Valley Forge: The Winter That Almost Ended the Revolution

They arrived on December nineteenth, seventeen seventy-seven, eleven thousand men, many of them without shoes, most without adequate coats, marching into a winter encampment on a plateau above the Schuylkill River after losing Philadelphia to the British two months earlier.

What followed at Valley Forge has been remembered as a heroic ordeal, a trial of patriotic endurance that forged a nation. The actual record is more desperate than that. The army's supply system had collapsed. The quartermaster corps was in disarray. Horses were dying of starvation faster than they could be replaced. Soldiers constructed huts from green timber that let in the wind. Smallpox, typhus, and pneumonia moved through the camp. Between December and June, approximately two thousand men died, more than one in ten of the army that had arrived.

George Washington wrote to the Continental Congress with enough force to be understood: unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place, this army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these three things: starve, dissolve, or disperse. He was not exaggerating for effect. Desertions ran into the hundreds.

The change that came was a Prussian military officer named Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand von Steuben, who arrived in February of seventeen seventy-eight and spent the spring drilling the army in European battlefield formations. Von Steuben spoke almost no English. He dictated commands to an interpreter, who translated into French, and bilingual officers translated again to the men. By the time the army left Valley Forge in June of seventeen seventy-eight, it had been transformed into a force that could hold a line.

The army that left was not the same army that arrived. The difference was not inspiration. It was drill, discipline, and the arrival of French military supplies.