The Drillmaster of Valley Forge (3 page)

In the “linear tactics” employed by eighteenth-century armies, success depended on two qualities in the infantry: first, the ability of individual soldiers to load and fire their muskets quickly and efficiently, combined with the restraint to withhold their fire until commanded to unleash it by their officers (a concept known as “fire discipline”); second, the ability of the infantry battalions to change formations precisely and without losing cohesion, even in the heat and fury of battle. The latter quality was necessary for an army to change from column of march to line of battle, even in the face of the enemy. Speed of fire allowed the Prussian infantry to maintain something resembling a continuous rolling thunder of musketry. Prussian infantrymen were trained to load and fire not only in stationary lines, three ranks deep, but also while marching rapidly forward or in retreat—no small feat, given the limitations of the flintlock musket. A musketeer in the Prussian army was expected to be able to load his weapon in the space of eleven seconds, enabling him to keep up a rate of fire (counting the time it took to aim the musket and pull the trigger) of at least four rounds per minute.

Things rarely went as smoothly on the battlefield as they did on the parade grounds of Potsdam, but still the Prussian infantry excelled both at speed of fire and at skill in maneuvering. No European army could approach the precision with which Frederick's infantry moved on the battlefield. One British observer noted, with gape-mouthed admiration, that while Prussian troops appeared slow and methodical to the untrained eye, “yet they are so accurate that no time being lost in dressing or correcting distances, they arrive sooner at their object than any others, and at the instant of forming they are in perfect order to make the attack.” The remarkable discipline of his infantry made it possible for Frederick to pull off amazing tactical feats. At the battle of Leuthen (December 5, 1757), the king's army of thirty-five thousand men managed to outmaneuver, outflank, and ultimately crush a well-fortified Austrian army three times its size.
¹⁶

 

F
RIEDRICH VON
S
TEUBEN'S CAREER PATH
after Prague was anything but conventional. After his convalescence, he volunteered for a post as a staff officer in one of the king's new light infantry units, the so-called “Free Battalions” (
Freibataillone
). The Free Battalions were not used as line infantry, but rather for scouting, reconnaissance, and raiding. Ill-disciplined and prone to riotous behavior, they were notoriously difficult to command; the men of one of the Free Battalions murdered their commanding officer in 1761 and then the battalion defected en masse to the enemy. By serving as adjutant of Free Battalion No. 2 (under General Johann von Mayr), Steuben risked both his reputation and his life. But he did well. A fellow officer in the unit later saluted him as “an able and pleasant officer.”
¹⁷

It was in the Free Battalion that Steuben experienced his second major battle. While holding off the Austrian and Russian armies to the east with a small screening force, Frederick's main army—only around twenty-two thousand strong—lunged west, making a forced march of almost two hundred miles in less than two weeks, to confront an allied force of French troops and Imperial levies (the
Reich-
sarmee
). The French had a numerical advantage of almost two to one, but Frederick's generalship made up the difference. At the village of Rossbach, on November 5, 1757, Frederick's cavalry hit the French cavalry hard, driving them from the field, while the Prussian infantry deployed quickly into line of battle and hurled themselves at the Franco-Imperial infantry while the latter were still in marching columns. The French and Imperial troops, caught in a vicious crossfire, panicked and fled in confusion, while Frederick's rear guard—including the Mayr Free Battalion—mopped up the shattered survivors. It was one of Frederick's tactical masterpieces, and the casualties told the story: the Prussians suffered fewer than five hundred casualties altogether, while the Franco-Imperial army lost five thousand killed or wounded and nearly as many taken prisoner.

Steuben remained with Mayr's Free Battalion until sometime in 1759, and from there his star rose rapidly. General J. D. von Hülsen, commanding a brigade in the army of Frederick's brother, Prince Henry, selected the now-veteran lieutenant to serve on his staff as a
Brigade-Offizier
, a sure sign that Steuben had by now attracted the attention of senior commanders. The staff appointment was a flattering mark of recognition, but it did not remove him from danger. Far from it. Two more battles faced him—in fact, two of the worst bloodbaths in the glorious history of the Prussian army: Kay, on July 23, 1759, and Kunersdorf, on August 12, 1759. In both cases, the Prussians, severely weakened by heavy losses from fighting three major armies simultaneously during three years of constant campaigning, were mauled by combined Austro-Russian armies. The action at Kunersdorf very nearly resulted in the complete destruction of the main Prussian army, the capture of King Frederick, and the loss of Berlin. Here Steuben received yet another wound, as did both his king and his general, Hülsen. At least he was rewarded for his pains with a promotion to the rank of first lieutenant in November 1759.

