- Historic Sites
The Winter Soldiers,
December 1973 | Volume 25, Issue 1
That was the end of the campaigning in 1776. Washington went into winter quarters and waited for a spring that would bring new hardships. Most of his soldiers went home, to be replaced by unpromising recruits. But now, for the rest of the war, there would be among these green men a leavening of veterans who had seen Hessians surrender and British regulars run from a pitched battle and who would not forget the sight. As Ketchum writes, “The Americans’ revolution survived—survived in some mysterious way that no one could quite fathom—in no small part because of what George Washington and his soldiers achieved against all the odds that nature and a vastly superior military force could pit against them. … Because of their accomplishments, the waning days of 1776 were not the end of everything, but a new beginning.”
The Winter Soldiers is the story of the men who brought about that new beginning; it is a story that cannot be told too often and has rarely been told so well.