The Glorious Cause - An Army from Nothing

American Political History · Apr 7, 2025 · 28m

In July 1775, George Washington rode into Cambridge to take command of the army that would win American independence, and found that the army did not exist. What he had instead was a great armed crowd of New England militia, brave but undisciplined, filthy, dissolving, and, as he would discover a month later, almost entirely out of gunpowder.

This is the story of how the Continental Army was built from nothing, and how close it came, again and again, to never being built at all. Washington keeps a terrifying secret about his empty magazines. Disease kills nine men for every one the British…