Valley Forge

by Bob Drury

  Greene was barely a week into his tenure before he had discovered, and had transported to Valley Forge, thousands of shovels, spades, tomahawks, and bolts of tent cloth that had lain moldering in forgotten warehouses and barns. He also activated plans to store nearly 800,000 bushels of grain “and as much hay as can be procured” in strategic magazines at roughly 15-mile intervals along what he and Washington calculated would be the northern route of the spring campaign. In the interim, with the weather breaking and the roads improving, he agreed to pay sometimes exorbitant prices in order to direct emergency deliveries of food, forage, and clothing to Valley Forge; shipments that in mid-March began as a slow drip would by May and June constitute a wellspring. The gills of rum and whiskey that Washington meted out in celebration of the army’s perseverance had been made possible by Greene’s organization of local sutler booths established across the Schuylkill on the outskirts of camp.

  Greene also instituted a transport system to streamline the movement of French arms, ammunition, tools, and uniforms—including crates of the highly prized .69-caliber Charleville muskets—from New England’s ports. With the assistance of Jeremiah Wadsworth—who had finally accepted the position of commissary general—he made certain that ships arriving from France were now met on quays by wagons leased by the Quartermaster Department and unloaded by commissary personnel. Whereas once the cargoes had languished in northern warehouses or, more perniciously, simply vanished at Continental chokepoints like Peeksville and Trenton, the materials were now hauled south via a network of protected inland roads that bypassed both major population centers and American base stations.

  Given the continual vicissitudes since the very establishment of the cantonment at Valley Forge, not all of Greene’s projects proceeded apace. A herd of cattle being driven south along one of the secret routes Greene had charted was captured in Connecticut by a company of Tories surreptitiously drilling in a secluded field. And a Massachusetts company ordered to unload a wagon train at a forage yard adjacent to the encampment elected to instead pilfer the wagons and desert as a body. Though several men and teams of horses drowned attempting to swim the Schuylkill, the majority made their escape and were never seen again. Washington may have required the faith described by Paul in Hebrews—the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen—but for the most part the commander in chief was elated by the electricity running through his reformed procurement department.

  On March 17, Saint Patrick’s Day, the commander in chief’s mood was further lifted by the news that every man in camp had been inoculated against smallpox. That same afternoon he watched a group of soldiers celebrate the arrival of a shipment of eight-pound cannonballs from Rhode Island by taking part in a competition to see who could roll the munitions farthest. The game, called “Long Bullet,” was a fitting metaphor. Over Washington’s own long bullet of a winter, his army had overcome a season of logistical nightmares that would have brought a European force to its knees. Like pig iron stripped of its impurities and annealed into steel, his remaining regiments were emerging stronger for their ordeals. They were, as so eloquently described by the historian and Washington biographer Joseph Ellis, “the chosen few who preserved and protected the original ethos of 1775–76 after it had died out among the bulk of the American citizenry.”

  Coping with the privations of Valley Forge had indeed become so routine for Washington’s troops that the influx of provisions, whether cannonballs or rum, constituted something of a divine dispensation. It also infused both his officers and his soldiery with a cautious optimism that was nowhere better reflected than in the manner with which they took to the tender ministrations of the ambitious and blustering Baron Steuben.

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  George Washington was not a man to let emotions, much less strained personal relationships, stand in the way of a good idea. When Thomas Conway had approached him with a plan to train a core of instructors who would then fan out among the regiments to impart their newfound knowledge, he had immediately grasped the efficacy of the Irishman’s model. He just did not view Conway as the man to implement it. Now he revisited the strategy with Steuben.

  Among the mythical images of the American Revolution is that of the musket-wielding Minuteman crouched behind a tree or a boulder firing into the squared ranks of the red-coated “Lobsters,” as if picking off so many crustaceans in a barrel. In fact, it was the Continentals’ utter disregard for the linear tactics employed by successful eighteenth-century armies that nearly doomed their cause. What military experts of the era called “fire discipline” required three rough components. First, infantry battalions on the march had to be able to change formations while maintaining cohesion. Then, upon meeting the enemy, each soldier required the discipline to stand and hold fire when so ordered even if the man next to him was torn to pieces by cannon fire. Finally, in engaging, the ability to load, fire, and reload rapidly and efficiently through the noise and smoke of a battlefield had to become second nature.