At Hülsen's side, Lieutenant von Steuben fought in at least two more desperate battles against the Austrians (Liegnitz, on August 15, 1760, and Torgau, November 3, 1760), but by then his administrative
abilities, physical courage, and good nature had brought him to the attention of Prince Henry, who was always on the lookout for new talent—especially, it was rumored, if that talent came in the form of a handsome young officer. Whatever the nature of their relationship, it paid immediate dividends for Steuben. In May 1761, the lieutenant was officially transferred from the muster rolls of the Lestwitz Regiment to what was called the “Royal Suite,” the king's personal headquarters, and given temporary duty as a
Quartiermeister-Lieutenant
. In this capacity, he would assist King Frederick and his staff with intelligence and strategic planning. It was a dream job for a thirty-year-old company officer.

But the army was suffering from an acute dearth of experienced officers. The campaigns of 1757–60 had claimed an unspeakable toll in officers and men. While losses in the rank and file could be made good from more intensive recruiting within Prussia, officers were much harder to replace. Regardless of his personal preferences, Steuben would have to go where he was needed, and so his tenure in the Royal Suite was soon over. Later, in the summer of 1761, the king assigned him to the staff of General J. von Platen, commanding the ill-fated Prussian forces fighting against the Russians in the northeastern theater of operations. That didn't last long, either. When Platen's army, outmanned and in sorry shape, surrendered to superior Russian forces at Treptow in October 1761, Steuben marched with his fellow officers into captivity at St. Petersburg.

Even as a prisoner of war, however, Steuben found that his luck had not run out. As an officer with high-ranking connections, he was entitled to comfortable accommodation and a great deal of freedom while in Russia. He turned this to his advantage, and aided by the speaking knowledge of Russian he had acquired during his childhood in the realm of the tsars, he made powerful friends—not the least of whom was Karl Peter Ulrich, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp and heir to the throne of Russia. The duke was not a likeable man, his personality being as unattractive as his smallpox-scarred face, but he had an affinity for all things Prussian. Steuben thought it a friendship worth culti
vating, and his instincts proved correct. When the duke's aunt, Tsarina Elisabeth, died in January 1762, Steuben wasted no time. He wrote in haste to King Frederick's foreign minister with news that was almost too good to be true: Karl Peter Ulrich, now Tsar Peter III, was eager to discuss peace terms with his personal idol the Prussian king. Old Fritz was delighted with this unexpected development, for Russian troops occupied a large chunk of Prussian territory and held the capital at Berlin. A lenient peace settlement with the new tsar could well prove to be the difference between life and death for Prussia.

Steuben found that it was not a bad thing to be the bearer of good tidings. Frederick wrote to him personally to thank him for his unofficial diplomatic efforts. When Frederick's emissary to Tsar Peter arrived in St. Petersburg, Steuben stayed on as his assistant. The mission was an unqualified success. Tsar Peter made peace with Frederick, pulled his troops out of Prussia, and Frederick's most dangerous enemy was out of the war for good. With Russia gone, Austria and France could not keep up their war against Prussia for very long. The peace was a godsend for Prussia. And it worked out well for Steuben, too. He had exchanged several letters with the king himself and had played a personal role in saving Prussia from what seemed at the time to be certain destruction. When he returned to Prussia in May 1762, the king received him in person. It is hard to imagine a more fortuitous turn of events for an ambitious junior officer. The Fates would surely favor him now.
¹⁸

And they did…for a while. The war with Russia was over; the wars with Austria and France, drawing to a close. King Frederick had some much-needed breathing space, and to make up for the wartime loss of so many talented generals, he decided to devote some of his time to the making of new ones. He did this through the creation of a rudimentary staff school—the “Special Class on the Art of War” (
Spezialklasse der Kriegskunst
)—an intensive course in generalship that he himself would teach. Thirteen students were carefully selected from the up-and-coming leaders of the army, to be schooled in the higher levels of strategic planning and army leadership. And Steuben, just recently promoted to captain, was one of them. At thirty-one, he was
being groomed for a general's rank, with the greatest soldier of the age as his personal tutor.

