The Drillmaster of Valley Forge (29 page)

 

T
HE
B
RITISH PROVED
S
TEUBEN RIGHT
. Steuben had told Congress and the Board of War, again and again, that their neglect of the army was bound to encourage the enemy. It did. Deserters from Morristown, picked up by British patrols in New York and northern Jersey, told their captors of how badly the Continental Army had suffered
that winter and spring. There were only four thousand troops left in Morristown, they said, and those few were themselves on the verge of desertion, and had no fight left in them. The British commander in New York took this to heart, deciding that he would be irresponsible if he sat by and did not capitalize on the rebels' misery.

The British commander in New York was not actually British. He was Wilhelm, Reichsfreiherr zu Innhausen und Knyphausen, lieutenant general under Sir Henry Clinton and the ranking officer of all the German mercenaries commonly (if inaccurately) known as Hessians. Clinton had left him in command at New York while he went to reinforce Cornwallis in the south. He really had very little independent authority—Clinton treated him as just another division commander—but Knyphausen took it upon himself to take the initiative in Clinton's absence.
³⁷

Knyphausen anticipated an easy expedition. He would march toward Morristown, take up a position near Springfield on the first day's march, and force Washington to come out of his encampment and give battle. Since the Continentals had so few horses—so the Hessian general had heard from his informants—Washington would have to abandon most of his supplies.

The British-Hessian-Loyalist force did not quite reach their destination. Jersey militia turned out in unexpectedly high numbers, leaving their homes with musket in hand to contest the invasion. After hot fighting and a difficult march, Knyphausen withdrew his men back to Elizabethtown to observe the Americans and wait for a better opportunity.

Washington reacted quickly to the enemy incursion. On June 7, while the New Jersey militiamen were making life difficult for the Hessian light infantry, he prepared his army for battle. He would not abandon Morristown, but neither would he wait passively for the arrival of the enemy. Especially not for the Hessians. Deserved or not, the German auxiliary troops had earned a reputation for barbarism, and few things seemed to anger the rebels more than the imagined depredations of Hessian troops—except, perhaps, for those of the perfidious Loyalists.

The Baron de Steuben on horseback, ca. 1780–83. Steuben was a knowledgeable connoisseur of fine horses. His favorite stallion, Cincinnatus, attracted admiring comments in Virginia even when the Baron did not. The Baron sold Cincinnatus in late 1788 to pay off some of his debt.
(Library of Congress)

Washington mobilized several brigades for the march toward Springfield and Elizabethtown, grouping them into three divisions. The first line of troops was divided into two wings, one under Nathanael Greene, the other under Lafayette. The second line, consisting of the brigades of Edward Hand and John Stark, he entrusted to Steuben.
³⁸

The ensuing campaign was brief but not pointless, for Knyphausen, even if poorly served by his sources of intelligence, presented a real threat to the undermanned American army. The French had not yet arrived, and there was no guarantee that the French fleet would be able to penetrate the cordon of warships with which the British had sealed off the American coastline. If Knyphausen could deal Washington a stinging blow, he just might be able to shift quickly northward and wrest West Point from Washington's grasp.

After two days of marching, Steuben's division was handed over to the command of Lord Stirling, while the Baron himself was transferred to a position of greater responsibility and risk: commanding the advance guard, a mix of Jersey militia and Continental troops, including William Maxwell's brigade and Light-Horse Harry Lee's legion. With this force, Steuben was to scout Knyphausen's positions outside Elizabethtown. Washington anticipated that Knyphausen would either attack the Continentals outright or make a mad dash for the Hudson
and West Point. Either way, Steuben would act as his eyes and ears, and—in the case of an attack on the Continentals in New Jersey—his first line of defense, too.
³⁹

This was not a promising assignment. The Baron was firmly convinced that the real target of Knyphausen's onslaught was West Point, not Morristown, and he knew well that West Point was in no condition to withstand a determined assault. That was where he wanted to be, where he felt the decisive blow would fall.