  Washington recognized that the loosely conjoined brigades of the Continental Army required not so much a refresher course in the rudiments of tactical maneuvers as a complete overhaul. Thus was a grand experiment born. The commander in chief expanded his personal guard of 50 Virginians by 100 men selected from each state in camp, and lent them to Steuben to constitute a version of Conway’s model company. They were joined by 14 majors—one from each of the infantry brigades—to serve as teaching inspectors who reported to Steuben’s handpicked subinspectors. Two days after the Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations, Steuben resumed the soldier’s life he had abandoned some 15 years earlier.

  Each morning and afternoon, in fair weather and foul, the Prussian assembled his small troop on the vast parade ground in the center of camp. Circulating among the soldiers and barking instructions like a rabid drill sergeant, he preached the dual discipline of mind and body. Woe betide the soldier who was late to a training session or handled his weapon clumsily on what John Laurens took to calling “our Campus Martius.” Steuben’s face would turn crimson and contort into a mask and his arms would flail as he hollered in his guttural French for his translator: “Come over here and swear for me!” This was invariably followed by a cataract of German and French curses and oaths interspersed with the occasional “Goddamn!” The scene had the unintended effect of reducing the Americans to fits of laughter. Yet as the historian Wayne Bodle notes, Steuben’s training regimen was “a difficult one: specialized, tedious, and in no way glamorous.”

  Without ever having seen them fight, Steuben intuited that the resiliency the Americans had exhibited to this point in the war was offset by their professional limitations. At less than three years old, the Continental Army lacked an institutional memory; its soldiers were no more adept at fighting a practiced, dedicated foe than its commissary officers were at feeding and clothing them. What few drills the army practiced were a mélange of the whims of individual state commanders whose influences, such as they were, ranged from bits of French, English, and Prussian field guides to homegrown backwoods fighting techniques. It was only the Americans’ spirited tenacity that had prevented them from being completely swept away by polished British and Hessian soldiers at Brandywine and Germantown. Such hardiness had even been responsible for the surprise victories in Boston and at Trenton and Princeton. But Steuben knew that the Continentals’ tendency to expose the flanks of their long files of Indian-style marching columns, for instance, or their inability to form swiftly into disciplined lines of fire, would ultimately lead to catastrophe.

  His commitment to even the most mundane-seeming disciplines was personal and intense, leaving nothing to chance. His training, for instance, began with the most basic concept—standing at attention. Breaking his gaunt combatants into 10- and 12-man squads, the tallest in the rear, he demonstrated for each trooper how “to stand straight and firm upon his legs, with his head turned to the right so far as to bring his left eye over the waistcoat buttons; the heels tw
o inches apart, the toes turned out; the belly drawn in a little, but without constraint; the breast a little projected; the shoulders square to the front and kept back; and the hands hanging down the sides, close to the thighs.” In time he progressed from close-order drill to maneuvering from column to fire line and back again to column, to wheeling in compact formation with machinelike precision, to shouldering, firing, and swiftly reloading flintlocks while attacking and retreating in unison.

  Unlike the imperious Conway—or, for that matter, unlike most American officers who felt it beneath their station as gentlemen to personally lead drills—Steuben was not afraid to literally get down on his hands and knees in the mud and muck to instruct his charges on such quotidian lessons as small-arms maintenance or how to read and exploit terrain—in short, everything he had learned under Frederick the Great, contoured for an American audience. He was aghast that the Continental soldier who even possessed a bayonet—about half of the troops did not own one—treated it as nothing more than a utensil “to roast his beefsteak.” The bayonet had evolved into a powerful tool in European armies, and it was not unusual to see the portly baron doff his blue regimental coat, hand his silver-tipped swagger stick to an aide, and demonstrate over and again the correct manner of wielding and thrusting the weapon. By the end of his first week, Steuben—“exerting himself like a lieutenant eager for promotion”—and his drillers were surrounded by crowds of fellow soldiers whooping and clapping to their choreographed maneuvers.

