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Winter at Valley Forge: George Washington’s Most Dismal Christmas Ever With a quarter of his troops freezing, starving, and barely clothed, Washington, running out of options, schemed a bold—and highly risky—Christmas Eve attack. December 23, 1777, dawned cold and dank over the hills of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, with the scent of snow in the air. General George Washington, pacing the headquarters tent of his revolutionary army’s winter encampment, was dictating a testy ultimatum to the Continental Congress, laced with what he called his “infinite pain and concern.” On his mind? British troop advancement and the dire state of his forces. As he spoke, some 12,000 troops were setting up camp around him for the winter, cobbling together 2,000 or so rude huts with foraged wood and the barest of tools. Horses and oxen were in such short supply that the men were reduced to yoking themselves to makeshift carts. Many soldiers went without coats, shoes, and blankets; most ate little in the way of meat. That day in camp, there were no cattle to slaughter and fewer than 30 barrels of flour in the commissary. The upshot: Nearly 3,000 freezing, near-naked and starving troops—a quarter of Washington’s force—had been declared unfit for duty. The six months that the Continental Army spent at Valley Forge would be the most difficult and ultimately, transformative of the American Revolution. That December, at a nadir in his campaign to expel the British, Washington found himself in a desperate moment, one that drove him to consider one of his boldest and riskiest military maneuvers yet: a Christmas Eve attack. ‘Starve, dissolve or disperse.’ Washington’s dispatch to the Congress that morning flagged a crisis situation: The British General Sir William Howe was on the move that very day, with a force of more than 8,000 Redcoats and Hessians. Having ventured out of the then-capital city of Philadelphia (which they captured three months earlier), they had crossed the Schuylkill River and, according to Continental scouts, were headed to raid nearby farmsteads for hay and livestock. But with the British force now positioned less than 20 miles south of Valley Forge, Washington worried that Gen. Howe would fill his forage wagons and then turn north to overrun his own ragtag, depleted army. “I ordered the Troops to be in rediness [for an attack] but behold!,” Washington wrote to what was left of the Congress, “to my great mortification…the Men were unable to stir on Acct. of Provision. All i could do under these circumstances was, to send out a few light Parties to watch and harass the Enemy." Washington blamed the civilian authorities for the wretched state of affairs. He was convinced “beyond a doubt” that if the Continental Congress and the Pennsylvania state legislators did not rapidly comply with his multiple requests for food, clothes, medicine, and blankets, “unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place in the [supply] line, this Army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these three things. Starve, dissolve, or disperse, in order to obtain subsistence in the best manner they can.” Starve, dissolve or disperse. It was the gauntlet thrown. How low Washington and his army had fallen in a mere 12 months.