Valley Forge

The winter encampment that Americans reflexively call “Valley Forge” has become a kind of historical shorthand, a single frozen tableau where virtue shivers nobly and emerges purified. That picture is comforting, and like most comforting pictures, it is incomplete. The army that staggered into Valley Forge in December 1777 had been forming, failing, adapting, and nearly coming apart since the summer of 1775. Valley Forge was not the beginning of the story, and it was not even the worst chapter. It was the reckoning.