Valley Forge: Where the Army Became an Army
Pennsylvania
On December nineteenth, seventeen seventy-seven, George Washington led roughly twelve thousand Continental soldiers into winter quarters here at Valley Forge, a plateau above the Schuylkill River about twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia. The British had taken Philadelphia two months earlier. Washington could not retake the city yet. What he needed was a place where his army could survive the winter without being destroyed.
Survival proved harder than he had hoped. The encampment lasted six months, until June nineteenth, seventeen seventy-eight, and the conditions during that time were among the worst the Continental Army ever endured. Soldiers lacked food, adequate clothing, and enough blankets. Over the six months, roughly two thousand men died of typhus, dysentery, pneumonia, and exposure. Washington wrote to the Continental Congress in terms that bordered on desperation, warning that without immediate resupply the army would dissolve. He estimated that a third of his men lacked viable footwear.
The military transformation that happened here is one of the reasons the place is remembered at all. In February of seventeen seventy-eight, a Prussian officer named Friedrich Wilhelm Augustus von Steuben arrived at Valley Forge. He carried letters of recommendation from Benjamin Franklin and a willingness to work. Washington appointed him drillmaster. Von Steuben did not speak English and had to work through translators, but he possessed an ability to teach military discipline that none of Washington's own officers had matched.
Von Steuben drilled the men in formations, in the handling of muskets, in how to march and maneuver in coordinated bodies. He wrote a training manual in French that was translated and distributed. Slowly, what had been a collection of militias from different colonies began to move and fight as a unified army. When the British evacuated Philadelphia the following June and Washington's forces gave chase, catching them at Monmouth, the soldiers who stood their ground that day were measurably different from the men who had stumbled into Valley Forge six months before.
The valley today is a national historical park, one of the most visited in the country. The earthen fortifications Washington ordered built are still visible, as are reconstructed log huts like the ones the soldiers built that winter.
