Valley Forge

Valley Forge is not a battle — no fighting happened there. It is the place where the Continental Army camped from December 1777 to June 1778, through a winter of brutal cold, disease, starvation, and desertion, and emerged as something better than what it had been. Roughly 2,000 of the 12,000 soldiers who entered the encampment died of disease — primarily typhus, dysentery, and pneumonia. The men who survived did so in crude log huts they built themselves, on half-rations that sometimes became no rations at all. What happened at Valley Forge was not heroic in any dramatic sense; it was a collective act of endurance that most soldiers would not have chosen if they'd had any reasonable alternative.

The transformation came through two sources: the arrival of Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a Prussian-born military officer who spent the winter drilling the Continental soldiers in the fundamentals of 18th-century warfare, and the decision by the men themselves to stay. Steuben had no common language with most of the troops he trained — he shouted commands in French, which were translated to English — but he understood that an army of free men required a different approach than Prussian conscripts, and he adapted accordingly. By spring, the army that emerged could maneuver and fight in formation in ways the British had reason to take seriously.

Valley Forge became a symbol almost immediately, pressed into service to illustrate the sacrifice and perseverance the Revolution required. George Washington's leadership there was mythologized with particular intensity — the story of his prayer in the snow circulated widely, almost certainly invented. The mythologizing served a purpose: it gave the struggle a sacred quality that pure political argument could not provide. The Valley Forge National Historical Park preserves the encampment ground today and hosts hundreds of thousands of visitors annually who come to understand, at least partially, what it cost.