by Bob Drury
Steuben never married, and died childless in 1794 at the age of 64. He was buried in a grove near his upstate New York log cabin in Oneida County. He left his estate to two junior aides, both presumed now to have been homosexual, whom he had met at Valley Forge and whom he adopted after the war. A third young “adopted son,” also a former military aide, was named an heir to Steuben’s library and collection of maps. Various statues, parades, social and charitable societies, county names across the United States, and even a city in Ohio honor Steuben. His grave, in what became the town of Steuben, New York, is now commemorated by a historical site that bears his name. Although he is most closely associated with his training techniques, as one biographer notes, “At heart [Steuben] was a soldier, not an administrator,” with a desire to lead troops into battle, a desire honed since his childhood in northern Europe and fulfilled on the battlefields of the United States.
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Not quite in the same league as Henry Knox’s about-face on American Indian policy, but for all of Baron von Steuben’s professed love of democracy, there was to his mind one fatal flaw in the ideals with which the signers of the Declaration of Independence had established their new nation. A republic, he felt, was only as virtuous as the men who led it. Perhaps owing to the lack of movement on his pleas for a pension, by the late 1780s he had grown increasingly disenchanted with many of the politicians replacing the men who had embodied the spirit of 1776. His proposed answer to this deficiency, discussed at length with Alexander Hamilton, was the notion of installing a constitutional monarchy in the United States. His choice for the throne was Frederick the Great’s younger brother Prince Henry. Steuben even wrote to the cultured and liberal-minded—and wonderfully ostentatiously homosexual—prince to gauge his interest. With the onset of the Constitutional Convention, however, the scheme died so quick a death that it does not even merit a mention in the hit Broadway musical based on Hamilton’s life.
It hardly needs to be said that what Lin-Manuel Miranda’s reimagination of Hamilton’s life, as well as the overall renewed interest in his biography, does emphasize is Hamilton’s outsize roles in the nation’s founding as a soldier, economist, political philosopher, constitutional lawyer, and abolitionist. During the war, Hamilton served for four years as George Washington’s principal aide, in every sense lending his voice to the commander in chief’s thousands of pages of writings. Washington finally granted Hamilton’s request for a field command during the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. With Laurens by his side, he captured a critical redoubt held by the British, and this action was credited with accelerating Gen. Cornwallis’s decision to surrender.
Hamilton relinquished his military commission after Yorktown and, in 1782, was appointed to the new Congress of the Confederation—the successor to the Second Continental Congress. He never lost his antipathy toward the decentralized leanings of both political bodies, however, and resigned that same year to open a law practice in Albany. When the British evacuated New York City at the war’s end he moved south, and in 1784 founded the Bank of New York. The following year, in honor of his fallen friend John Laurens, he established the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves.
Some contend that Hamilton never really recovered from Laurens’s death. As mentioned, there have even been attempts to elevate their Damon and Pythias friendship into a love affair. The evidence is speculative. It is true that throughout their service together Hamilton and Laurens continued to pore over sources as disparate as Plutarch and Demosthenes and record passages from them to give as gifts to one another. But a rumored gay relationship sidesteps the fact that in 1780—two years prior to Laurens’s death—Hamilton married Elizabeth Schuyler, the daughter of Washington’s old ally Gen. Philip Schuyler, and went on to father eight children with her. In this regard one must also contend with the fact that Hamilton was the first major American politician to become involved in a sex scandal when, in 1797, he admitted to having carried on a yearlong affair with a 23-year-old married woman some six years earlier.
Less salacious, but perhaps more pertinent, was Hamilton’s composition of 51 of the 85 Federalist Papers—James Madison and John Jay were the other anonymous authors—which were published in 1787 and 1788. The arguments put forth in the documents were key to the ratification of the Constitution, and Hamilton took part in the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia as a New York delegate. In 1789, President Washington tabbed Hamilton as the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, a post he held for over six years. It was from this position that he formed and enacted the primary economic policies of the administration that we are so familiar with today—the establishment of a national bank, the funding of state debts by the federal government, and open mercantile relationships with Europe, most notably his old adversary England, to name a few. All this led to his leadership of the Federalist Party, which was created in great part to support his centralized monetary views. It also likely led to his premature death.
During the 1800 presidential election, Hamilton headed the successful Federalist Party campaign against John Adams. When Adams’s support fell off and Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr amassed an equal number of electoral college votes, Hamilton broke with his party’s orthodoxy by casting the tie-breaking vote for Jefferson on the thirty-sixth ballot. Burr never forgave him, and the enmity between the two escalated when Hamilton lobbied hard against Burr’s 1804 run for the governorship of New York state. Burr, taking issue with what he felt was Hamilton’s calumny in a series of letters and gossipy conversations, challenged him to a duel.
On July 11, 1804, atop a rocky ledge on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River—not far from where Hamilton’s oldest son Philip had died in a duel three years earlier—the antagonists paced off their flintlock pistol range, turned, and fired. No one knows who pulled his trigger first. Hamilton’s ball cracked a tree branch high above Burr’s head. Burr’s found its mark in Hamilton’s abdomen, breaking several ribs and tearing through his liver and diaphragm before lodging in his spine. All present, including Hamilton, recognized it as a mortal blow. Hamilton, 49, was transported back to a friend’s home in New York City where, anesthetized with heavy doses of laudanum, he died the following afternoon surrounded by family and friends. He was, and remains, entombed in the cemetery at lower Manhattan’s Trinity Church.