But something went horribly wrong. Steuben ran afoul of a classmate: as he himself put it, he had earned the “rancor” of an “implacable enemy.” Most likely Captain von Steuben was referring to General Wilhelmi von Anhalt, a jealous, vindictive, and brutal misanthrope, who for some perverse reason stood high in the king's favor. Anhalt had gained a justly deserved reputation for wrecking the careers of officers for whom he had taken a dislike—and there were many of them. Whatever or whoever authored Steuben's fall from grace, it happened in the blink of an eye. Steuben finished the staff school around the time the war with Austria ended, in February 1763, and found himself almost immediately demoted. He was assigned to a company command in the Infantry Regiment von Salmuth (No. 48), stationed at Wesel, on the far western edge of the kingdom, a humble post in a mediocre regiment, and at a remote location. It was clearly
not
a mark of royal favor. Only a couple of months later, he was dismissed from the service entirely. After residing for a while in Berlin, he left Prussia sometime before the end of 1763.

It is still impossible to determine exactly what happened to the promising career of Captain von Steuben. He did not blame his misfortune on the king, whom he still mentioned years later with the purest reverence. It is true that the king radically pared back the size of the army upon the conclusion of peace in 1763, as a matter of economy, and so it is possible that Steuben was the victim of nothing more insidious than “downsizing.” Yet that does not seem to be a logical explanation. Even as he mused over his life during his twilight years, Steuben found the events of 1763 almost too painful to contemplate, much less to discuss in writing.

“Of my service in the Seven Years' War, I have no reason to be ashamed,” Steuben proclaimed many years later. Indeed, he could be—and was—quite proud of it. After his arrival in America more than fourteen years later, he would frequently tell his new acquaintances that he had studied war in the finest school in the world. He
didn't just mean the king's
Spezialklasse
, but the entire range of experiences that the Prussian army had bequeathed to him. He had been an NCO, a company commander, an adjutant, a general in training, and a junior diplomat. He had trained raw recruits, led an infantry company into battle, and served on staffs at the battalion, regimental, brigade, and army levels. He had watched his men die, and in turn he had been wounded in battle twice, so he knew what it was like to fall in combat.

But what set Steuben apart from his contemporaries was his schooling under Frederick the Great, Prince Henry, and a dozen other general officers. He had learned from the best soldiers in the world how to gather and assess intelligence, how to read and exploit terrain, how to plan marches, camps, battles, and entire campaigns. He gleaned more from his seventeen years in the Prussian military than most professional soldiers would in a lifetime. In the Seven Years' War alone, he built up a record of professional education that none of his future comrades in the Continental Army—Horatio Gates, Charles Lee, the Baron Johann de Kalb, and Lafayette included—could match.

But in the summer of 1763, Captain von Steuben, of course, was unaware of any future use to which his extensive education and considerable talents might be put. All he knew then was that he had given his all to the army. He had known no other world. Perhaps it would have been more merciful if he had remained a company commander all his life. Instead, he had been given a taste, just a taste, of a glorious future in the service of his king, only to have it taken away from him just at the moment when that future looked most promising. Since his paper credentials did not match his actual experience, he was just another mediocrity, just another minor officer who had been cast aside by the fortunes of war. At age thirty-three, Steuben's life appeared to be over.

W
ITHOUT THE ARMY
, Friedrich von Steuben was lost.

The Prussian army had practically owned him from birth. It had consumed his childhood and his adolescence. As soon as he was physically able, he had joined it, for he knew no other life, and because that's what young Prussian noblemen did. And when the army had finished with him, it spat him out ungratefully.

When, in his declining years, Steuben recounted, for posterity and Congress, the events of his life in Europe, he downplayed his desperate condition in 1763. He had all sorts of options, he said: he could have retired to a life of ease on his estates in southwestern Germany; he could have accepted a commission in the army of Piedmont-Sardinia. He settled, instead, for the cushy life of a courtier.

In reality, Steuben's life followed a much different course. The truth was that he had no estates, in southwestern Germany or elsewhere; he owned nothing and had no prospects.
“My adverse fate,” he once admitted in a rare unguarded moment, “forced me to leave my fatherland, my friends, and my support, and perhaps renounce them for life.”
²
He was adrift in a Europe at peace, where his calling counted for little, and he was willing to pounce on any job that his honor would permit him to take. After wandering aimlessly for the better part of a year—just how he got by is anyone's guess—he finally found such a job: in the autumn of 1764, he took the post of court chamberlain (
Hofmarschall
) to the sovereign prince of Hohenzollern-Hechingen.

