If these historical facts complicate and confuse the mythical picture of Valley Forge, virtually all of the firsthand accounts tend to confirm the desperate character of the conditions experienced by the Continental Army at the onset of the Valley Forge winter. An army surgeon, Albigence Waldo, described a soldier named Will upon arrival in camp. He was without shoes, his breeches were tattered and his shirt in strings, his hair was lice-infested and disheveled, his body covered with sores. Exhausted by hunger and exposure, he kept repeating the lamentation “I fail fast. Soon I shall be no more.”
No less authority than Washington himself confirmed the scenes of “blood on the snow”: “”To see men without Cloathes to cover their nakedness, without blankets to lay on, without Shoes, by which their Marches might be traced by the Blood from their feet – and almost as often without Provisions as with: Marching through frost & Snow… is a mark of patience and obedience which in my opinion can scarce be parallel’d.”
Source:
Ellis, Joseph J. “The Winter.” American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic. Vintage Books, 2008. 63. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Albigence Waldo, “Diary of Albigence Waldo of the Connecticut Line,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 21 (1897), 306.
Washington to John Bannister, 20 April 1778, PWR 14:577-78.
Further Reading:
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