Welcome to the American story. Stories about what it is that makes America beautiful, heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and endlessly interesting. This is Chris Flannering with the Claremont Institute. I call this one, The Fate of Liberty, New Year, 1777

On New Year's Day, 1777, Robert Morris, Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress,

wrote from Philadelphia to commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, George Washington,

who was deployed with his army in a defensive

position 35 miles away near Trenton, New Jersey.

Morris wrote, The year 1776 is over. I am heartily glad of it, and hope you nor America

will ever be plagued with such another.

There were many reasons to be heartily glad that the year 1776 was over.

Chief among them, the crushing setbacks and hardships that had plagued Washington's armies since independence was declared six months before.

From August to the last week of December, as David McCullough writes,

1776 had been as dark a time as those devoted to the American cause had ever known.

As the year ended, despite the stunning and historic victory at Trenton the day after Christmas,

there was good reason to fear that Washington's army

would dissolve, and with it, any hopes for the American cause. One New England regiment was

representative of the desperate state of the army on which the fate of the American Revolution depended.

A sergeant in that regiment reports what he observed on New Year's Eve.

Our troops, he writes, were in a destitute and deplorable condition.

Neither the horses nor the men had shoes.

On the last day of December, 1776, time for which I and the rest of my regiment had enlisted, expired.

At this trying time, General Washington ordered our regiment to be paraded and personally addressed us,

urging that we should stay a month longer.

He told us that our services were greatly needed, and that we could now do more for our country

...