The Potts Prayer Story

The best known image of George Washington at Valley Forge, the general kneeling alone in prayer, rests on a single witness: Isaac Potts, a Quaker who owned the house beside Valley Creek that Washington used as his headquarters during the encampment of 1777 and 1778. Potts ran a grist mill at Valley Forge, where his brother David had a share in the ironworks. The story was put into print by Mason Locke Weems, the early biographer of Washington, and it appears in editions of his Life of Washington from the early 1800s on. In the story Potts, a Quaker opposed to the war, came upon the commander kneeling alone in the woods, and a later family account ends with Potts saying that if George Washington be not a man of God, he was mistaken.

A second version, in the diary of the Presbyterian minister Nathaniel Randolph Snowden, has Potts hearing a plaintive sound in the woods about a quarter of a mile off and finding Washington on his knees, his sword on one side and his cocked hat on the other. Potts told Snowden he had been a rank Tory until then and afterwards became a Whig, although Snowden called him John rather than Isaac.

No contemporary record supports the scene. Isaac Potts spent most of that winter around Pottstown rather than at Valley Forge. In 1918 the Valley Forge Park Commission refused a request for a marker on the supposed spot, after searching the papers of Washington, his staff and his officers and finding not a single paragraph to substantiate it. The image lived on in Henry Brueckner's 1866 painting, in a two-cent Valley Forge stamp issued in 1928, and in the words of Ronald Reagan, who called it the most sublime picture in American history and invoked it for the 1982 National Day of Prayer.