The Drillmaster of Valley Forge (33 page)

The action at Blandford did indeed accomplish something of value: it kept up morale in the beleaguered state, and it held up Phillips just long enough to keep him from doing real damage. For while the British commander marched his men, with impunity, on to Richmond to destroy the capital, he was stopped dead in his tracks by unexpected news. On April 29, Lafayette's Continental light infantry, one thousand strong, had entered the town of Manchester, Virginia, and Steuben was on his way to join him. Wayne's men of the Pennsylvania Line would not be far behind. Vexed by this unwelcome development, cursing Lafayette for his impeccable timing, Phillips grudgingly retreated to Bermuda Hundred. After loading up on fresh provisions, the Redcoats piled back into their barges and set sail for Portsmouth. Along the way, they paused occasionally to raid farms and kill livestock.

Reversal followed reversal, and if Lafayette and Steuben celebrated the British withdrawal, they soon had cause to reconsider their jubilance. Phillips's squadron sailed as far down the river as Burwell's Landing, and then—inexplicably—hove to and reversed course. It stopped at Brandon on May 7 to unload its soldiers, who promptly marched back to Petersburg the following day. Phillips was again on the warpath.

Phillips knew something that his enemies did not. Cornwallis, having patched up his army after its bludgeoning at Guilford Court
house, settled on a course that Nathanael Greene had not anticipated. He drove his army north from its base in Wilmington, North Carolina, to invade Virginia. He would meet up with Phillips at Petersburg to crush the Continentals before the French could intervene. After all of the heartbreak and sacrifice in Virginia, after all of the rebels' improbable success in the Carolinas, the very thing that Greene and Steuben had toiled to prevent was about to take place regardless.

S
TEUBEN HATED
V
IRGINIA
, and Virginia hated Steuben right back.

Despite the brief period of mutual admiration after Blandford, the frictions and misunderstandings between the Baron and the Old Dominion were neither forgotten nor forgiven. Virginia wanted him gone. In part this was because Steuben represented the clutching, unwanted authority of the Continental government, asking Virginia to sacrifice its sons and treasure to defend other states. But largely Steuben's personality was to blame.

Whether dealing with the governor, or militia officers, or ordinary civilians, the Baron found it impossible to be subtle. In late February 1781, as Steuben's latest Continental battalion was preparing to march south to Greene, a colonel in the Virginia militia showed up at the Chesterfield barracks. He
brought with him a young man whom he intended to present as a recruit for Continental service. Steuben and William Davies had had a devil of a time trying to find suitable recruits, so even a single volunteer was welcome. The Baron was genuinely pleased to meet the colonel—that is, until he met the prospective recruit. He was a mere boy, far too young for military service. Steuben had a sergeant measure the boy's height, and when his shoes were removed in order to obtain a more accurate measurement it was discovered that they had been altered in an attempt to make the child appear taller than he really was. “The Baron's countenance altered,” North recalled; “we saw, and feared, the approaching storm.” Steuben stooped down to the boy and tenderly asked him his age, while patting “the child's head with a hand trembling with rage.”

Then he turned on the colonel. “You must have supposed me to be a rascal,” he bellowed. The colonel, visibly frightened, blurted out a denial, but Steuben would not listen to him. Calling the colonel a “scoundrel” for “cheating” his country, the Baron ordered that he be forcibly enlisted in the boy's place. He told the young lad to go home and tell the colonel's wife “that her husband has gone to fight as an honest citizen should, for the liberty of his country.”

His immediate subordinates approved. After his encounter with the militia colonel, Davies observed, “the people seem afraid to bring in the little dwarfs and children they formerly counted upon.” Few could argue with the Baron's principles. It was his manner that got him in trouble. North summarized the incident neatly: “Nor did the Baron's zeal permit him…to act with the mildness and caution, proper to be observed by military commanders in the service of a Republic.”
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C
ORNWALLIS'S INVASION
spelled disaster for Virginia, but Lafayette's long-overdue appearance was a godsend for the Baron. In other circumstances, he would have resented being replaced, but the stress of command had sapped him in body and spirit. “I heartily wish
his exploits may be more brilliant than mine have been,” he wrote to Greene in mid-May.
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Not that Lafayette's arrival guaranteed victory. Far from it. The marquis had only around nine hundred Continentals plus three thousand militia. The main British force, now commanded by Benedict Arnold—William Phillips having succumbed to disease on May 15—numbered four thousand. Cornwallis marched into Petersburg with around fifteen hundred Redcoats and Loyalists, and a further fifteen hundred reinforcements sent by Clinton arrived in the Chesapeake the next day. Facing seven thousand seasoned enemies, Lafayette was seriously outgunned.