  Concurrently, in an effort to codify his methods, Steuben began compiling his legendary “Blue Book” of military regulations. At night he would return to his rented farmhouse at the south end of camp to compose his short chapters, subsections, and sub-articles in French for his military secretary du Ponceau to translate into textbook English. John Laurens and Alexander Hamilton, who had taken to doting on Steuben like a brace of Prince Hals orbiting Fat Jack Falstaff, would then polish the manual by adding a colloquial flourish easily digested by the common American soldier. Chapter and verse were subsequently copied longhand into regimental orderly books by the brigade inspectors for distribution to each of their commanders. Steuben’s rules of war addressed subjects as disparate as the gathering and interpretation of intelligence; the proper arms and accoutrements to be carried by all officers and enlisted men; the marching formations and exercises of brigades, regiments, companies, and platoons; the instruction and inspection of new recruits; and even the correct method for executing an about-face.

  By now Washington had ordered the cessation of all drilling not overseen by Steuben or his subinspectors, and that spring the resulting Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States would be circulated among Gen. Smallwood’s troops in Delaware as well as Continental regiments in New Jersey. The work eventually constituted the United States Army’s primary field guide for decades. Its unique rationale—that European military methods could be integrated into a thoroughly independent-minded army—may be Steuben’s greatest gift to his adopted country. It was also a metric that set him apart from his would-be predecessor Conway. Even Washington took notice when reports began trickling back to him that the German viewed the Continental soldier through a prism different from most European officers’.

  Unlike his foreign-born peers, Steuben had experience with what would today be called unconventional warfare. He had cut his teeth commanding an ill-disciplined Magyar light infantry that served as Frederick the Great’s shock troops, and realized that much like the wild Hungarians, the iconoclastic Americans had over generations lost their ingrained deference to authority for authority’s sake. The Continentals required an understanding of why a particular order might mean the difference between victory and defeat, between life and death. “You say to your soldiers, ‘Do this,’ and he doeth it,” he wrote to an acquaintance in the French army. “But I am obliged to say, ‘This is the reason why you ought to do that,’ and then he does it. Your army is the growth of a century, mine of a day.”

  Instead of recoiling from this singular American trait, he worked it into his training, patiently explaining the tactical and strategic logic behind each move and countermove he required of his students. As with the Magyars—who were known to turn on and kill officers they did not like—he found that once he had justified his premise to the rank and file, Washington’s soldiers would run through flames for him. Conversely, Steuben’s respect for the resiliency of the tattered rebels and their imposing commander in chief grew far greater than he could ever have imagined while plotting his journey with Benjamin Franklin in Paris. “No European army could have been kept together under such dreadful deprivations,” he once mused. Not many would dispute that.

  So meticulous was Steuben’s process, so indefatigable his diligence, and so burgeoning his influence that Washington was soon issuing a series of General Orders suitable for, and nearly indistinguishable from, the Prussian army’s boot camp directives. Soldiers whose arms and equipment were not maintained in proper fashion were subject to arrest. Brigade and regiment commanders were instructed to ensure that their men marched in step, even within camp and no matter how small the party, “in order to preserve order, regularity, and discipline.” Noncommissioned officers who failed to adhere to “a conduct and example which ought to distinguish them from privates” were threatened with a reduction in rank. Each waking hour in camp, the diarist Joseph Plumb Martin complained, “was a continual drill.”

