Feeding Washington's Army by Ricardo Herrera

Feeding Washington’s Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778
By Ricardo A. Herrera
University of North Carolina Press, 2022

Graphic descriptions of the deprivations George Washington’s Continental Army suffered at their Valley Forge, Pennsylvania camp during the winter of 1777-1778 have been standard Revolutionary War fare for over 200 years. Every history of the war pauses to talk about the misery of the ragged, barefoot amateur soldiers struggling to survive on boiled oxtails and old corn stalks. And Valley Forge is the subject of Feeding Washington’s Army, a new book by Ricardo Herrera, Professor of military history at the School of Advanced Military Studies at the US Army and General Staff College. 

But although Feeding Washington’s Army does indeed open with some horrifying anecdotes about how completely destitute the hapless Continentals were that winter (this is not the first book to point out that the winter that year wasn’t particularly harsh, but you try doing it with barely any food or shelter), the book is far more concerned with how the army survived. That was the Grand Forage of 1778, in which fifteen hundred men marched with carts and horses and an extensive shopping list into Southeastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, well into Delaware, and northeastern Maryland. 

The Grand Forage was commanded by Nathanael Greene, hand-picked by Washington. “Despite his upbringing as a Quaker, Greene was anything but a pacifist,” Herrera writes. “During the foraging he more than once demonstrated a hardnosed and unforgiving side.”

Although Herrera is as diplomatic as he can be about the whole matter (he calls it “a moral and ethical gray zone”), Greene’s objective was plunder. British soldiers in the New World had a black reputation for just such actions, despite strict, even draconian instructions to refrain from taking food or supplies from the civilian population. And George Washington recognized the dark hypocrisy. “Were we in an enemy’s country such practices would be unwarrantable,” he wrote, “but committed against our friends are in the highest degree base, cruel and injurious to the cause in which we are engaged.” 

Typically, the ink was still wet on that kind of comment when Washington gave Greene his blessing. And off the expedition went: “trudging southeastward out of Valley Forge, the column tramped along miserable muddy paths, generously described as roads.’ 

Herrera does a quietly, no-nonsense fantastic job of fleshing out this Grand Forage, complete with personnel lists, inventories of equipment, and the interplay of every personality involved. Far from being yet another melodramatic rehash of soldierly stoicism, Feeding Washington’s Army is an invaluable elaboration of a key footnote in the Revolutionary War. Herrera very effectively makes the case that the Grand Forage set crucial patterns in place. “Small it may have been, but the Grand Forage of 1778 was great in its results,” he writes. “It contributed to the Continental Army’s continued survival until the spring, the army’s continued support of Continental and state authority, and its continued challenge to British authority.” Had the Continental Army starved to death at Valley Forge, all would have been lost – but so too would all have been lost if the Army had fallen apart into unstructured brigandage. Nathanael Greene got his unsavory job done. 

-Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.