A Letter from Valley Forge, Re-read

I.

In the popular memory of the Revolution, Valley Forge has two images attached to it. The first is the soldier in the snow, his feet wrapped in rags, leaving bloody footprints on the road from Whitemarsh. The second is George Washington on his knees in prayer in the woods, a scene that almost certainly never happened but which appeared in a Parson Weems anecdote and was repainted, throughout the nineteenth century, into half the Sunday school readers in the United States.

The historical Valley Forge is more interesting than either image. The Continental Army arrived at the site, twenty-two miles northwest of Philadelphia, on December 19, 1777, with about twelve thousand soldiers. By the time it left, on June 19, 1778, roughly two thousand of those soldiers were dead — almost all of them from disease — and the army that marched out was a fundamentally different institution from the army that had marched in. That transformation, and not the suffering, is what makes Valley Forge important.

I have been rereading Washington's correspondence with the Continental Congress from that winter and spring. It is the part of the record most often quoted out of context. Washington's December 23 letter to the President of Congress, the famous one, contains the line "I am now convinced beyond a doubt that 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." That line is in every textbook.

The rest of the correspondence — the letters before December 23, and the long, steady stream of letters that follow it through the spring — is much less often read. It is also where the actual story is.

II. The bureaucratic war

Washington wrote, by my count, more than three hundred letters during the Valley Forge encampment. Many of them are routine: requisitions, court-martial reviews, intelligence assessments of British movements out of Philadelphia. A surprisingly large number are about supply.

Supply was the war Washington was actually fighting that winter, and the despair that comes through in the December 23 letter is a despair about logistics. The Continental Army had no functioning quartermaster department; Thomas Mifflin, the quartermaster general, had effectively resigned in October and had not been replaced. The commissary system was no better. Beef and flour that had been collected in New Jersey and Pennsylvania were sitting in warehouses or on wagons because no one had the authority — or the cash — to move them to the army.

Washington's letters from January and February of 1778 are a sustained, detailed, frequently exasperated explanation of this to a Congress that did not want to hear it. He writes about the price of wagon hire. He writes about the failure of the impressment system. He writes about the desertion rate, which is climbing, and about the officers who are resigning their commissions because they cannot afford to feed themselves.

He also writes about the alternatives. He is explicit, in private correspondence to Henry Laurens (the new president of Congress) and to Joseph Reed (the Pennsylvania political leader), that the only solution he can see is the appointment of a competent quartermaster general with the authority to act independently of Congress's committee structure. He has a candidate in mind: Nathanael Greene.

In late February, after several months of pressure, Congress relents. Greene is appointed quartermaster general on March 2, 1778. Within six weeks the supply situation begins, measurably, to improve. By May the army is being fed.

This is the part of Valley Forge that the popular memory has largely lost. The story is not, fundamentally, a story of suffering rewarded by perseverance. It is a story of institutional failure repaired by institutional reform, accomplished by a commander who spent the winter writing letters.

III. Steuben

The other transformation that happens at Valley Forge, which Washington's letters track in detail, is the reform of the army's training and tactical doctrine under the supervision of Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben.

Steuben arrived at Valley Forge on February 23, 1778, with letters of introduction from Benjamin Franklin (in Paris) that overstated his previous military rank in the Prussian service. He spoke no English. He was, by all accounts, a charismatic figure with a fluent French interpreter and an enormous capacity for profanity in three languages.

He was also a serious soldier. He found a Continental Army that had been trained in five or six different drill systems, depending on which colony its regiments had been raised in. He invented, on the spot, a simplified American drill manual — the Blue Book, formally titled Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States — and personally drilled a model company of one hundred soldiers in front of the entire army, repeatedly, day after day, throughout March and April.

Washington's letters from this period are quietly enthusiastic. He writes to Congress recommending Steuben for promotion. He writes to subordinate generals describing the visible improvement in the army's parade-ground performance. He writes, in a March letter, that the new method of training the troops introduced by Baron Steuben will soon produce material advantages in the discipline and movement of the Army.

The advantages were real. At the battle of Monmouth, three months later — the army's first major engagement after leaving Valley Forge — the Continentals stood and exchanged volleys with British regulars in open ground, on roughly equal terms, for the first time in the war. They had been trained, in three months, to do something they had not previously been able to do.

IV. The other letters

The letters get stranger, and more interesting, when you read further down the file.

There is a March letter to Bryan Fairfax, an old neighbor and friend of Washington's from northern Virginia who had remained loyal to the Crown. It is one of the more personal letters Washington wrote during the war. He acknowledges their political differences, expresses regret for the breach, and writes — in a passage that surprised me — that the friendship he had always professed and felt for Fairfax had suffered no diminution from the difference in their political sentiments. It is a letter from a commanding general, at the lowest point of his army's fortunes, taking the time to reassure a Loyalist friend that their personal connection survives the war.

There is an April letter to Martha, who joined him at Valley Forge in February and stayed through May. The letter is from a short period when she had returned briefly to Mount Vernon. It is brisk, affectionate, and almost entirely about household management. It does not mention the army.

There is a series of letters to Laurens — the president of Congress, with whom Washington was developing a real correspondence — discussing the conspiracy among certain Continental Army officers and members of Congress that has come to be known as the Conway Cabal. Washington's tone in these letters is more controlled than his contemporaries' recollections of his private conversation; he writes about Thomas Conway and Horatio Gates with formal restraint, even as he is clearly furious. The cabal collapses in the spring, partly because Washington refuses to escalate it in writing.

These are not famous letters. They are working letters from a working commander. They do not contain stirring patriotic statements. They contain, instead, the granular evidence of how a particular person, in a particular institutional crisis, kept things going by sustained attention to detail.

V. What the snow does to memory

Why has the popular memory of Valley Forge converged on the snow and the bloody footprints?

Partly because those images are true. The winter was hard, the supply situation was genuinely catastrophic, and soldiers genuinely died in numbers we would now find unacceptable. The suffering was real.

Partly because the suffering serves a particular narrative purpose. A nation that wants to believe its founding was a moral triumph needs a moment of moral testing somewhere in the story. Valley Forge gives us that moment. The soldier in the snow is the American equivalent of the cross.

But the cost of remembering Valley Forge as a story of moral testing is that we lose the more useful story of institutional reform. Washington did not save the Continental Army by enduring. He saved it by writing three hundred letters about the quartermaster department and by giving a foul-mouthed Prussian the run of the parade ground.

That is a less stirring story. It is also a much more relevant one for any republic that has to keep its institutions functioning under stress. The lesson of Valley Forge, properly read, is that the survival of a republic depends on the unglamorous capacity of its leaders to attend to logistics, to delegate to competent strangers, and to keep writing letters when nothing seems to be working.

VI. Reading the file

The complete Washington papers from Valley Forge are now online, at the National Archives' Founders Online project. Anyone with an internet connection can read them in chronological order, as they were written. It takes about three days to read through the whole winter and spring.

I recommend it. Not because the letters are uniformly beautiful — many of them are administrative — but because reading them in bulk corrects the picture that the textbook quotations have left us with.

The Washington who emerges from the file is not the praying figure in the woods. He is a forty-five-year-old Virginia planter, dealing with cascading institutional failure, doing the slow work of holding an army together by means of paper. He is closer, in temperament and in working habits, to a modern crisis manager than to the marble statue in the Capitol rotunda.

That is the Washington worth knowing. The snow can stay where it is.