The Drillmaster of Valley Forge (11 page)

Supply presented the thorniest problems. Continental property was not accounted for. “The spoil and waste of tents, arms, ammunition, accoutrements and camp equipage” was ruinous.
¹⁸
Men whose enlistments had expired frequently took their muskets and equipment—all of it government property—home with them, while new recruits rarely had sufficient stocks of the same items.

And this was only the tip of the iceberg. The entire army was in an organizational shambles. It was to be expected that regiments were not even close to full strength; what was truly frustrating, though, was the fact that the sizes of individual regiments were so inconsistent. When an entire brigade was no bigger than a single regiment in another brigade, when one regiment consisted of five or six companies while another contained more than a dozen, it was almost impossible for the high command to estimate the strength of the army as a whole, let alone make intelligent plans for the coming campaign. Company and regimental officers were often completely ignorant of the whereabouts of their men.

Within Congress there existed a “mania for reform,” but nothing was actually done until November 1777, when the Board of War appointed Thomas Conway as the army's first inspector general. That appointment was actually a political move, an attempt to discredit Washington—and as it turned out, a futile gesture. Washington was predisposed to disregard anything Conway had to suggest.

Steuben filled a critical need at a critical time. His poor command of the language might be a temporary hindrance, but he had the requisite knowledge and experience. And he had another vital quality: a practical appreciation of the American character, remarkable for a man who had been in the country for so brief a time. “He seems to understand what our Soldiers are capable of,” John Laurens observed approvingly. He knew, in other words, that Americans were not Europeans. They were citizens, not subjects; if he were to achieve anything with them, he would have to take a different approach than he would if dealing with Prussian serfs. “[He] is not so starch a System
atist as to be averse from adapting established forms to stubborn Circumstances. He will not give us the perfect instructions absolutely speaking, but the best which we are in condition to receive.”
¹⁹

With or without Steuben, the army had to be reorganized
now
. Within a few short weeks the snows would thaw, the roads would dry, and the spring campaign would be upon them. “We want some kind of general Tutoring in this way so much,” John Laurens told his father, “that as obnoxious as Conway is to most of the Army, rather than take the Field without the advantages that might be derived from a judicious exercise of his office, I would wish every motive of dissatisfaction respecting him for the present to be suppressed.”
²⁰
The aide had hit upon the single obstacle to putting the Baron in charge: there already was an inspector general.

Yet over the next few weeks, the Baron made such a name for himself that all reservations about substituting him for the volatile Conway quickly evaporated. His broad grasp of military affairs could have made him appear intimidating, a condescending know-it-all, if he had had a different temperament; but when combined with his openhearted friendliness, his literary wit, and his simple desire just to be liked, his knowledge was well received by nearly everyone he met. He won over the army command just as he had the factionalized Congress. “The Baron Stüben has had the fortune to please uncommonly for a Stranger, at first Sight,” John Laurens wrote, proud of his new friend and mentor. “All the Gen
^l
Officers who have seen him are prepossessed in his favor and conceive highly of his Abilities.”
²¹

The congressional Committee in Camp also sought him out for his advice. Their leader, Francis Dana, consulted with Steuben on Washington's proposal to enlist Native Americans as an organized corps of light infantry, and at his request, the Baron gave Dana a detailed lesson on the use of “irregular” forces in European warfare—something Steuben knew a great deal about firsthand. Dana was enthralled by the Baron's analysis of the Austrian Grenzer, light infantry recruited in the border regions of Croatia, whom Steuben described as “a kind of White Indian.”
²²

But Steuben was not content with merely being accepted by his new comrades. He had to immerse himself in the social scene at camp, too, which was surprisingly vibrant. Officers of all grades made the best of their unpleasant circumstances, hosting dinner parties and “carousals” in the evenings, and the presence of so many generals' wives in the camp lent the whole an air of almost surreal gaiety amid the army's sufferings.

