The war of Independence unofficially started when George Washington ambushed a French war party in the back woods of Pennsylvania. But it actually started when the british wanted to put an army in America but the british passed the stamp act in order to pay for it.
New York was the retreat place for the british army from the beginning to the end of the war. Howe was their leader. Howe had it in his head to capture Philadelphia before snowfall, so he lead his army to the outskirts, and though it was a hard and bloody battle, he eventually captured it.
The british army was having a good time in Philadelphia, but George Washington was the opposite. His army was in a terrible mess. He had just sent them to Valley Forge in winter conditions, and that of all places was not the best. It was a small town with 12 little houses, and an old iron works, so they had to build a thousand little cabins with thatched roofs and dirt floors to keep them moderately warm. The conditions there were one of the worst conditions I have ever heard of. The men slepped on wooden bunks with no blankets, and all they had to keep warm were their ripped shirts and pants. But the worst thing was that it was the dead of winter. Men had to take turns being on guard and standing out in the freezing cold. And men who weren’t on guard had to lend them there clothes. They didn’t have shoes so some if they had them strapped hats to their feet. People who didn’t have them their feet would freeze and then rot off. The food wasn’t much better either. Firecake it was called, a thin paste of flour and water baked on a hot stone. Men who were lucky enough to have whiskey would make “salamanders”. They would take a cup of whiskey set it on fire and then drink it flames and all. They weren’t nourishing but they’d keep your insides warm for a while. People were astonished to see guards wearing women’s gowns to keep warm. One lucky man poured his left over whiskey into his boots to keep his feet from freezing while he was on guard duty. It was a tragic site to see the mounds of dead bodies. More than 2000 men died there from starvation, cold and disease. It was a tragic sight altogether.
Although they were in bad conditions, they couldn’t have asked for a better general than Washington. When he was elected at the beginning, he had never led an army before, and he didn’t think he could now. But he did it anyways, and he told them not to pay him, which inspired a lot of his men. Washington was a great man, but they probably owed more to Von Steuben than anyone else at their time in Valley Forge.
He taught them tactics that they had never known before, and discipline, which they apparently didn’t know either. But there was one slight problem. He was German, and he knew almost no English, so the soldiers got very confused at times, and he had a sailors mouth at those times. But by the spring of 1778, Washington’s soldiers could fight like trained professionals.
