Surviving the Winters

Castrametation, the art of laying out military encampments, has received little scrutiny from historians. This is a major deficiency in military studies since sheltering armies has often been an important logistical problem. Offering an important new perspective on camps, Steven Elliott’s Surviving the Winters argues that housing the main Continental Army in the Revolutionary War involved crucial logistical and strategical consequences. Weaving together administrative, operational, and environmental history, Elliott provides an analytical narrative of the origins and impact of the log-hut cities that housed George Washington’s Continental Army in the Middle States throughout much of the conflict. These winter encampments, Elliott states, “represented an innovation in castrametation and one of the great achievements of Washington’s army during the war” (4). Indeed, the log-hut city eventually became the cornerstone of Washington’s Fabian and positional strategy in the Middle States as he kept his army in defensive terrain close to British-occupied cities while implementing a cautious strategy for wearing down a stronger enemy. Therefore, Elliott asserts, “the American log-hut city represents one of the most important and original contributions made to the art of war” (176).As a part of the so-called Military Revolution of the early modern era, there developed the need for the long-term housing of large permanent armies. In the eighteenth century, European governments supplied armies with tents while in the field; however, these provided poor shelter against snowy and cold conditions, so funding was provided for the construction of winter barracks. A significant number of troops still were housed in private homes, which often forced armies to disperse widely to find adequate billets.At the start of the American War of Independence, the rebels were unprepared to house the newly created Continental Army. Its officers, including a few who had practical experience from the French and Indian War for managing housing problems, did use some European military texts on quartering troops and maintaining camp sanitation, but they remained uninformed about the most advanced writings on castrametation. Moreover, the differences between North American and European conditions would require the Continental officers to use other means for sheltering their troops. Indeed, Elliott asserts that “adapting castrametation methods to fit the realities of the new war would prove to be one of the most significant challenges to Washington’s generalship” (25).During late 1775 and early 1776 near Boston, Continental troops created their first winter quarters, but insufficient supplies and ineffective organization undermined the effort to construct an adequate number of barracks. The following winter in the New Jersey Highlands, another area without barracks or fortresses, Washington’s army resorted to billeting in or near towns. By January 1777, the Continental soldiers quartered among the civilian population witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of smallpox cases, which prompted Washington to inoculate all troops at Morristown and all new recruits arriving at Philadelphia.After a year of exhausting warfare, the main Continental Army on December 17, 1777, began its famous winter encampment at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Since there were no significant towns in the area for billeting and due to the lateness in the year, which prevented construction of more substantial barracks, Washington ordered the army to build small wooden shelters. This, Elliott asserts, “represented a departure from European methods and the beginning of military shelter practices suited to waging war in North America. At the heart of this new method stood humble timber structures, log huts, of which the army would build nearly two thousand in the coming months” (77). By keeping the army together, which included approximately four hundred women and an unknown number of children, Washington hoped it would facilitate defense, communications, and training. Though the Continental Army during the winter of 1777–1778 endured many supply problems, Washington’s order for creating at Valley Forge an encampment of huts was a significant innovation in castrametation that would become the basis for constructing similar camps in subsequent winters.During the winter of 1778–1779 at Middlebrook, New Jersey, near the Watchung Mountains, the main Continental Army further developed the new American castrametation by using improved standards of construction and employing ideas from European texts for upgrading camp sanitation. Furthermore, the army better understood how a camp’s location partly should be determined by access to roads, as well as proximity to forage and arsenals. In short, as Elliott notes, the rebel leaders “honed a better appreciation for what landscapes could best support a prolonged, stationary camp” (120–21).In the winter of 1779–1780 at Jockey Hollow near Morristown, New Jersey, Washington’s army, though frequently suffering from a shortage of food, used its previous experiences to construct well-built huts in a remote and defensible location while enduring the coldest and snowiest conditions during the war in the Middle States. The following winter Washington was able to combine existing structures with new construction at Jockey Hollow and avoid supply shortages by stockpiling and impressing from the surrounding area, though the army was forced to confront mutinies by the Pennsylvania Line and a New Jersey brigade due to disputes over back pay and enlistment terms.After returning from the successful Yorktown campaign in the fall of 1781, the New Jersey brigades used the existing infrastructure at Jockey Hollow for the third consecutive year, while New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts brigades were housed elsewhere in New Jersey or New York. As the war then neared its end, Washington’s army spent its final winter at New Windsor, New York, in 1782–83, which Elliott declares, “represented the culmination of the log-hut city and the development of the army building it” (170).Solidly based on extensive research in primary and secondary sources, Surviving the Winters is a significant contribution for studying the origins and impact of the main Continental Army’s log-hut cities in the Middle States

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