The worst thing, however, was that he found himself commanding forces that did not quite live up to the standards he expected from soldiers. Within a few days of Knyphausen's retreat to Elizabethtown, the Jersey militia grew restless and bored, and soon they were straggling back to their homes. While making his rounds of the American advanced posts on the morning of June 20, the Baron found that two of these posts had been completely abandoned by the militia assigned to man them. He was dumbstruck that the militia could be so careless and negligent while Loyalists and Hessians were burning homes and farms in the countryside. “With a very inferior Force I have hitherto labor'd to keep at Bay an Army very respectable in their Numbers & prevented their ravaging your Country,” he wrote to the state governor, William Livingston. “I am liable however every moment to be defeated by those few Men who constitute my Command.” Feeling very ill, and fearful that his reputation as an officer would be destroyed not by his own actions but by the incompetence of the men under his command, Steuben begged Washington to send him to West Point instead. Washington, who agreed with the Baron's assessment of British intentions, complied immediately.
⁴⁰

Steuben's instincts were dead-on. While Knyphausen was holding tight at Elizabethtown, Clinton and his troops returned from Charleston, sailing into New York Harbor on the very same day that the Baron requested a transfer. Sir Henry was not the least bit pleased with Knyphausen's independent action, but he thought it wise to turn the New Jersey invasion to good use. He would reinforce Knyphausen's force, presenting an even greater threat to Morristown, and so enmire
the Continentals that a thrust up the Hudson toward West Point could be executed. Again Knyphausen's army surged forward, and again the offensive failed. Washington moved with the main body of the army to West Point, where Steuben was already helping to organize the small garrison and beef up the defenses. Greene's division remained behind, alone, in New Jersey. At Springfield, on June 23, the intrepid Rhode Islander and his men held off Knyphausen's assault in fine fashion, convincing the Hessian to give up and retreat to New York.

Greene was the one who took most of what little glory was to be gleaned from the anticlimactic Knyphausen invasion. The battle at Springfield, perhaps the most unjustly forgotten clash of the war, was a telling demonstration of the effectiveness of the revamped Continental Army in the hands of one of its star generals. It was also the only real pitched battle of the entire campaign. Steuben, by contrast, could not count himself quite so fortunate.

But it was not without significance. Washington had given him a field command, and not just the responsibility of moving troops. It was a sure mark of esteem from the commander in chief, a sign that Steuben had finally earned the trust that he thought he had won at Monmouth. Even better: none of the brigadier generals had complained about the Baron's preferment. He was no longer an inspector general with the rank of major general; he was one of Washington's generals, a bonafide and permanent battlefield commander in the Continental Army.

In a mere six months, Steuben would come to regret this with every fiber of his being.

W
HILE CONDUCTING INSPECTIONS
at West Point in early October 1780, the Baron de Steuben ran across a name in the muster rolls of the 3rd Connecticut Regiment that caught his eye. Inspection days were busy ones, without much time for idle banter, but Steuben found the man's name so intriguing that he simply had to investigate. As the regiment stood stiffly at attention, the inspector general summoned the man to report front and center. Jonathan Arnold, a twenty-three-year-old tenant farmer from East Hartford, stepped nervously to the front and saluted.

Only a couple of weeks before, the name “Arnold” would not have merited a second glance, but that had changed. On September 25, Benedict Arnold, one of Washington's favorite generals and the unsung hero of Saratoga, had tried to sell out West Point to the British. Arnold's treason was detected before any real damage could be done, but the act devastated Washington and infuriated the entire army. Steuben shared in the
communal, visceral hate. He sat on the court that tried Arnold's British accomplice, Maj. John André, as a spy. Like most of his comrades, Steuben admired the cultured, gentlemanly André, and would have far preferred to have seen Arnold, and not André, dangling from the gibbet at Tappan.

Somehow it struck Steuben as odd that another man from General Arnold's native state could possibly bear the same surname as the perfidious traitor. When Jonathan Arnold came before him that day, the Baron asked him how he could stand having such a name, as if it were a matter of choice. The terrified young soldier stammered out that he hated the name but didn't think he could do anything about it. Delighted at the response, Steuben put Arnold at his ease. Assuredly the name could be changed, he said, and offered “Steuben” as a substitute.
²

Neither man forgot the episode. As soon as he was discharged from the army in 1783, Jonathan Arnold petitioned the Connecticut General Assembly to change his name. “Pitying the misfortune of any person Friendly to the American cause” with that unspeakable name, Steuben supported the petition, and further asked the state of Connecticut to pay Arnold a lifetime pension of two dollars per month. The Baron and the Connecticut farmer, now Jonathan Arnold Steuben, would remain linked for the rest of their lives.
³

This kind of informal fellowship with the common soldier came easy to Steuben, especially now that he had accepted the fact that America was likely to be his permanent home. Two years before, the notion that he might never leave the New World would have struck him as inexpressibly depressing. His gentleman's agreement with St. Germain, assuring him of a commission in King Louis's army, had been his hope and his comfort. Only gradually did he come to realize that that hope had been but a phantom.

