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Essay On If You Were A Soldier At Valley Forge

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To Stay, or Not to Stay? You’re in a white, smokey room that you call your home, shivering in cold, and hearing your stomach growl of starvation. You sit here for six brutal months, just to go out and fight in a battle after. These were the conditions for George Washington and his army when they arrived at Valley Forge in December 1777. Washington and his army were there for six months, many sick or on the verge of dying. If you were a soldier at Valley Forge, would you have abandoned your army, or would you have re-enlisted? If I was in this situation, I would have re-enlisted, because Thomas Paine wrote to persuade the soldiers to stay, George washington and the Congressional Committee were supporting us, and healthy soldiers were desperately needed. …show more content…

From the engraved painting in document B, you can see that George Washington is introducing the men of the Congressional Committee to his soldiers. This also shows that Washington is putting in the effort for his army, and plans on staying with them (Document B). Having Washington, the soldiers’ leader, put in the effort to help his men through these hard times would make me, as his soldier, want to be more loyal to him. This would result in me staying with him throughout the rest of the war, after Valley Forge. The final reason I would re-enlist is that if you were a healthy soldier, you were desperately needed in the war. When reading the information provided in document A, you can see that during Valley Forge, around 1,800 - 2,500 soldiers died due to illness. Also, in the month of December, about one-fourth of the soldiers became sick, and in February, about one-half of the soldiers were sick. This would cause less and less soldiers to come back since they were in poor conditions. This means that if I happened to be one of the healthy, or less sick, soldiers, I would re-enlist in the war to keep

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