushed in an open forest clearing, for instance, instead of forming up in a European-style defensive square, they were to rush the woods and flank their attackers. He dictated that the area around any potential stockade site was to be cleared of brush and trees to just beyond the 70 yards of a musket’s range—rectifying an oversight that had helped to doom his first military foray against the French. If troops should happen upon the aftermath of an Indian massacre, they were to harvest the corn crop before moving on. And despite his lifelong love of dogs, he ordered that before a surprise attack was mounted, all dogs roaming the camp were to be killed lest their barks and growls alert the enemy. He was also a harsh disciplinarian to officers and rangers alike. Any man found drunk on duty faced lashes, sometimes numbering in the hundreds. Captured deserters were summarily hanged. Washington was a compassionate man, but the exigencies of war prevailed.
His Virginia Blues eventually played an integral role in the final defeat of the French at Fort Duquesne in 1758. During that campaign, which was led by the renowned British military administrator Gen. John Forbes, Washington took advantage of his proximity by copying Forbes’s orders into notebooks that he would keep for future reference. By the war’s end his regiment of Provincials was regarded as the most effective colonial fighting force in America. Now, almost two decades later, as Washington watched the threadbare Continentals shamble toward Valley Forge, sometimes pausing to boil their shoes in an attempt to make them digestible, a simple question arose: Would he be granted the same time and leeway to restore and retrain these soldiers as he had done with his Virginia corps? Or would that long-ago newspaper editorialist prove prescient; would military success “not always attend his Undertakings”? In truth, given the horror still facing the raw, unkempt men and boys passing before him, his prospects looked as improbable as a human being’s having the strength to fling a silver dollar across the wide Potomac.I
Added to this burden was his recognition that he was now the physical embodiment of the American Revolution, the man and the cause having fused into a single entity. Three weeks earlier Henry Knox had advised Washington, “The people of America look up to you as their father, and into your hands they entrust their all.” The Jeffersons and Adamses, the Hancocks and Franklins and Paines may have set in motion a rebellion based on ideals not contemplated since classical Athens. But no one in York or Lancaster, no one in Boston or Albany or Charleston, could lead the political movement those philosophers of freedom had birthed. Pericles may have moved men’s minds, but Leonidas made them get up and march. In practice and in deed, the Spartan mantle of breaking the bonds of stratified British colonialism fell to Washington, and Washington alone.
In his youth he had been granted a glimpse of the immensity of a continent whose eastern rim was now consumed by revolution. His decisions and actions in the weeks and months to come would determine the fate of those thousands of miles rolling westward that would constitute the future United States of America. Given the gravitas of such a task, it is no wonder that a sense of desperation hung no less heavy over the Gulph Road that December than the storm clouds saturating his army.
I. The legend of a young Washington displaying such prodigious strength probably arose from his ability as a boy to clear Virginia’s 300-foot-wide Rappahannock River with a rock as he and his friends waited by a ferry stop.