The sad truth was that France had forgotten him. St. Germain had died in January 1778, and any arrangement he had made with the Baron went to his grave with him. Beaumarchais no longer held much influence at court. Of those men privy to the deal, only Vergennes remained, and Vergennes did not care what became of Steuben.

The Baron searched both Gérard and Luzerne for any sign that he might have a future in France, but in vain. After escorting Luzerne from Boston in the summer of 1779, it finally dawned on him: “I saw that he knew nothing of me,” Steuben confided to his memoirs, “and that the French ministry had not informed him how it happened that I came to this country…. They had set me adrift and…I was to manage for myself as well as I could.”
⁴

That was a discouraging epiphany, but things could have been worse. Steuben had to admit that he
liked
America and Americans, and he had come to think of their Cause as his own. Historians and a few hostile contemporaries would later describe the Baron as a “mercenary” to whom the concept of liberty meant little. Such an assessment is both unfair and wrong. Like many educated Europeans of the Enlightenment, Steuben idolized Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire, men who sincerely believed in the equality of humankind and the sanctity of freedom. To him, as to Lafayette, the American bid for independence was a great experiment, one that would, he hoped, prove that these were not the mere musings of abstract philosophy.

The political progressive in him thought very highly of the
idea
of America. He was nobly born and proud of it, yet he found the lack of class distinctions in the New World wondrous. “What a beautiful, happy land is this, without kings, without high princes…and without idle barons…. Here we are in a republic and a baron does not count for more than any James or Peter,” he explained, with evident pride, to Chancellor Frank. “Our general of artillery [Henry Knox] was a book-printer in Boston—a worthy man who understands his craft from the bottom up, and who carries out his present position with much honor.”
⁵

He liked most politicians, too, but as individuals and not as officials. As a body, Congress left much to be desired, he thought: there were too many idealogues and self-seeking businessmen, too few realists who understood war. Congress's lack of authority perplexed him. What perplexed him even more was the unwillingness of the states to cooperate with one another when solidarity was vital for America's
survival. “In the moment when the most Vigorous exertions are necessary,” he ranted in exasperation in 1780, “the States instead of vying with each other [to see] who should do the most, observe a Contrary Conduct & calculate only to furnish the least to the general good.”
⁶

Steuben's assessment of American politics was not far off the mark. Nothing, however, could have prepared him for his firsthand experience of American democracy in 1781, when the shortcomings of American politics nearly resulted in the loss of an entire state.

 

A
S
K
NYPHAUSEN'S ARMY
receded sullenly from northern New Jersey, burning farmsteads as it went, Washington concentrated his forces in the Hudson Valley. Steuben was already in the mountains at West Point, helping Maj. Gen. Robert Howe to train new recruits and prepare the Point's defenses for a possible British attack. He reunited with Washington and the main army before the summer was out.

Steuben made his headquarters near Fishkill, New York, in the modest, one-story stone farmhouse of Hendrick Kip. There, he and the core of his staff—Walker, North, and Duponceau's replacement, Lt. James Fairlie—inspected the small bands of recruits trickling in from New England and New York, and resumed the training that had been so rudely interrupted by the Hessian Knyphausen. But the Baron didn't mind the brigade drills and inspections that started each morning at five o'clock. He loved the Hudson Valley above all the places he had fought or camped; the views of the broad river from Fishkill Landing, and of the mountains to the west beyond, calmed and invigorated him. And at the Kip house he had plenty of room for entertaining guests, which he did almost nightly. “Notwithstanding the scarcity of provisions in the camp,” one of those guests noted with approval, “the Baron's table continues to be well-supplied; his generosity is unbounded.”
⁷

More exciting than the idyllic landscape and the social life was the promise of action to come. Rochambeau's first expeditionary corps of French royal troops had made landfall in Newport in mid-July. There
would be battle soon—maybe not this year, but undoubtedly in the spring—and as a division commander, a
real
major general, Steuben would be in the thick of it.

As eager as Washington was to oust the British from New York, he and his generals agreed that the time was not yet right. The British fleet still controlled the seas, trapping Rochambeau in Rhode Island, and the Continental Army remained quite small. Developments in the south were not at all encouraging. On August 16, Horatio Gates, the darling of Congress, fled in terror as Lord Cornwallis destroyed his army just north of Camden, South Carolina. The battle ruined Gates's career, but more important, it all but gave the Carolinas to the British.