That summer, his travels took him to Wildbad, a picturesque little town nestled in the northern portion of the Black Forest, remote but highly popular with the powerful and well-to-do in southwestern Germany, who were drawn to the healing properties of its springs. Most likely, that was what drew Steuben there—not the spa itself, but its fashionable clientèle, who that fall included an old friend from the Prussian army, Prince Friedrich Eugen of Württemberg, one of Frederick's generals. Accompanying the duke was his consort, Margravine Friederike Dorothea, twenty-seven-year-old niece of the Prussian king. A beautiful, vivacious, and learned woman, she was also quite lonely, so the presence of the courtly Steuben provided her with a pleasant diversion. The two hit it off immediately. Soon she introduced him to another guest at Wildbad: Josef Friedrich Wilhelm, the Catholic prince of a tiny German territory called Hohenzollern-Hechingen, a small portion of the original ancestral lands of Prussia's ruling dynasty. With Friederike's help, and bearing a testimonial from Prince Henry of Prussia, Steuben persuaded Prince Josef to hire him as chamberlain for his modest residence at the town of Hechingen.
³

The post came as a great relief to Steuben. It wasn't much, but it was infinitely better than nothing at all. Hohenzollern-Hechingen was a genuinely minuscule German state. Its capital, the town of Hechingen, was small, slow-paced, and pretty; the prince's palace, the Altes Schloss, was a modest whitewashed structure that might have been mistaken for a city hall in a larger German town. Steuben's position there was not a demanding one. A
Hofmarschall
was not a political
figure but rather a member of the prince's personal staff, a sort of social secretary and manager of the princely household. He supervised the daily administration of the court and its personnel, advising his master on matters of economy and personal finance, and was responsible for the education and rearing of the prince's children. For Steuben, who loved parties, being at the center of the social scene at court was no small attraction.

He fit in well, fast becoming a trusted member of the prince's family. And he made friends, many friends, foremost among them the prince's ranking minister, Chancellor Daniel Marianus Frank. Because of his central position in the household, Steuben soon came to know influential men from neighboring courts as well. Yet he was never quite comfortable there. The duties bored him, and being fully aware of his ineptitude in handling his own money, he was reluctant to watch over the prince's finances. After Chancellor Frank asked him repeatedly to take over the management of the court accounts, Steuben stubbornly refused. “You know full well, my dearest friend,” he wrote Frank, “and I do not conceal it from anybody, that in the management of my own affairs I have always been…careless…. It would be ridiculous to load upon my shoulders the management of another, and by far more considerable, household.”
⁴

Not that there was much for him to manage. The prince was so heavily saddled with debt that in late 1771, he decided to dissolve his household temporarily. Chancellor Frank would watch over affairs in Hechingen, while the prince, his family, and his chamberlain would take a brief sojourn in southern France. There they would live, incognito, as private citizens, unencumbered by the burden of hospitality.

For the next three and a half years, Steuben and the princely family would live in self-imposed fiscal exile, first at Strasbourg and then at Montpellier. It was a disaster, at least from a financial standpoint. The prince was unable to hide his identity for long, and therefore was still compelled to entertain innumerable dinner guests with all due ceremony and munificence. “Our incognito,” Steuben reported to Chancellor Frank in dismay, “is a laughable masquerade.”
⁵
The chamberlain
didn't mind Strasbourg all that much, for it was both a university town and a fortress with a large garrison. In between chaperoning the young princess and shopping, he found the time to strike up friendships with prominent French officers in the Strasbourg garrison.

Montpellier should have been equally alluring. Nestled between the Alps, the Pyrénées, and the Mediterranean, it was a popular resort for the Parisian elite seeking to escape the grayness of the Île-de-France in wintertime. But Steuben did not enjoy it—though not for lack of trying. He attended the Comedy almost nightly, or as often as his money and his duties would allow. Yet the city, by his estimation, was overcrowded and dirty. Good seafood was plentiful and cheap, but he craved “good beef and sauerkraut,” which, like most essentials, were either unavailable or too expensive. “I cannot understand,” he wrote, “how this place has acquired such great renown in half of Europe.”
⁶

Though he loved his surrogate princely family, Steuben soon wearied of the effort required to keep the household together and within budget. Chaperoning the young princess and trying to make sure she had an adequate education, looking for affordable housing, purchasing daily necessaries for the household—these were challenging chores when in Hechingen, but logistically much more difficult when away from home. “The happiest hour of my life,” Steuben intimated to Chancellor Frank, “will be when…I shall be able to embrace you, my dearest friend. After that I shall be ready to die at Hechingen.”
⁷

His employers agreed. What little money they had ran out, and the prince grew increasingly despondent. In the summer of 1775—just as, far away across the Atlantic, George Washington was engaged in a struggle of his own, trying to cobble together an army to fight the British—the exiles returned to Hechingen dejected and chastened.

