Starve, Dissolve or Disperse: The Commissary Department That Fed Valley Forge

On December 23, 1777, with the army encamped at Valley Forge, George Washington wrote to Henry Laurens, President of the Continental Congress. Unless some great change came suddenly to the Commissary Department, he warned, his army must be reduced to one of three things:

Starve—dissolve—or disperse, in order to obtain subsistence in the best manner they can….

What the department did

The Commissary Department bought, packed and distributed food and supplies for the Continental Army. Unlike the Quartermaster Department, which the army controlled, it answered directly to Congress. Commissaries were paid a salary plus a commission on what they bought.

Buying was organized by region: Eastern (Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire), Northern (New York), Middle (New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland) and Southern (Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia).

What a soldier was promised

What they got

Often less. Joseph Plumb Martin wrote that on arriving at Valley Forge he spent "two nights and one day and had not a morsel of anything to eat all the time, save half a small pumpkin."

The army's appetite was enormous: from December 1777 to February 1778 it consumed more than 2,225,000 pounds of beef, 2,974,000 pounds of flour and 500,000 gills of rum and whiskey. But New Jersey and Pennsylvania had little spare food or forage after the campaigns already fought there. Buchanan spent most of his energy dealing with Congress in York, Pennsylvania, left the details to subordinates, and had little grasp of how much the army actually needed. Distance, other troops drawing on the same states, inflation and poor cooperation made it worse — Pennsylvania alone had three competing sets of buyers: Congress's commissioners, the Board of War's and the state's own.

The crisis peaked in early to mid-February 1778, when a visiting committee of Congress called the prospects for provisions "truly alarming."

The turnaround

By spring 1778, food was flowing without interruption. Buchanan resigned in March, and the new Quartermaster General, Nathanael Greene, replaced him with Jeremiah Wadsworth. Wadsworth worked closely with purchasing agents, above all Ephraim Blaine of Pennsylvania, who drove cattle to camp from the far southern reaches of the Middle Department. Shortages recurred through the war, but under Wadsworth and Blaine they were few and far between.

Jeremiah Wadsworth, Commissary General of the Continental Army from April 1778.

Sources

Based on "The Commissary Department," National Park Service, Valley Forge National Historical Park, citing E. Wayne Carp, To Starve the Army at Pleasure (1984); Joan Marshall (1983); Joseph Plumb Martin's memoir; Erna Risch, Supplying Washington's Army (U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1981); and Jacqueline Thibaut (Valley Forge National Historical Park, 1982); a work of the United States government in the public domain.