by Sarah Vowell
When not motivating his soldiers to slap up the log cabins they would spend the winter in and to dig their latrines, Washington made time to undermine the backstabbers, bringing to light Gates’s and Conway’s gossipy “weak general” letter shenanigans, which Congress officially frowned upon, even though a few of the delegates had said way worse.
In the end, it was Lafayette, not Washington, who bore the brunt of the cabal. Washington’s rivals on the Board of War dispatched Lafayette to invade Canada—in winter, without providing the necessary personnel, supplies, or battle plan. “I go on very slowly,” Lafayette wrote to Washington on his way north, “sometimes drenched by rain, sometimes covered by snow . . . if I am not starved I shall be as proud as if I had gained three battles.” From Albany, he informed Washington that the undertaking was “madness,” adding, “I have been deceived by the board of war.”
The only upside to the pointless misadventure was a detour when Lafayette negotiated an alliance with the Oneida tribe in upstate New York, returning to Valley Forge with a cool new Indian name, Kayewla. Later that spring, a few dozen Oneida warriors even showed up at Valley Forge, ready to pitch in to help Kayewla and the patriot cause.
Lafayette frittered away his days in Albany writing letters to Washington about the absurdity of his no-go assignment: “I am afraid it will reflect on my reputation, and I shall be laughed at.” In the meantime, a new arrival at Valley Forge was busy making the Continentals a less laughable fighting force.
Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a veteran of the Prussian army from the Seven Years’ War, had served as a staff officer to the accomplished warrior King Frederick the Great. As Jay Luvaas writes of the monarch’s hands-on approach to military leadership in Frederick the Great on the Art of War, “Often he could be seen on the drill ground, stop watch in hand, calculating the number of shots fired per minute.” Luvaas adds, “Frederick once went so far as to claim that ‘the speed with which the Prussian could reload trebled the firepower and made him the equal of three adversaries.’” Therefore, “by the variety and precision of its movements and the rapidity of its fire, the Prussian army soon came to enjoy a reputation comparable to that enjoyed by the Italians in music.”
One of the countless European officers downsized after the Seven Years’ War ended in 1763, Steuben then whiled away more than a decade as a court official in a minor principality in southwestern Germany. In the summer of 1777, his hopes of a new military commission in Baden were dashed when a rumor surfaced there that he had “taken familiarities with young boys.”
With defense jobs on the Continent already scarce, the prospects for an aging veteran saddled with the unsubstantiated yet frowned upon accusation of being a homosexual were even gloomier. And so, like Lafayette, Steuben looked to the New World for employment. Yet unlike France’s richest teenage orphan, the forty-six-year-old Steuben was broke.
Desperate, Steuben journeyed to Paris to meet with Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane. By then the American commissioners were under strict orders from Congress not to sign up any more European recruits. But they could not ignore the fact that this one had served in what was arguably Europe’s best-trained army.
Though they could not offer Steuben a commission, Franklin and Deane did provide him with a letter of introduction to Washington, dropping the name of French foreign minister Vergennes as one of Steuben’s admirers, plus enumerating (and exaggerating) his military accomplishments, instantly promoting him from Prussian army captain to lieutenant general.
Speaking of embellishment, the notion that Steuben also fudged his nobility by calling himself a baron has dogged his legacy for centuries. I tend to believe Steuben’s adept biographer Paul Lockhart, who notes that Steuben, whose godfather was none other than the king of Prussia, was “nobly born.” But more to the point, who cares? Though the story I’m telling necessitates typing reams of irritating words like “marquis,” “duke,” and, worst of all, “lord,” at this point the only useful aristocratic title belongs to the Count on Sesame Street. Every time I come across a historian in a snit about Baron von Steuben not being a real baron, I am reminded of Theodore Roosevelt’s exasperation at making small talk with all the royal muckety-mucks at the funeral of Edward VII: “I felt if I met another king I should bite him!”
Whether or not Steuben was a bona fide gentleman, he could not have gotten to America without assistance from a fake one. The playwright Beaumarchais—a watchmaker’s son, né Caron, who had fabricated his fancy name and a phony coat of arms to go with it—came to Steuben’s rescue. He lent Steuben money for travel expenses and offered him passage across the Atlantic on one of his Hortalez & Company ships.
Steuben sailed from France on September 26, 1777, without a guarantee that the flailing Continentals, recently walloped at Brandywine, would even take him. Night after night he must have stared out at the cold sea with a little hope and a lot of dread, contemplating the mystery fate awaiting him onshore. Which makes the bouncy scene depicting Chicago’s annual Von Steuben Day parade in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off all the merrier. Who could have predicted that more than two hundred years after this washed-up Teutonic mercenary bummed a ride across the Atlantic because he had nowhere else to go, the director of Pretty in Pink would hire the kid from WarGames to play a high school student who skips school and crashes a German-American celebration in Steuben’s honor, commandeering a float of buxom Bavarians to lip-synch to Wayne Newton’s “Danke Schoen.”