  In the meantime, even as Steuben remained officially classified as a “volunteer,” he was already fulfilling John Laurens’s prophecy by assuming the de facto role of the army’s inspector general. This posed a problem. For despite his banishment to seeming obscurity in upstate New York, having his position usurped was not an insult Thomas Conway was willing to absorb. He was, after all, technically still the congressionally appointed inspector general of the Continental Army, and it galled him that Steuben had apparently stolen his training ideas and methods. It also puzzled him that during his years of service in France he had never heard of the famous lieutenant general who was allegedly such a cog in Frederick the Great’s mighty Prussian war machine. It would not have been unusual for American generals such as Washington, Greene, Wayne, and Knox to be unaware of a Prussian officer’s battlefield accomplishments. But foreigners occupying high ranks in the Continental Army such as Conway, de Kalb, and Lafayette—the latter two having yet to return from Albany—would surely have taken note of someone arriving on American shores with such a glorious reputation. Even enemy commanders such as the Howe brothers and Clinton were certain to grow suspicious. That this notion had also dawned on Steuben was reflected in the subtle manner in which he went about correcting his counterfeit record.

  It began with a hint dropped to John Laurens. During one of their many late-night discussions, Steuben told the young aide that he had really not been Frederick the Great’s quartermaster general, but merely a deputy quartermaster general with the rank of colonel. One supposes he just could not bring himself to admit that he had risen no higher in rank than captain. He also disclosed to Laurens that his lieutenant generalship and his noble title had not been conferred upon him until he was in the employ of the Margrave of Baden, after his retirement from the Prussian army.

  Certain that these new fabrications would find their way from Laurens to his father, Henry, and from there to Washington, he explained that the misunderstandings must have arisen from errors in translation during his meetings in Paris with Franklin. Now, having been made aware of the inconsistencies, he felt it best to set the record straight. A few days after revising his résumé in conversation with the younger Laurens, Steuben apparently forgot that he had concocted the post in Baden. He wrote to Henry Laurens that he had been appointed a lieutenant general while in service to the Holy Roman Emperor in the province of Swabia. Yet by this point Steuben’s reputation at Valley Forge was already such that the elder Laurens apparently decided to let the contradiction pass. He was no doubt influ
enced by his son’s lavish praise for the Prussian.

  In the same letter to his father subtly adjusting Steuben’s biography, young Laurens also let it slip that after a proper period as a volunteer, “The Baron” expected to be rewarded with a major general’s post and all the pay and perks that came with it, including an eventual command. After all, Laurens wrote to his father, “All the genl officers who have seen him are prepossessed in his favor and conceive highly of his abilities.” Washington, he added, “seems to have a very good opinion of him, and thinks he might be usefully employed in the office of inspector general.” Reading between the lines, Henry Laurens took his son’s point, and began referring to Steuben as a former lieutenant general in some vague “foreign service.” As if anyone on his side of the Atlantic would know, or even care to know, the difference between Baden and Swabia.

  Laurens père et fils were not alone in falling under Steuben’s spell. The Caribbean-born Hamilton also viewed himself as something of a “foreigner” serving in an army of flinty New Englanders and rustic southerners, and fell easily into Steuben’s circle. Linked by their language skills and their keen interest in military history, they delighted in discussing subjects ranging from Spartacus’s strategy in the Third Servile War to Inaros II’s successful guerrilla tactics against the Persians. The normally circumspect young scribe gushed to John Jay, “ ’Tis unquestionably due to [Steuben’s] efforts that we are indebted for the introduction of discipline in the army.” The Prussian also made allies of lesser-known junior officers by hosting a series of dinners that only majors, captains, or lieutenants whose breeches were torn to rags were allowed to attend. Steuben himself presided over these events sans-culotte, sharing his allowance of “tough beef steaks,” moldly potatoes, and hickory nuts. Similarly, enlisted men vied to be posted as sentries outside his quarters when word spread of his habit of sharing his nightly meals with his guard. And on the several occasions when Steuben was invited to dine at Washington’s headquarters, his suave European manners charmed the French-speaking officers’ wives; his aide du Ponceau noted that the flirtatious Caty Greene and Lady Stirling’s daughter Kitty were particularly enchanted.