Ricardo A. Herrera - Feeding Washingtons Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778

Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778

Ricardo A. Herrera

The University of North Carolina PressCHAPEL HILL

2022 Ricardo A. Herrera

All rights reserved

Set in Merope Basic by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Herrera, Ricardo A. (Associate professor), author.

Title: Feeding Washingtons army : surviving the Valley Forge winter of 1778 / Ricardo A. Herrera.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021049433 | ISBN 9781469667317 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469667324 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Washington, George, 17321799HeadquartersPennsylvaniaValley Forge. | United States. Continental ArmySupplies and stores. | United States. Continental ArmyHistory. | Valley Forge (Pa.)History, Military18th century. | United StatesHistoryRevolution, 17751783Destruction and pillage.

Classification: LCC E234 .H47 2022 | DDC 973.3/341dc23/eng/20211025

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021049433

Cover illustration: Harrington Fitzgerald, Valley Forge Winter, the Return of the Foraging Party (ca. 18801900, oil on canvas). Museum of the American Revolution.

To Dolora

This project began while I was a historian on the Staff Ride Team, U.S. Army Combat Studies Institute. I was building a staff ride on the Philadelphia Campaign of 17771778 and writing the stands, the locations where participants discuss a particular action, decision, or piece of terrain, for the Valley Forge portion. Staff rides use battlefields and larger areas of operations as classrooms and primary documents over which students, traditionally military, walk, talk, analyze, and discuss decision making, leadership, and their applicability to the modern military force. Among other things, staff rides are predicated upon the movements, maneuvers, and actions of military forces. The period between the armys marching into Valley Forge in December 1777 and marching out in June 1778, however, is largely static. The ride needed movement, if only for an hour in a longer day spent at the park. Activity, not immobility, is at the heart of the endeavor; thus, the challenge of examining Valley Forge, an encampment.

While pausing at Anthony Waynes statue, I drew from Wayne Bodles first-rate study of the encampment, The Valley Forge Winter: Civilians and Soldiers in War. Wayne gave attention to the armys patrolling and foraging activities, as soldiers and civilian interacted during the winter of 177778. The answer to my problem was to reframe Valley Forge as an eighteenth-century predecessor to the modern Forward Operating Base (FOB), a fixed, albeit temporary defensible position from which military forces operate. From FOB Valley Forge, the Continental Army maintained a security line to the east and south and sent patrols into the countryside to contest the space between the encampment and British-occupied Philadelphia. Soldiers from FOB Valley Forge marched out to forage in search of food and supplies for the army. All this was much more than passively and miserably sitting in freezing huts and starving. Here was action, here was the movement to sustain something of the staff rides conceptual momentum. The focus of the stand at Anthony Waynes statue would be the Continental Armys actions to feed itself, its sustainment operations in current parlance.

The story behind the armys efforts to sustain itself in February of 1778 is much larger and more important than the actual act. The bigger story is one of a maturing general, George Washington, and his officers and soldiers. The Continental Army, if one argues for a line of continuity that traces to its birth on 14 June 1775, was but thirty-two months old in February 1778. In that period, the army had lost more fights than it had won. The main army under Washington had won signal victories at Trenton and Princeton, but its record of wins to losses was anything but respectable. Yet, Washington and the army had persevered, learned, and matured. By February 1778, Washington was able to give subordinate officers like Nathanael Greene, Anthony Wayne, Henry Lee, and others broad orders that gave them the latitude needed for the exercise of their initiative.

This books genesis lies in my teaching at the U.S. Armys School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) and in my previous position on the Staff Ride Team. Scholarship informs my teaching, much as teaching informs my scholarship. The two are inseparable. Out of the need to introduce movement, one hour of teaching at Valley Forge, came an article. A second and third article, several conference papers, and a blog post later emerged. This book is the ultimate expression of that teaching moment. In small things, greater ones often inhere.

Following months of active campaigning, in December 1777, Gen. George Washington led the Continental Army into winter quarters at Valley Forge, a place whose name in American history is synonymous with privation, suffering, and endurance. From the late spring of 1777, through the onset of that years winter, the army had marched and maneuvered well over 200 miles from its encampments at Morristown, New Jersey, to Coochs Bridge, Delaware, to Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and beyond. Eventually, the armys journey led to Valley Forge. It had marched to fight and fight it did. Washingtons Continentals and local militias had clashed with Gen. Sir William Howes British regulars and Hessian auxiliaries at Coochs Bridge, Brandywine, Paoli, Germantown, Whitemarsh, and other places over the course of the Philadelphia Campaign. The Continentals and militiamen had lost more battles than they had won, and yet the Continental Army had held together. As the end of the normal campaigning season (late spring though autumn) neared and then closed, General Washington convened several councils of war with the armys other generals to determine whether the army should wage a winter campaign or enter quarters until the spring. In the end, Washington determined that his soldiers would winter at Valley Forge. It was the least bad option within a limited range of possibilities.

Washingtons decision to order the army into a winter cantonment at Valley Forge came about only after a lengthy series of considerations with the generals, congressional delegates, and local politicians. In the end, the approaching winter, the armys physical circumstances, and political and strategic necessity joined forces to limit Washingtons courses of action. Ever the risk taker, Washington was also ever the realist. The army that wintered at Valley Forge was near enough to Philadelphia to challenge British occupiers for control of southeastern Pennsylvania; but doing so exacerbated the Continental commissariats near inability to feed its soldiers. Washingtons undertakingbuttressing Pennsylvanias government, exercising the writ of the Continental Congress, and denying the British exercise of political powerhowever, precluded his making any other decision. Faced with this complex and challenging strategic and political environment, Washington and the army made the best of a poor situation, constrained as they were by the strategic calculus of war. December 1777 was bad enough for the army, but worse was yet to come.