LACK OF ADEQUATE CLOTHING.
Not even good soldiers warmly clothed could be expected to endure this ordeal by weather without some complaint. How much more agonizing, then, was such a winter for Washington’s men in Jockey Hollow, who were again poorly clad! A regimental clothier in the Pennsylvania Line referred to some of the troops being “naked as Lazarus.” By the time their huts were completed, said an officer in Stark’s Brigade, not more than 50 men of his regiment could be returned fit for duty, and there was “many a good Lad with nothing to cover him from his hips to his toes save his Blanket.” As late as March, when “an immense body of snow” still remained on the ground, Dr. Thacher wrote that the soldiers were “in a wretched condition for the want of clothes, blankets and shoes.”