After Steuben docked in New Hampshire in December, he stopped in Boston and then continued to York to hit up Congress for a job. En route, he forwarded Deane and Franklin’s note to Washington and offered the commander his services as a volunteer, proclaiming, “The Object of my greatest Ambition is to render your Country all the Services in my Power, and to deserve the title of a Citizen of America by fighting for the Cause of your Liberty.”
Which sounded a lot better than the truth: his pockets were empty and he was probably hoping to get hired before the Americans got wind of the gay thing. Though the Advocate magazine once referred to Steuben with a wink as “a lifelong bachelor,” if he was in fact a homosexual, his life as a soldier would have ended if anyone found out. As Randy Shilts points out in Conduct Unbecoming, his book on gays and lesbians in the armed forces of the United States, the newly arrived Steuben may have witnessed a lieutenant court-martialed for sodomy get drummed out of Valley Forge. Literally: Washington ordered drummers and fifers to badger the man from the camp, making him “the first known soldier to be dismissed from the U.S. military for homosexuality.”
Congress granted Steuben the temporary rank of captain. Aside from the letter from Franklin and Deane mentioning his military accomplishments and Vergennes’s tacit support, it no doubt helped Steuben’s cause that he looked the part. Before departing Paris, he had had an imposing Prussian-style officer’s uniform made. A teenage private at Valley Forge later compared him to Mars, “the ancient fabled God of War.” He noted, “The trappings of his horse, the enormous holsters of his pistols, his large size, and his strikingly martial aspect, all seemed to favor the idea.”
The delegates also granted Steuben’s request for commissions for some of his shipmates, as well as a pair of Frenchmen recruited by Beaumarchais whom Steuben had met in Boston, one of whom was the artist and engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant. Thus in one slapdash human resources meeting, the congressmen not only hired the foreigner who would reshape the army, but as an afterthought also rubber-stamped the foreigner who would one day design the street plan of the future nation’s capital, including the hilltop spot for a “Congress House” that became the Capitol building. Which sounds like a lucky turn of events until one remembers that to L’Enfant’s new bunkmates at Valley Forge, snagging a potential city planner was not as fortunate as scoring a few bonus wagonloads of ham.
Upon arrival at Valley Forge in February of 1778, Steuben surmised, “No European army could have be
en kept together under such dreadful deprevation.”
To remedy the supply problems, Washington had appointed Nathanael Greene as the new quartermaster general—much to Greene’s dismay. “No body ever heard of a quarter Master in History,” he complained, but he was good at it, and as winter turned to spring, his foraging parties had the campers who hadn’t died or deserted better fed.
Washington invited Steuben to evaluate the state of the army, and Steuben made it clear there was room for improvement. To Washington’s credit he welcomed the critique, putting Steuben in charge of retraining the troops.
According to Washington, “The Importance of establishing a Uniform System of useful Manoevres and regularity of discipline must be obvious, the Deficiency of our Army in these Respects must be equally so.” Alas, he added, “the time we shall probably have to introduce the necessary Reformation is short.”
Washington had also been ruminating on a deeper, less obvious stumbling block than the fact that summer—and summer battle season—was coming all too soon. Namely, that the rebels under his command were not fighting to become free; they were cornered into fighting because the government of Great Britain had failed to understand that they already were. As John Adams would recall in 1818, “But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American War? The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.” Yet the self-respect and self-possession that incited said people to revolt was hindering the revolution’s goal, independence, because functional armies required hierarchy and self-denial, orders barked and orders followed.
Coming up with a catchy call to arms like “Give me liberty or give me death” requires different skills than actually bearing arms as a group does, especially in the technical context of eighteenth-century warfare. Who knows how many New World nonconformists actually did get death on the battlefield for the simple boring reason that their more conformist Old World enemies had been drilled ad nauseam on how to reload their muskets faster or how to wield their bayonets when there wasn’t time to reload.
“Men accustomed to unbounded freedom, and no control,” Washington wrote, “cannot brook the Restraint which is indispensably necessary to the good order and Government of an Army; without which, licentiousness, and every kind of disorder triumphant reign.”
Steuben’s new friend and Washington’s aide de camp John Laurens wrote to his congressman father, “We want some kind of general Tutoring . . . so much.”
Steuben caught on quick that he was dealing with an entirely new kind of man. As he would later describe these inherently insubordinate individuals to an officer crony back home in Prussia, “The genius of this nation is not to be compared . . . with that of the Prussians, Austrians, or the French.” (The genius for following orders, he meant.) Steuben explained to his friend, “You say to your soldier, ‘Do this,’ and he does it; but I am obliged to say, ‘This is the reason why you ought to do that,’ and then he does it.”
At first, 120 soldiers were chosen to train under Steuben directly. “I made this guard my military school,” he wrote. “I drilled them myself twice a day, and to remove that English prejudice which some officers entertained, namely, that to drill a recruit was a sergeant’s duty and beneath the station of an officer, I often took the musket myself to show the men that manual exercise which I wished to introduce.” Nearly three years after the war began, someone had finally gotten around to teaching the Continentals “to carry arms, stand at ease, present arms, to load, take aim, fire by platoons, and to charge bayonets.” Steuben later recalled that before his bayonet lessons, “the American soldier, never having used this arm, had no faith in it, and never used it but to roast his beefsteak.”