No longer in charge of field operations, Steuben resumed the preparation of troops for Greene. All he had at the moment was the newly raised battalion of Col. Thomas Gaskins, Jr., numbering around five hundred men. Certainly they could be of use in their home state, but both Steuben and Lafayette—like most military men in Virginia—still labored under the mistaken impression that the real war was going on in the Carolinas, not Virginia. As soon as Gaskins's men were made ready to march, they would go south.

Steuben would go with them. “My presence in this State has become entirely useless,” he wrote to Greene. “Never was a man more disgusted than I am at the conduct and proceedings in this quarter.” His prayers were answered immediately. On the very same day he wrote these words to the Quaker general, he received orders from Greene to join the Southern Army. “I find myself so beset with difficulties that I need the counsel and assistance of an officer educated in the Prussian school, and I persuade myself I shall find in you both the friend and the General I want.”
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When he wrote these orders, Greene had no way of knowing that Cornwallis was going to lunge into Virginia. Not until May 23 did he learn otherwise, and once he found out, he immediately countermanded his latest orders to Steuben. Neither the Baron nor any of his troops should leave Virginia, Greene told Steuben. Unfortunately, Steuben never received the order. A British patrol intercepted it. The
last Steuben had heard from Greene, he was supposed to march to the Carolinas.

Steuben needed no urging, but he hesitated anyway. He could not move. Not yet. Gaskins's battalion was “Neither cloathed nor equipped.”
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On May 24, Cornwallis's heavily reinforced army set out from Petersburg, crossing the James and marching on Richmond. Lafayette retreated north, hoping to link up with Anthony Wayne's slow-moving corps, and all of central and western Virginia lay open to the invaders. As the people of Richmond fled from the British for the third time in five months, it struck Steuben that Gaskins's ill-equipped battalion was the only American force in the region. The new temporary capital, at Charlottesville, was vulnerable. So, too, was the only significant stockpile of state-owned military supplies. Since the time of the Phillips invasion, this stockpile was stashed away on the narrow, triangular jut of land at the confluence of the Rivanna and upper James rivers, forty-five miles northwest of Richmond. Locals called this the Point of Fork.

Steuben had no great desire to do any favors for the state of Virginia, but he understood that the stores at Point of Fork needed to be moved or guarded, and only Gaskins's men were available to do the job. He sent them from the “new” Continental recruit depot at Albemarle Barracks, a former prisoner-of-war camp near Charlottesville, to Point of Fork on May 28, catching up with them the next day.

The Baron was wracked by uncertainty. Greene's orders for him to move south made little sense in light of the current situation. “Please let me have news of you,” he begged Lafayette on June 3. “I do not know where you are or what has become of Cornwallis.” The sorry state of Gaskins's battalion immobilized him. A recent shipment of newer French muskets from Philadelphia allowed Steuben to arm the Virginians, but they were lacking in every other necessity. “There is this poor battalion camped in the forest, perishing without the power to employ it in the service,” Steuben appealed to Archibald Cary, speaker of the Virginia Senate, “without even the power to drill the men, because they lack shoes and shirts.” Inadequate accommodations
at Point of Fork—the men were lodged in “two very bad Negro Quarters”—exacerbated the rate of sickness among the men, which was already disturbingly high. “Two-thirds of [the men are] very bad cases.”
⁶

Cornwallis did not wait for the rebels to prepare for battle. The aggressive Briton had been on Lafayette's tail for a week. He gave up the chase on June 1, but not before sending out two raiding parties to the exposed west. One, led by the ruthless cavalry commander Col. Banastre Tarleton, was ordered to raid Charlottesville, capturing Governor Jefferson and the members of the General Assembly if possible. The other, under John Graves Simcoe, was to seize Point of Fork.

As Gaskins's men loaded the state's military supplies on the few wagons they could find, Simcoe pushed his corps mercilessly forward in a series of forced marches that wore the men's shoes to nothing. But because they moved with extraordinary stealth, taking prisoner every soul they encountered to ensure secrecy, Steuben did not have any idea that the enemy had been on the move until June 3.

The details came the next morning, and they were not reassuring. Just before dawn, a Continental dragoon officer galloped into Point of Fork, his horse winded and frothed after a long chase. He had nearly been captured by a mounted British patrol but had seen enough in the meantime to give him a good fright. Two columns, he informed Steuben, were rapidly converging on Point of Fork: a small force of British cavalry coming from Goochland Courthouse to the east, and nearly a thousand enemy infantry from Louisa Courthouse to the north-north-east. Cornwallis himself was approaching Goochland with the main body of troops. Goochland was only twenty miles away from Point of Fork; Louisa, a mere fifteen. The British would be upon Point of Fork in no time at all.