Though Hamilton’s biography has been recounted well and often in many venues, perhaps less well known to most Americans is the postwar fate of the Marquis de Lafayette. In the aftermath of the Battle of Monmouth Court House, Lafayette beseeched both Washington and Versailles to allow him to attempt another invasion of Quebec. The American commander in chief, taking his usual long view, privately questioned if the presence of a second “New France” on the United States’ northern border might not potentially amount to simply trading one European master for another. Without disparaging Lafayette’s motives, Washington diplomatically rejected the idea, noting that the war in the southern states was far from over, and Lafayette might be needed there. Louis XVI and his foreign minister the Comte de Vergennes, meanwhile, recognized that they had spread their troops far too thin fighting the British around the world to consider opening a Canadian front.
After his request was rebuffed, in late 1778 Washington granted Lafayette permission to return to France, where he lobbied to organize a French invasion of the British Isles. When the French king and his ministers dismissed that idea, Lafayette returned to America in April 1780 to act as a liaison for the additional 6,000-man force that Louis XVI had decided to dispatch to Washington’s command. In the meanwhile, back in France, Adrienne gave birth to their first and only son, whom the couple named Georges Washington Lafayette.
In early 1781, while Lafayette awaited the arrival of the promised French troops, Washington sent him south with a division of Continentals to join Steuben in Virginia. Vastly outnumbered by Cornwallis, the marquis nipped at the British heels as best he could until, joined by Washington, Greene, and the
French reinforcements, the Americans finally cornered the Redcoats at Yorktown. After Yorktown, Congress appointed Lafayette as an official adviser to its European diplomats—Benjamin Franklin in Paris, John Jay in Madrid, and John Adams at The Hague. He also eventually became part of the Paris delegation negotiating the British capitulation. Lafayette’s parting with Washington at Mount Vernon in 1784 was a tearful affair, for despite the young Frenchman’s protestations the commander in chief suspected that this would be the last time they would ever see each other. Again, Washington’s premonition proved prescient. Returning to Paris a hero on two continents, feted by kings, statesmen, and generals at home and abroad, the world as Lafayette knew it came crashing down with the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789.
Lafayette was originally caught in the middle by the French Revolution. Viewed by the radicals as a royal ally, he had also fallen out of favor with Louis XVI for his efforts to provide the serfs and burgeoning middle class with a more potent voice in a French Assembly dominated by the nobility and the clergy. To that end he had stopped using his title of marquis. During the revolution’s infancy he continued to attempt to thread this needle, but by mid-1791 he was being denounced by leading insurgents such as Maximilien Robespierre and Georges-Jacques Danton. Given command of an army when France declared war on Austria the following year, Lafayette saw firsthand the effects of the slow-rolling revolution when the common soldiers displayed more animosity toward their own officers than toward enemy troops. While he was in the field, the Jacobins took control of Paris, and Danton, the new Minister of Justice, issued a warrant for his arrest.
Lafayette attempted to flee to the United States, but was captured by the Austrians in present-day Belgium. Ironically, in the eyes of the Austrians and their Prussian allies, Lafayette’s earlier, measured steps to steer a middle course between the French radicals and the nobility were proof of his antimonarchical tendencies. While he was held in various Prussian and Austrian prisons from September 1792 to September 1797, the Parisian radicals had also jailed his wife, Adrienne. She was spared the guillotine only by the impassioned pleas of the American minister to France, James Monroe, who managed to smuggle her son Georges Washington Lafayette to Connecticut. Similar American efforts to free Lafayette were futile, as the United States had no formal ties or treaties with Austria and Prussia. And though the Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, did manage to push an act through Congress awarding Lafayette back pay for his service to the country—the funds eased the severity of his imprisonment for a time—President Washington, despite his deep personal empathy, was determined to avoid any actions that could embroil America in intramural European affairs. Even a freelance escape attempt organized by Alexander Hamilton’s sister-in-law went awry.
In October 1795, Ambassador Monroe managed to obtain American passports for Adrienne Lafayette and her two daughters on the basis of the many states that had granted her husband United States citizenship. With this, she and her girls traveled to Vienna, where she convinced Emperor Francis II to allow them to join Lafayette in confinement. The four lived together in his cell for the next two years until the young General Napoleon Bonaparte helped to negotiate their release.
Lafayette and Adrienne were reunited with their son, and they and their daughters were allowed to return to France upon Lafayette’s promise to refrain from any political activities. Even when Napoleon held a memorial service in Paris for the recently deceased George Washington, Lafayette was not invited. Lafayette’s relationship with Bonaparte remained icy even after the soon-to-be “emperor for life” restored his French citizenship in 1800. And when President Thomas Jefferson offered Lafayette the governorship of the newly acquired territory of Louisiana he declined, citing his determination to work quietly to build a democratic France in the shape of a constitutional monarchy.