The Baron fit right in. Like most of the European-born officers, he became a regular guest at the table of Caty Greene, the vivacious spouse of Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene. Mrs. Greene, an incurable flirt who was fluent in French, took an immediate shine to Steuben. So, too, did Martha Washington and Kitty Alexander, the daughter of Maj. Gen. William Alexander, Lord Stirling. Men and women alike tended to find Steuben charming, but women in particular found his manner especially endearing. Several years later, when visiting with the prominent Livingston family of New York, the Baron was introduced to a young lady friend of the Livingstons. “I am very happy,” Steuben purred, “in the honor of being presented to you, Mademoiselle, though I see it is at an infinite risk. I have, from my youth, been cautioned to guard myself against mischief, but I had no idea that her attractions were so powerful.”
²³

In their first month at Valley Forge, the Baron and Duponceau attended a dinner engagement or party almost every night. Only rarely did Steuben stay in his quarters for an evening “at home” with his staff. When he did, it was not often a quiet evening. The Baron delighted in throwing his own parties for his American hosts. By pooling his rations with those of his staff and trading the surplus for little luxuries, he could present a relatively well-stocked table for his officer guests. He was anxious to make sure that junior officers were welcome, too. “Poor fellows,” he once remarked, “they have field officers' stomachs, without their pay or rations.”
²⁴

At the request of his aides, the Baron hosted a party exclusively for their lower-ranking friends. He insisted, though, that “none should be admitted that had on a whole pair of breeches,” making light of the
shortages that affected the junior officers as they did the enlisted men. His
Sansculottes
, he called them, “those without breeches”—the same name that would later be applied to radical republicans in the French Revolution—and never was there “such a set of ragged, and at the same time merry fellows” at Valley Forge. Duponceau led the group in singing a few raucous American songs he had learned, while the captains and lieutenants—including Lord Stirling's aide-de-camp, the future President James Monroe—indulged in the feast put together by Carl Vogel: “tough beefsteak and potatoes, with hickory nuts for our dessert.” Over this rough fare, and several rounds of a flaming high-proof concoction dubbed “Salamanders,” the Baron quickly earned a reputation as a bacchanalian lord of mirth. It was not the kind of behavior that the Continentals expected out of a Prussian nobleman, and they liked it. Only a couple of weeks into his stay, Steuben had already made himself a legend.
²⁵

 

T
HE
B
ARON SENSED
that he was accepted, that although he may not have made himself indispensable yet, he was seen as having the potential for it. For, less than a week after he rode into Valley Forge for the first time, he intentionally let it slip that he was not precisely the man everyone thought he was.

Thus far, he had told every American leader he met that he had no interest in rank or pay, and had made a great show of refusing even the humble rank of captain. He said the very same thing to Washington in their first interview. But by the end of February, he said something much different to John Laurens, with no attempt at secrecy: “The Baron proposes to take the rank of Major General with the pay, rations, &c.” This was no trifling ambition. “Major general” was the highest rank the Continental Army had to give; only Washington ranked higher. Such an appointment would put Steuben, who had been at Valley Forge for a matter of days, and in the United States for less than three months, on the same level as leaders who had been with the army from the very beginning of the war. He did not ask for
a field command—not
yet
—“as he is not acquainted with our lang[uage] and the genious of the people,” but that very sentiment implied that he intended to command troops in the field once he had established himself.
²⁶

He didn't stop there, but continued to compromise the packaging that had been so carefully designed for him by his backers in Paris. On March 9, he revealed—again to John Laurens—that he had never been a “lieutenant-general in Prussian service.” In Prussia, he said, he had never risen above the rank of colonel. It was another lie, just one of lesser magnitude. His generalship came not from Prussia but from Baden—another lie. Three days later, maybe forgetting the details of his latest untruth, he informed Henry Laurens that his commission came instead from the ineffectual army of the Holy Roman Empire, the
Reichsarmee
. There he had been a general commanding the “Circle of Swabia,” one of the ten administrative districts into which the Empire was divided.
*
This, too, was an unvarnished fabrication.
²⁷

