The Valley Forge Winter: Civilians and Soldiers in War (review)

Wayne Bodle's Valley Forge Winter is a well-researched and engaging work that examines the Continental Army's famed winter cantonment at the intersection of war, politics, and society. It is not a retelling of the quintessential American morality play of military virtue, stoicism, self-sacrifice, and eventual moral and battlefield triumph set against the backdrop of previous defeats and civilian neglect. Rather, it is a model study of war and society that argues convincingly for the Continental Army's service "as a partial proxy for faltering civilian political legitimacy" in Revolutionary Pennsylvania (p. 5). In doing so it addresses the effects of war on a population caught between contending forces and skillfully delineates the process that brought the Continental Army to Valley Forge.

Military and political necessities and the overlapping interests of Pennsylvania's government, the Congress, and the army underlay the decision to winter at Valley Forge. In the summer of 1776 radical Whigs overthrew Pennsylvania's provincial government. That winter, fear of a British invasion caused a panicked evacuation of Philadelphia. The new government's inability to protect the people of Pennsylvania from war exposed its weakness and seriously threatened its tenuous authority and credibility. When British forces did indeed move upon Philadelphia in 1777, state leaders recognized that the regime's survival depended upon its seriously challenging the occupation and protecting the citizenry from the effects of the war. Meanwhile, Congress, exiled in nearby York and hoping for a return to the comforts of Philadelphia, wanted a winter campaign to drive the British from its erstwhile capital.

As for the army, a November council of war called by George Washington revealed "two hypothetically complementary, but in fact . . . potentially contradictory strategic objectives": denying Philadelphia's rich agricultural hinterland to the British; and resting, recruiting, and training the army (p. 58). Following a series of negotiations, Washington consented to wintering the army at Valley Forge. His consent, a hard-driven bargain, allowed him to use the encampment as a stage from which he could pressure the nearby Congress into making needed military reforms.

In his research, Bodle discovered that the kernel of the myth that persists today may well have been planted through Washington's deft "political skill or rhetorical guile" (p. 2). By exaggerating the condition of his army and its surroundings, Washington manipulated Congress's fears to pressure it into better providing for his forces. Chroniclers compounded the story by portraying an army living hand-to-mouth in a wilderness, alternately passively or mutinously suffering, yet always on the verge of disintegration. Modern historians, moreover, had accepted much of the story, further burnishing its heroic qualities. Bodle, however, has corrected the picture through his solid research, clear writing, and convincing arguments. This book is a welcome contribution that should be considered seriously by scholars and interested readers.