In 1814—seven years after Adrienne’s death on Christmas Day, 1807—the French monarchy was restored and the Comte de Provence, brother of Louis XVI, was placed on the throne. It is said that in their long exile the Bourbons neither learned anything nor forgot anything, and Lafayette reacted as coolly toward his country’s autocratic new ruler as he had toward Napoleon. Ever the idealist, he kept hoping that he could in some way effect a more democratic ruling system by means of a strong and diverse National Assembly. When Napoleon escaped Elba a year later and regained power, Lafayette again refused any role in his government. Yet four months later, upon the emperor’s abdication in the wake of Waterloo, Lafayette magnanimously arranged with President James Madison for Napoleon’s retirement in America. The victorious British, having none of that, instead escorted him to Saint Helena. Over the ensuing years Lafayette stealthily threw his influence into causes ranging from Greek democracy to American abolitionism.
In 1824, at the age of 66, Lafayette returned to the United States to a hero’s welcome as the only living general who had fought in the Revolutionary War. Traveling with his son, he was feted in scores of cities and towns in all 24 states of the union. Over the course of his 14-month tour he dined with President James Monroe, traveled on the Ohio River and that modern marvel the Erie Canal by steamboat, took in Niagara Falls, visited with Gen. Andrew Jackson in Tennessee, witnessed the inauguration of President John Quincy Adams, and laid the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument before scooping up a handful of dirt he wanted spread on his grave. Arriving at the foot of Manhattan, he is said to have steadied himself on his cane, taken in the rapturous throngs, and burst into tears.
Back in France, Lafayette spent the next decade promoting the same republican impulses he had always hoped to plant in his native soil. To little avail. France was still under the heel of an all-powerful king and noble class when, on May 20, 1834, Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette died in Paris, felled by pneumonia. He was buried next to Adrienne in Picpus Cemetery in what is now the city’s eighth arrondissement. The French king ordered Lafayette buried with full military honors in order to prevent mob riots, and toward the end of the ceremony Georges Washington Lafayette sprinkled the dirt from Bunker Hill over his father’s grave. Each Fourth of July thereafter representatives and military attachés from the French and American governments join Lafayette’s descendants in watching the American flag flying over his grave replaced by a new Stars and Stripes. One such commemoration in particular stands out.
On July 4, 1917, at the height of World War I, the initial 200 soldiers of the first American Expeditionary Force to land in Europe entered Paris. Among the delegation led by Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing to Lafayette’s tomb was Col. Charles Stanton, the nephew of Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton. “America has joined forces with the Allied Powers,” Stanton pronounced, “and what we have of blood and treasure are yours.”
Speaking in French, Stanton concluded, “Lafayette, we are here!”
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When Victor Emmanuel united the warring principalities and city-states of the Italian peninsula into a consolidated nation some 85 years after the American Revolution, it was estimated that less than three percent of the population spoke standard Italian. “We have made Italy,” the Piedmontese statesman Massimo d’Azeglio was said to have remarked, “now we must make Italians.”
George Washington faced the opposite problem at Valley Forge. There, Americans understood each other perfectly but all too often worked at cross-purposes. Yet despite any technical limitations Washington may have had as a battlefield general, at Valley Forge he displayed a personal quality of steely leadership that is difficult to imagine being matched by any other soldier or statesman of the era.
On December 4, 1783—almost precisely six years from the day he had led the Continental Army out of the dank, rugged Gulph and onto that bleak plateau in the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania—Washington acknowledged how far that army had come, during a private farewell address to some 30 of his commanding officers. Nine days earlier he had ridden into New York City at the head of a procession that r
eclaimed his long-lost prize even as the last of the British occupiers scurried onto transports in the harbor. Now, with Henry Knox and Friedrich von Steuben seated to either side of him at the head of the long banquet table on the second floor of Samuel Fraunces’s tavern in Lower Manhattan, Washington—dressed in his finest blue-and-buff uniform—raised his glass with a trembling hand.
“With a heart filled with love and gratitude, I now take leave of you,” he said, his voice catching in a rare show of emotion. “I most devoutly wish that your latter days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable.”
He paused, and tears began to stream down his cheeks. He then concluded his toast: “I cannot come to each of you, but shall feel obliged if each of you will come and take me by the hand.”
At this all the officers stood to embrace their commander in chief. When the last man had brushed his cheek with a solemn kiss, Washington crossed the room and lifted his hand in a gesture of farewell. He then turned and walked through the door without looking back.
AFTERWORD
It was not the first time he had revisited the former winter camp. That had occurred almost a decade earlier, during a recess in the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Then, George Washington and his old friend Gouverneur Morris, both delegates at the convention, had decided to test the trout of Valley Creek on a sunny July afternoon. Tiring of the fishing, Washington had left Morris to his casting to, as he put it, “ride the old Cantonment,” and take in the ruins. On his circuit he had reined his horse on Valley Forge’s outskirts to speak to a passel of farmers about their planting methods and harvest yields. He took notes, planning to put their crop lore to good use at Mount Vernon as soon as he returned home.
