Welcome to the American Story. Stories about what it is that makes America beautiful.

Heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannery with the Clermont Institute.

I call this one.

The Fate of Liberty

American New Year 1777

On 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

Army 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.

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