Taking Matters Into Their Own Hands

Taking Matters Into Their Own Hands David C. Hsiung Surviving the Winters: Housing Washington’s Army during the American Revolution. By Steven Elliott. Campaigns and Commanders. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021. 252 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. Feeding Washington’s Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778. By Ricardo A. Herrera. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. 270 pages. Cloth, ebook. The Continental army moved into Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in December 1777 and on the nineteenth began building their winter quarters. The soldiers’ trials, however, were only starting as they felled trees and constructed log huts by hand and with insufficient tools during those short cold days. Brigadier General James Mitchell Varnum of Rhode Island soon reported to General George Washington: “Three Days successively, we have been destitute of Bread. Two Days we have been intirely without Meat. It is not to be had from the Commissaries. Whenever we procure Beef, it is of such a vile Quality, as to render it a poor Succeedanium [substitute] for Food. The Men must be supplied, or they cannot be commanded.”1 During each of the two previous winters, the size of the Continental army had shrunk as soldiers refused to reenlist, not just drawn toward home but also driven away by the hardships of military life. To prevent the army’s dissolution, Washington had to supply the essentials of food, fuel, and shelter while also keeping an eye on a dangerous enemy located only about twenty miles away in Philadelphia. The stakes could not have been higher: the very success of the revolution depended on the army’s ability to survive the winter. What held the Continental army together for eight years? It was more than just surprising victories such as those at Trenton, Princeton, and Saratoga, though these boosted morale and spurred enlistments. Keeping the soldiers fed, housed, and healthy counted at least as much. Every broad [End Page 155] survey of the American Revolution addresses the winter encampments, but some volumes go little beyond describing the bitter cold, tattered clothing, and Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben’s drills.2 The two books under review here accomplish considerably more. Steven Elliott’s Surviving the Winters: Housing Washington’s Army during the American Revolution broadens our understanding by showing how encampments developed over the duration of the war, while Ricardo A. Herrera’s Feeding Washington’s Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778 deepens our appreciation for the ways soldiers actively ensured their own survival. Elliott makes a strong and novel case for the importance of these encampments to the war’s outcome. Drawing upon correspondence, diaries, military treatises, orderly books, and personal papers in two dozen manuscript collections and about one hundred published primary sources, he shows us a commander in chief who learned and adapted over time and officers who advanced the study and practice of military camps—called “castrametation” (3)—by reading European texts and making innovations year after year. Encampments that kept soldiers not only healthy but also secure, and that were well placed to extend such security to the surrounding countryside, played a key role in Washington’s Fabian strategy of staying close to the enemy and acting cautiously. Elliott convincingly argues that the Continental army’s achievements in these areas over the course of the war provided a foundation for its eventual success. Surviving the Winters moves chronologically, with each principal chapter dedicated to how the Continental army under Washington’s direct command (called the Main Army) experienced the winters. Outside Boston in 1775 and 1776, and in New York and New Jersey during 1776, the soldiers shivered in tents, hastily assembled shanties, inadequate barracks, and public and private buildings, or often with nothing at all over their heads. In 1777, after striking victories at Trenton and Princeton, the soldiers had to billet in Morristown’s fifty homes; one family of six had to share their house with thirty-six Delaware infantrymen. At Valley Forge the following winter, the soldiers built their own huts, and the Main Army used similar structures each year thereafter in camps near Morristown, New Jersey; West Point and the Hudson Highlands in New York; and western Connecticut

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