Content, and with time on his hands, Steuben drew up plans for the creation of a corps of light infantry based on the ideas of the French tactician Guibert: selected from the most agile, physically fit, and intelligent veterans in each regiment, the light infantry would be specially trained as shock troops for special operations like Stony Point. He also tried to fine-tune the administrative procedures practiced by the army. In the Prussian, Austrian, and French armies—the only armies worthy of emulation, in Steuben's view—the commanding general met daily with all of his subordinate generals as a group, but in the Continental Army “the Commander in Chief…does not see the General Officers as often as he should.” This bad habit came from British practice, and just because the British did it “certainly cannot justify any thing which is in itself absurd.” Henry Knox, who had come to be Steuben's best friend among the generals, warned him that Washington might take “umbrage” at the blunt criticism of his leadership style, but Steuben was unconcerned. He knew he was secure in the commander's esteem, and saw no reason to mince words.
⁸

But the pleasant late summer could not last forever. Congress had just resurrected the incorporation plan. That might have been alarming news in other circumstances, but the Board of War had taken a different approach this time. The loss of Charleston and Gates's disgrace at Camden had humbled Congress, so when Washington dictated his ideas on army reorganization, Congress hushed to listen. In
Washington's plan, the number of infantry regiments would be reduced only slightly, the number of men per regiment increased, and the army—not Congress—would determine which officers would have to be dismissed. Retired officers, like their brethren who served throughout the war, would be granted half-pay for life. And Congress
must
pressure the states for more recruits. It was a bold proposal. Anticipating a fight, Washington sent Steuben back to Independence Hall in October 1780 to defend the plan.

Steuben went, with a certain amount of dread, but much to his surprise there was almost no wrangling except over the issue of half-pay. After only a few days of negotiation, the Baron could report back to Washington that Congress had accepted the proposal “without Alteration.”
⁹

On the very same day, Washington had news of his own for the Baron. The commander in chief had made a decision that would radically alter Steuben's role in the war. On October 22, 1780, Washington nominated Nathanael Greene to replace Horatio Gates as commander in the Southern Department, where he would rebuild the army and try to slow the northward advance of Lord Cornwallis. Accompanying Greene as his second-in-command would be the Baron de Steuben.
¹⁰

 

W
ASHINGTON WAS WILLING
to part with two of his most prized subordinates because he was deadly serious about the southern theater of operations. There was nothing to keep Cornwallis from sweeping through the Carolinas and into Virginia—and that would be a catastrophe. If Virginia fell, then Clinton and Cornwallis could envelop Washington's army in a giant pincers, crushing it and ending the war. Of all of Washington's generals, only Greene had the command instinct and the fire to take a swing at Cornwallis, and only Steuben had the ability to fashion a functioning army out of virtually nothing.

“To the Southward there is an army to be created,” Washington informed Steuben, “the mass of which is at present without any forma
tion at all.”
¹¹
It was no exaggeration. Most of the Continental troops in the South had been lost with Savannah and Charleston, and the small remainder had been chewed up and spat out by the British at Camden. It would be Steuben's assignment to raise and train a new Continental force, and—more challenging—to get some useful service out of the southern state militias.

Orders in hand, General Greene went to Philadelphia to receive Congress's blessing and to consult with Steuben. Four days later, on November 3, 1780, the two men and their staffs set off for Virginia as quickly as they could. Joining them, over Steuben's initial objections, was Duponceau. The young Frenchman had been suffering terribly from consumption, and his doctors had condemned him to death, but he insisted on accompanying his master anyway. “Very well,” Steuben conceded, “you shall follow me, and I hope that you will either recover your health or die an honourable death.”
¹²

The group paused briefly at Mount Vernon, where Martha Washington greeted them as old friends. Steuben loved Mrs. Washington, whom he knew well from many gatherings at the Potts house in Valley Forge, but he was unimpressed with the Washington estate. “If General Washington were not a better general than he was an architect,” he told the ailing Duponceau with a wink, “the Affairs of America would be in a very bad condition.”
¹³

 

A
CTUALLY
, the affairs of America
were
in a very bad condition, and the greatest troubles were within Virginia.

Greene and Steuben did not plan to stay very long in Washington's home state, for their tasks there were very simple: assess the strategic situation, make sure that local defenses were adequate, take whatever Continental recruits and supplies they found, proceed to South Carolina. But from the intelligence they garnered along their journey to the new state capital at Richmond, it appeared that their business in Virginia might be a bit more complicated than they had anticipated. Before they had even left Philadelphia, Maj. Gen. Alexander Leslie
and 2,200 Redcoats had sailed into Chesapeake Bay, disembarked, and seized the towns of Portsmouth and Suffolk. The British “invasion,” if it could be called that, caused little damage and did not last for very long. On November 16, the very same day that Greene and Steuben rode into Richmond, Leslie's corps boarded their transports again and left for Charleston.