Valley Forge: Where the Army Became an Army
Pennsylvania
The name Valley Forge has come down through American history as a synonym for endurance, but the story of what actually happened here in the winter of seventeen seventy-seven to seventeen seventy-eight is more specific and more remarkable than the word endurance alone suggests.
On December nineteenth, seventeen seventy-seven, nearly twelve thousand Continental soldiers marched into this valley on the Schuylkill River, about eighteen miles northwest of Philadelphia. The British had just captured the city. Washington chose Valley Forge for its defensible ground, access to water, and safe distance from enemy lines. What his army could not bring was adequate food, clothing, or shoes. What arrived instead was disease. Typhus, typhoid, dysentery, and influenza spread through the camp. By the time the army left the following June, roughly two thousand soldiers had died, most of them not from combat but from the cold and contagion.
And yet Valley Forge is not remembered as a defeat. It is remembered as the place where the Continental Army was remade.
The instrument of that transformation arrived on February twenty-third, seventeen seventy-eight: Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand von Steuben, a Prussian military officer who introduced himself to Washington as a baron and former general, which was not entirely true, but his knowledge of professional European warfare certainly was. Washington appointed him acting Inspector General in March.
Von Steuben did not speak English. He drafted his drill manual in French; his secretary Pierre Etienne Du Ponceau translated it, with help from John Laurens and Alexander Hamilton. He assembled a model company of one hundred twenty men and drilled them personally, marching alongside them, breaking musket loading into eight precise steps, teaching bayonet technique as a weapon of decision rather than a campfire implement. Then those men taught the rest of the army. By the time Washington's forces left Valley Forge in June, they were a disciplined, coordinated fighting force.
The proof came within weeks at the Battle of Monmouth in New Jersey, where the Continental Army stood and fought the British regulars on equal terms for the first time in the war. Von Steuben's drill manual, published as the Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States, remained the official Army field manual for more than three decades.