Steuben was far too crafty to let something slip in an unguarded moment. His declarations were no accident—he
wanted
Washington and Congress to know. It was a form of professional damage control. A lieutenant general under Frederick the Great would have been a very high profile commander. Americans might be too parochial to know the names of Frederick's chief generals, but not so the many foreign officers—Prussians as well as French—who served in the Continental
Army. It was only a matter of time before Steuben's fictitious past would be discovered and denounced. By tweaking the details of his story, Steuben instantly gave himself a lower profile…and a past that would be much harder to debunk than the one that Deane, Franklin, and Beaumarchais had invented for him. By “outing” himself, chalking up his “error” to misunderstanding or miscommunication, he avoided the scandal that might have ensued had he been uncloaked by a hostile rival—like Thomas Conway.

Regardless of the details, either General Washington or President Laurens could have ejected Steuben then and there. The Baron had admitted, baldly and without apology, that he had been dishonest with both men and with Congress. He
did
desire rank and pay after all, and his credentials had been falsified. Yet neither Washington nor Laurens so much as batted an eye over the revelation—for they had already decided that Steuben's worth more than made up for his self-serving dishonesty.

 

D
URING HIS FIRST THREE WEEKS
at Valley Forge, Steuben was everywhere. He poked his aquiline nose into the leaky, mud-chinked log huts that served as barracks, talking briefly with individual soldiers, asking about their health, their rations, their officers, and all the minutiae of life in camp.

Staff officers rarely concerned themselves with such matters; almost never did they deign to listen to the men in the ranks. But the Baron did—to him, raised in the Prussian service, this was what good officers were supposed to do—and the men took notice of his genuine interest in their welfare. What really caught their attention, what brought them out of the near stupor into which hunger, boredom, and despair had driven them, was the Prussian's appearance. They emerged from their huts to watch him pass, usually on horseback and always dressed in his dark blue regimental coat and cloak, carefully bedecked with the Star of Fidelity, a barrel-chested man riding tall in his saddle. He did have a sword, but
more often he carried a straight, silver-headed swagger stick—called an
Exerzierstock
in German—which was all the fashion among Prussian officers. Azor would follow him, as would Duponceau and sometimes John Laurens or Alex Hamilton, translating Steuben's blunt but kindly interrogations into English.

In a different century, he might have appeared comically pompous, but here he inspired dumbstruck wonder. “Never before, or since, have I had such an impression of the ancient fabled God of War as when I looked on the baron,” wrote Ashbel Green, a sixteen-year-old private who would later serve as president of the College of New Jersey and chaplain to Congress. “He seemed to me a perfect personification of Mars. The trappings of his horse, the enormous holsters of his pistols, his large size, and his strikingly martial aspect, all seemed to favor the idea.”
²⁸

And Steuben found the men fascinating, too. He loved the attention he got from them. Most of all, he admired the resilience of the ordinary Continental soldiers. They lived in unbearable conditions and were terribly disorganized, nearly bereft of food or clothing, sometimes all but forgotten by absentee officers. Few had serviceable blankets, many were without shoes or breeches, with little more than a linen hunting frock and underdrawers to stand between their nakedness and the elements. Their rations looked bad enough on paper, but despite the Herculean efforts of the commissaries, they rarely lived up to the prescribed minimal standard. The men frequently went for days at a time without the smallest piece of salt meat or dried fish, subsisting mostly on “fire-cakes” made from flour and water. It was not an unusual sight to see groups of men boiling shoes and leather accoutrements in order to make them digestible.

The men huddled for warmth around their scattered campfires, listless eyes sunk deep in gaunt faces, staring up at Steuben as he passed by. They did not often have the energy or inclination to show him the deference to which he was accustomed, but this did not offend him. These soldiers seemed to have been abandoned by their country, and although their numbers had dwindled alarmingly, the fact that there were any men at all astounded him. As he later told one of his aides,
“no European army could have been kept together under such dreadful deprivations.”
²⁹