Two-hundred and forty years ago, George Washington and 11,000 soldiers of the Continental Army, as well as 500 women and children, were suffering through a miserable winter in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. The winter before had been successful: on Christmas night, Washington led a force across the icy Delaware River and surprised Hessian troops in Trenton, New Jersey. He also beat the counterattack by the British a few days later, still in Trenton. He then marched around the British army and captured their supplies in Princeton. But 1777 was hard for the new Americans. Two major British armies assailed Congressional forces, and on December 19, Washington marched his army into Valley Forge. It was there that the 11,000 enlisted soldiers, many of them poor, non-white and marginalized members of their home communities, huddled shoeless around campfires, risking their lives in the desperate hope that the American Revolution would benefit them after the war. Washington ordered his soldiers to complete their rations on Christmas Day. He was busy that winter; he met with officers and wrote to Congress, asking them for more supplies. Many Continental Army soldiers wrote that they thought their nation had abandoned them that winter, but knew that Washington had not. He spent late nights in Isaac Potts’ house, desperately trying to get his soldiers some food.
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