Right then and there, Steuben decided to retreat. From what he had been told, the entire British army in the state was headed toward him from two different directions. Even with the addition of Gen. Robert Lawson's command of 250 militia, who arrived later that day, Steuben's position was untenable. The British far outnumbered and
outclassed him; Point of Fork had no fortifications, no high ground worthy of mention; and the James was swollen to flood stage. There could be no escape once the Redcoats got close. “I thought it absurd to be making a Bravado with a small number of bad Troops against such a force,” Steuben wrote in his official report.
⁷

Hoping at least to save his men, Steuben ferried most of them across the James. Simcoe's four hundred infantry and one hundred cavalry crossed the Rivanna early on the morning of the fifth. By noon, they occupied the Point in plain view of the rebels on the opposite bank of the James. Only one hostile exchange of fire occurred that day, and it quickly confirmed the wisdom of Steuben's decision to retreat. Simcoe directed his men to fire a three-pounder cannon at one of the American picket posts. The rebels, to a man, fled in terror as the small projectile whizzed harmlessly overhead. “It was with much persuasion and threats [that] they were brought back again,” the Baron noted sourly.
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The Baron waited for the cover of darkness and then retreated as fast as his men could move. Simcoe awoke early on the morning of the sixth surprised to discover the rebel camp deserted. He had fought against Steuben at Blandford, and he expected another fight now.

Steuben was right to be prudent. Mere hours after the rebels withdrew, Tarleton's dragoons returned from their raid on Charlottesville and joined Simcoe near Point of Fork. The next day, Cornwallis brought the main army to Elk Hill, only five miles downriver. Had Steuben delayed his retreat by a few hours, his troops would have been destroyed. All of the truly valuable stores had already been evacuated. The loss of the few supplies left—a modest quantity of cloth and a few hogsheads of rum—would hardly have justified the sacrifice of his entire command.

Cut off from Lafayette by a much larger and highly mobile British force to his north and east, the Baron led his men south. He did his best to raise the alarm as he went, sending letters to the county lieutenants to call out their militiamen. Leaving Lawson's militia at Charlotte Courthouse, he took Gaskins's battalion to Cole's Ferry, on the
Staunton River, a march of seventy miles in five days. At Cole's they paused for a couple of days so the men could catch their breath and tend to their blistered feet. Steuben tried to relax, too, enjoying a local culinary delight that he had just discovered: he had acquired a taste for black snakes, and he detailed several of his men to scour the woods around Cole's for the reptiles.
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Here Steuben first found out about Greene's lost order, that he was to stay in Virginia and help Lafayette as best he could. Abruptly changing course, he drove his troops back north toward the James, even faster than he had retreated. On June 19, less than two weeks after the evacuation of Point of Fork, the bone-weary Baron reported in person to Lafayette, then encamped on the South Anna River northwest of Richmond. With Steuben were precisely 408 of Gaskins's men and about 500 militia.

 

S
TEUBEN'S CAUTIOUS ACTIONS
in May and June 1781 may not have been glorious, but they were militarily sound. There could be no comparison with Blandford. There he had good ground and enthusiastic troops; at Point of Fork he had neither.

These facts made little difference to those in the state government who already had cause to dislike the Baron. To them, Steuben's conduct before and after the incident at Point of Fork smacked of cowardice and incompetence. Benjamin Harrison, speaker of the lower house of the Assembly, asked congressional delegate Joseph Jones to try to get Steuben cashiered. The Baron, he asserted, had “600 fine men” who “lay Idle” because he refused to lead them against the British. “I believe him a good officer on the Parade,” Harrison concluded, “but the worst in every other respect in the American Army.”
¹⁰

Six hundred “fine men”? Had Harrison seen Gaskins's half-naked, disease-ridden troops—“more ragamuffins than soldiers,” as Steuben described them—he might have whistled a different tune. But once the news of the loss of Point of Fork, and of Steuben's retreat, came to
the new capital at Staunton—the next in line of Virginia's ad hoc wartime capitals—the criticism got much, much worse.

The mood at Staunton was understandably black in mid-June. Virginia had been ravaged, and the Assembly was hungry for scapegoats. One of them was Jefferson himself, whose term as governor expired in early June. Gen. Thomas Nelson was elected in his place the following week. Although Nelson had been one of Steuben's most vocal supporters, he made no effort to deflect the barrage of criticism the Assembly was firing at the Baron. The members of the Assembly did not know exactly what had happened at Point of Fork. They assumed that Steuben had fled before an inferior force, and in doing so lost thousands of muskets and tons of ammunition. The State Council opined that the Baron should be hanged for negligence of duty. The Assembly then demanded an inquiry into Steuben's conduct, asking the Marquis de Lafayette to take the lead.
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