they became black, and it was often necessary to amputate them.” ...  The army frequently remained whole days without provisions, and the patient endurance of the soldiers and officers was a miracle which each moment served to renew ... while the country around Valley Forge was so impoverished by the military operations of the previous summer as to make it impossible for it to support the army.  The sufferings of the latter were chiefly owing to the inefficiency of Congress.[1]

[Footnote 1:  F.D.  Stone, Struggle for the Delaware, vi, ch. 5.]

No one felt more keenly than did Washington the horrors, of Valley Forge.  He had not believed in forming such an encampment, and from the start he denounced the neglect and incompetence of the commissions.  In a letter to the President of the Congress on December 3, 1777, he wrote: 

Since the month of July we have had no assistance from the quartermaster-general, and to want of assistance from this department the commissary-general charges great part of his deficiency.  To this I am to add, that, notwithstanding it is a standing order, and often repeated that the troops shall always have two days’ provisions by them, that they might be ready at any sudden call; yet an opportunity has scarcely ever offered of taking an advantage of the enemy, that has not either been totally obstructed or greatly impeded, on this account.  And this, the great and crying evil, is not all.  The soap, vinegar, and other articles allowed by Congress, we see none of, nor have we seen them, I believe, since the Battle of Brandywine.  The first, indeed, we have now little occasion for; few men having more than one shirt, many only the moiety of one, and some none at all.  In addition to which, as a proof of the little benefit received from a clothier-general, and as a further proof of the inability of an army, under the circumstances of this, to perform the common duties of soldiers, (besides a number of men confined to hospitals for want of shoes, and others in farmers’ houses on the same account,) we have, by a field-return this day made, no less than two thousand eight hundred and ninety-eight men now in camp unfit for duty, because they are barefoot and otherwise naked.  By the same return it appears, that our whole strength in Continental troops, including the eastern brigades, which have joined us since the surrender of General Burgoyne, exclusive of the Maryland troops sent to Wilmington, amounts to no more than eight thousand two hundred in camp fit for duty; notwithstanding which, and that since the 4th instant our numbers fit for duty, from the hardships and exposures they have undergone, particularly on account of blankets (numbers having been obliged, and still are, to sit up all night by fires, instead of taking comfortable rest in a natural and common way), have decreased near two thousand men.

We find gentlemen, without knowing whether