George Washington at Valley Forge

While on recess during the 1787 Constitutional Convention, George Washington accompanied Gouverneur Morris on a fishing trip to Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Taking a break from fishing, or perhaps feeling the pull of nostalgia, Washington left his friend and the trout to ride the all too familiar grounds of the encampment where he had spent a very trying winter ten years prior at Valley Forge. He noted in his diary, “I rid over the old Cantonment of the American [army] of the Winter 1777, & Visited all the Works, wch. were in Ruins: and the Incampments in woods where the ground had not been cultivated.” As Washington explored the fading remnants of camp life, he was surely reminded of the conditions—the lack of supplies, the disease, and the destitution—that brought the American forces to the brink of dissolution. 

The Commander faced daunting management challenges stemming from administrative incompetence, procurement issues, and logistics, but the most important outcome from Valley Forge would be whether Washington’s forces were going to emerge from their winter encampment as a more cohesive and better trained army, or simply just a collection of survivors.