 

A
T HECHINGEN
, we first get a glimpse of Steuben's personal appearance. Sometime around 1769, he had his portrait painted. Since he was not a wealthy man, that in itself was a sign of high social standing, for Prince Josef undoubtedly commissioned the portrait.
Roughly age thirty-nine at the time, courtier Steuben only vaguely resembles the distinguished baron who has come down to us from the more familiar portraits painted by the American artists Ralph Earl and Charles Willson Peale. With a long nose on a longer face and closely set eyes looking impossibly large beneath dark eyebrows, he stares back at the viewer in a half-serious, almost playful way, with his small mouth upturned in a partial smile. He hardly looks as if he could have been a soldier: his light brown hair is neither powdered nor queued, but hangs in long, soft curls about his ears and neck. There is, however, a hint of the lush about him, not only in the expression on his face but also in the informal posture, and the weight that was already beginning to show beneath his prominent chin. His fondness for fine clothing is obvious, too. He wears an elegantly ruffled shirt with a lace collar, surmounted by a waistcoat and a collarless frock coat of figured green silk, garments that should have been beyond his modest means. And on the frock coat, peeking out from under his left arm, almost as if he were indifferent to its presence, is an eight-pointed star.

The Freiherr von Steuben. The only known portrait of Steuben in civilian clothes, probably painted between 1769 and 1772. The insignia of the Order of Fidelity, bestowed upon him along with the title
Freiherr
(Baron), is visible on the left breast of his coat. Despite the claims of later historians, Steuben was both a nobleman and a genuine baron.
(Private Collection)

The insignia of the Order of Fidelity (
Hausorden der Treue
). The honor was bestowed upon Steuben by the margrave of Baden-Durlach, a German prince of middling significance, in 1769. He never claimed it was a gift from Frederick the Great, although some scholars mistakenly believe that he did.
(Private Collection)

That star was his pride, the emblem of the elevated social status he had achieved at Hechingen. He owed it to his patroness and protector, Princess Friederike. She had not forgotten him. More than four years after their meeting at Wildbad in 1764, the princess nominated him for a knighthood—not in her own land of Württemberg, nor in Hechingen, but in nearby Baden-Durlach, where Steuben was also well known and well liked. At Friederike's request, the ruling margrave of Baden-Durlach elevated Steuben into the Order of Fidelity (
Hausorden der Treue
), a chivalric order founded more than five decades before. In a ceremony held at Wildbad in June 1769, the princess herself pinned upon Steuben's chest the distinctive insignia of the order, a Maltese cross mounted on an eight-pointed silver star emblazoned with the motto
Fidelitas
.

Chivalric orders were a prominent feature of noble life in eighteenth-century Europe. They had changed a great deal from their inception at the time of the Crusades. Then, they had served to sanctify
and mobilize those who went to the Holy Land to fight against the infidel in the name of Christ. By Steuben's day, however, such orders were almost purely honorific, a means by which European monarchs could reward their subjects for faithful service, outstanding achievements, or high moral character. In this regard, they did not differ much from British knighthoods today. Yet the orders served other important purposes. Rulers could use knighthoods to show their solidarity with their nobles. Though membership in some orders could translate into preferential treatment—such as the Prussian
Pour le Mérite
, which Steuben's father had received—in general it did not entail material reward. Nobles still coveted such distinctions regardless. In a society in which social rank was more important than wealth, and honor more important than life, elevation into a chivalric order was a badge of prestige.

Another, more enduring, honor, came to Steuben with his induction into the order: the title of
Freiherr
. Like the medal of fidelity, this title would become part of his permanent identity. When life took him away from Germany, first to France, then to the United States, he rendered the title into its nearest French-language equivalent, a version that would be instantly recognizable to French and American audiences alike. The rough translation of
Freiherr
—literally, “free lord”—was “baron” and hence the name by which he would become known, the name he would use himself, while in America: not the Germanic “Freiherr von Steuben,” but the Gallic “Baron de Steuben.”
*