Resigned to the seasonal end of combat in the northern states, Washington took the bulk of his army into the safe haven of a winter cantonment in Morristown, New Jersey. Confronted by early snow and hail, the soldiers chopped down two thousand acres of timber and roughed out a city of nearly a thousand log cabins. Washington—and a month later, Martha—took up residence in the handsome mansion of Mrs. Theodosia Ford, a substantial three-story house with shutters and dormer windows that must have seemed palatial compared to the compact Potts house at Valley Forge. Unfortunately the unbending Mrs. Ford refused to yield two of four downstairs rooms, forcing the Washingtons to share the floor with her. The kitchen, in particular, was a scene of pure bedlam. “I have been at my present quarters since the first day of December,” an irritable Washington wrote to Nathanael Greene in January, “and have not a kitchen to cook a dinner in.” His retinue of eighteen servants “and all Mrs. Ford’s are crowded together in her kitchen and scarce one of them able to speak for the colds they have caught.”46 To accommodate his aides, Washington completed a couple of rooms upstairs and constructed an adjoining log cabin for daytime duties.

Washington braced for a winter that, for sheer misery, threatened to rival the trials of Valley Forge. As early as October, there wasn’t a single pair of shoes in army depots, and the situation was equally lamentable for shirts, overalls, and blankets. Since the Continental currency now fetched only three cents to the dollar, Congress stopped printing money and appealed to the states to pay their own troops. As the latter issued their own paper currency, prices soared even further. Washington captured graphically the ruinous hyperinflation when he told John Jay that “a wagon load of money will scarcely purchase a wagon load of provisions.”47 To Gouverneur Morris, he protested, “A rat, in the shape of a horse, is not to be bought at this time for less than £200.”48 He took seriously intelligence reports that the British in Philadelphia had purloined reams of the paper used to print currency and planned to crush the rebellion by swamping the country with counterfeit money.

Washington faced double jeopardy from the debased currency. Besides placing goods beyond the budget of his quartermasters, it was whittling away his personal fortune. Like many rich planters, Washington had large loans outstanding in Virginia that were being repaid in debased currency. As he complained to his brother-in-law, “I am now receiving a shilling in the pound in discharge of bonds which ought to have been paid me and would have been realized before I left Virginia, but for my indulgence to the debtors.”49 Washington estimated that personal losses occasioned by his absence from home had swollen to ten thousand pounds. Further embittering him was the selfish behavior of Jacky Custis, who stalled in settling debts to him so he could repay in cheaper currency. Washington, finally losing his temper, scolded his stepson: “You might as well attempt to pay me in old newspapers and almanacs, with which I can purchase nothing.”50 For political reasons, Washington accepted payment for land in Continental currency, so he wouldn’t be seen as questioning American credit, but by the summer of 1779 he could no longer afford these massive losses and discontinued the practice.

The previous winter Washington had been sufficiently confident of his troops to risk a six-week stay in Philadelphia, but he now felt compelled to stick close to his restive men, “to stem a torrent which seems ready to overwhelm us.”51 Reports from New York told of mutinous sentiments brewing among the militia for want of food, and Washington feared the contagion might spread to New Jersey. If Sir Henry Clinton invaded Morristown, the Continental Army would be easy prey. Clinton “is not ignorant of the smallness of our numbers,” Washington alerted New Jersey governor Livingston. “He cannot be insensible of the evils he would bring upon us by dislodging us from our winter quarters.”52 In mid-December he informed Congress that his army had gone for days without bread, making its prospects “infinitely worse than they have been at any period of the war and . . . unless some expedient can be instantly adopted, a dissolution of the army for want of subsistence is unavoidable.”53 For Washington, it was one crisis too many, straining already taut nerves. Worried that his army would simply disintegrate, he shed his stoic composure, and people began to gossip about his sulky moods. Nathanael Greene told Jeremiah Wadsworth, the commissary general, that Washington was in a “state [of] distress” and was blaming “everybody, both innocent and guilty.”54

As in previous winters, Washington was appalled by the lack of patriotism displayed by private citizens. He did not want to imitate British precedent and force nearby residents to house officers, but voluntary offers were not forthcoming. He reprimanded men who plundered food or livestock from local farms and warned his soldiers that “a night scarcely passes without gangs of soldiers going out of camp and committing every species of robbery, depredation, and the grossest personal insults. This conduct is intolerable and a disgrace to the army.” 55 On the other hand, he privately confessed that he felt powerless to stop this marauding.

Then on January 2, 1780, thick snow began to descend on Morristown, accompanied by fierce winds, and continued steadily for four days. It was a blizzard of such historic proportions, said James Thacher, that “no man could endure its violence many minutes without danger of his life.”56 Four feet of snow blanketed the winter camp and drifted to six feet in many places, sealing off the army from incoming supplies and compounding the misery of men shivering in their bunks. Before the winter was through, the Morristown encampment would be pounded by a record twenty-eight snowfalls. It would qualify as one of the most frigid winters on record, so severe that New York Bay crusted over with ice thick enough for the British to wheel cannon across it. Because the ice formed land bridges, Washington meditated a surprise attack on the British garrison at Staten Island. The plan was for 2,500 men under Lord Stirling to cross over from New Jersey, destroy British supplies, and carry off sheep and cattle. Washington, who must have dreamed of reliving the Delaware crossing on Christmas Night 1776, grew so enamored of this plan that he worried the cold snap would end, thawing the ice. The plan was shelved when the British picked up intelligence about it, eliminating the element of surprise. Washington promptly confiscated the caps and mittens issued to men who were to conduct the raid. The British were cooking up their own surprises. In February a British raiding party of three hundred men on horseback crept up stealthily on Morristown in an apparent plot to kidnap Washington. When they couldn’t traverse the deep snow, they turned back and abandoned the plan.

As a howling blizzard swirled around the Ford mansion, Washington filed a dreary report with Congress: “Many of the [men] have been four or five days without meat entirely and short of bread and none but on very scanty supplies.”57 Horror stories abounded of ill-clad men gnawing tree bark or cooking shoes or dining on pet dogs. Washington said his men were eating every kind of horse food but hay. As at Valley Forge, they were starving in the midst of fertile farming country, adding an extra dimension of tragic gloom to their suffering. As Greene lamented, “A country overflowing with plenty are now suffering an army, employed for the defense of everything that is dear and valuable, to perish for want of food.”58 Even forced requisitions didn’t alleviate the abominable situation. As late as April 12 Washington bewailed the perilous scarcity of food: “We have not at this day one ounce of meat, fresh or salt, in the magazine,” and he didn’t know of any carts loaded with meat rolling toward Morristown.59 Further aggravating matters was the fact that his army hadn’t been paid in months. Alexander Hamilton, never one to shy away from strong opinions, probably spoke for many soldiers when he wrote, “We begin to hate the country for its neglect of us.”60 The winter wasn’t a complete loss for Hamilton, who met and fell in love with his future wife, Elizabeth Schuyler, the daughter of General Schuyler. The young woman never forgot Martha Washington’s kindness: “She was quite short: a plump little woman with dark brown eyes, her hair a little frosty, and very plainly dressed for such a grand lady as I considered her . . . She was always my ideal of a true woman.”61