A Private Soldier's Winter

Joseph Plumb Martin was nineteen years old during the Hard Winter at Morristown. He had already served three years in the Continental Army — long enough to lose any illusions about glory. What he had not lost was the ability to observe, to remember, and eventually to write it all down.

The winter of 1779-80 began badly and got worse. Martin and his regiment arrived at Jockey Hollow in December to find nothing prepared: no huts, no food, no firewood cut. They slept on frozen ground while building their shelters. The huts, when finished, were barely adequate — twelve feet by sixteen, housing twelve men, with a single fireplace that smoked more than it heated.

Then the blizzards came. Twenty-eight storms between November and April. Snow piled to six feet. The roads became impassable, and with them went any hope of regular supply. Martin recorded what they ate when they ate at all: a handful of rice, some rotting meat, bark stripped from birch trees. On some days, nothing.

"We were absolutely, literally starved," Martin wrote. "I do solemnly declare that I did not put a single morsel of victuals into my mouth for four days and as many nights." This was not poetic exaggeration. Other accounts confirm the scale of the deprivation.

What kept him there? Martin never provides a simple answer. He was angry — at Congress, at civilians who profited from the war, at a system that asked everything of soldiers and provided nothing in return. He considered deserting. Many did. But he stayed, and in staying he became part of something he could not have named at the time: a collective act of endurance that preserved the possibility of American independence through its darkest winter.

Decades later, writing his memoir as an old man in Maine, Martin reflected on Morristown without sentiment. He did not claim his suffering was noble. He did not dress it in patriotic language. He simply told the truth: that he and his fellow soldiers survived because they chose to, day after day, when choosing to leave would have been easier and perhaps wiser.