The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [102]
After those battles, George Washington’s force of nearly fourteen thousand soldiers, with their supply wagons and train of cannon, sought a camp for the coming winter while Horatio Gates’s northern army remained in Albany. Pennsylvania officials insisted that Washington’s army establish winter quarters near the Valley Forge, northwest of Philadelphia on the banks of the Schuylkill River. They wanted the army there to protect southeastern Pennsylvania from any British attack. Several generals recommended Wilmington, Delaware, towns in Pennsylvania, and communities in New Jersey. Washington, under intense political pressure from the politicians, chose Valley Forge.
There was no housing at Valley Forge and the soldiers were faced with the challenge of building a large city on meadows that could, when completed, house all fourteen thousand men, two thousand horses, several slaughterhouses, cattle pens, granaries, offices, parade grounds, privies, stables, wagon barns, blacksmith shops, and several hospitals. To house his men, Washington ordered the construction of log huts, sixteen by fourteen feet in size. Twelve enlisted men would live in each. Every hut had bunk beds for sleeping and a small fireplace in the rear. More spacious huts were built for officers. The cabins were built along neatly planned dirt lanes with soldiers from each state grouped together in their own neighborhoods. The encampment was so large that, in population, it was the fourth largest city in the United States.
The hut city was plagued with problems from the day the army arrived. The misery that the troops encountered there would test their endurance and courage like no other time in the Revolution and, perhaps, no other time in American history.
Sergeant Ebenezer Wild’s journey to Valley Forge was ominous. The trip from Morristown, New Jersey, was filled with all of the myriad problems that had plagued the army from the first days of the war. That included a court-martial, mixed up orders, poor intelligence, overly long marches, mismanagement, snowstorms, rain deluges, cold weather, and a lack of both food and supplies. If any soldier’s route served as a truly representative preamble for the tangled troubles that would nearly overwhelm the army at Valley Forge, it was Wild’s.
The march of Wild’s regiment, the First Massachusetts, began in Albany on October 30, just three weeks after the battle of Saratoga. The trek would cover a total of more than two hundred fifty miles and take the soldiers through mountain ranges in northern New Jersey, flat sandy terrain in the central and southern part of the state, and then through the rolling hills of eastern Pennsylvania. The First Massachusetts traveled to Morristown, camped there for several weeks, and then moved south on Friday, November 21, on a narrow dirt highway to Basking Ridge, a tiny village in the foothills of the Watchung Mountains. There, in a brief note that would symbolize much that lay ahead that winter, Wild scribbled in his journal, “Unsettled weather.”
Two days later, on November 23, the army camped just outside of Princeton, where it had achieved a stunning victory ten months earlier. Again, in a line that would foreshadow the treacherous months ahead, Wild wrote that the field where they set up their tents was “very full of briers.” The prickly brier bushes that dotted the fields and woods around Basking Ridge would be the least of the troubles that the men from Massachusetts would encounter that winter.
The brigade did not move out the next day because a court-martial had to be held so that the regiment’s colonel could dispense discipline. The men formed in a large circle to serve as an audience for the judicial proceeding in which two privates and two sergeants were tried for leaving the company without permission. The court-martial