Steuben’s show-and-tell method worked. “I had my company of guards exactly as I wished them to be,” he gushed. “They were well dressed, their arms cleaned and in good order, and their general appearance quite respectable.” He then “dispersed by apostles,” sending the new, improved soldiers from his model company to fan out throughout the camp and preach the good news to their fellows.
Camp life, wrote Private Joseph Martin, became “a continual drill.”
Impressed, Washington, in probably his most blatant defiance of the Continental Congress, promoted Steuben to be the Continental Army’s inspector general. This did not sit well with the army’s actual inspector general, the one the Congress had appointed a few weeks earlier.
“I am told that Baron Steuben is now in possession of the same place to which I was appointed,” Inspector General Conway griped to General Gates. “I can venture to say that I would have effected in one Month or six Weeks, what he will not be able to accomplish in six Months.”
Crowed Steuben, “I applied my system to battalions, afterwards to brigades and in less than three weeks, I executed maneuvers with an entire division in [the] presence of the commander in chief.”
Who can blame Thomas Conway for thinking he could have been a better inspector general than Steuben? Or Horatio Gates for believing he could have out-generaled Washington? Conway and Gates were the surer bets—on paper.
Steuben went on to write a training manual the army kept in print through the War of 1812. In a passage about a commanding officer’s duty regarding “the instruction of his recruits,” he wrote, “that is a service that requires not only experience, but a patience and temper not met with in every officer.” In other words, a commanding officer is a person. That Steuben, who needed a translator, what with his English vocabulary consisting almost entirely of swear words, ended up being the perfect hire to upgrade the Continental Army should rattle every search committee, small-business owner, casting director, college admissions officer, headhunter, and voter.
John Laurens admired Steuben because he “seems to understand what our Soldiers are capable of . . . He will not give us the perfect instructions absolutely speaking, but the best which we are in condition to receive.”
Washington wrote to the Congress, “I should do injustice, if I were to be longer silent with regard to the merits of Baron Steuben.” Convinced, Congress made Steuben’s appointment as inspector general official, as well as promoting him to the rank of major general.
After Beaumarchais learned of Steuben’s promotion, he wrote in a letter, “I congratulate myself on having given so great an officer to my friends, the free men . . . I am not by any means uneasy about the money I lent him for his voyage. Never did I make an investment that gave me so much pleasure, for I put a man of honor in the right place.” (Good thing, too. Steuben never did pay back the playwright.)
The so-called Conway cabal was kaput. Ultimately, Conway quit and returned to France. General Gates resigned from the Board of War, eventually resuming a field command, overseeing one of the Continental Army’s worst flops at Camden, South Carolina, in 1780. If there is anything to be learned from the conspiracy—other than when in doubt, bet on George Washington—it is to beware the pitfalls of certainty. Men like Benjamin Rush who were so sure in 1777 that Gates should replace Washington were sighing with relief three years later that they had not gotten their way. By 1780, Gates’s reputation was in tatters, whereas Washington was clearly going places—the kind of places that would one day find Rush himself begging Washington’s biographers to edit out his acerbic post-Brandywine complaints.
Lafayette was recalled to Valley Forge. “My only desire is to join you,” he purred in a letter to Washington.
So he was back at the Pennsylvania camp with his division of Virginians that May when Simeon Deane, brother of Silas, galloped into Valley Forge with news: the French government had officially recognized the independence of the United States. Washington read aloud a letter Franklin and Deane sent from Paris: “We have now the great satisfaction of acquainting you and the Congress that the Treaties with France are at length completed and signed. The first is a treaty of amity and commerce . . . the other is a
treaty of alliance.”
Lafayette wept. Then he hugged Washington. Washington, I’m guessing, blushed.
Simeon Deane brought another letter for Lafayette from his wife. As laughter and huzzahs swirled around him, he read the news from Adrienne that their daughter Henriette had died.
“The loss of our poor child is almost constantly in my thoughts,” he wrote to Adrienne. “This sad news followed immediately that of the treaty; and while my heart was torn by grief, I was obliged to receive and take part in expressions of public joy.”
Steuben’s French shipmate Pierre-Étienne Du Ponceau reported, “I thought I should be devoured by the caresses which the American officers lavished upon me as one of their new allies.”
Writing to his congressman father about the ceremonial rifle salute performed by the troops at Valley Forge to celebrate the French alliance, John Laurens gushed about “the beautiful effect of the running fire which was executed to perfection.” Columns of men led by Generals Lafayette and Stirling formed crisp lines, shooting their muskets in a rapid sequence called a feu de joie, a fire of joy, a feat of discipline and coordination unthinkable before Steuben’s tutorials. “Long live the King of France!” they yelled.
Negotiating in Paris in the wake of French excitement about the victory at Saratoga (as well as their admiration for Washington’s gutsy mishap at Germantown), Benjamin Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee, representing “the Thirteen United States of America,” had signed the Treaty of Alliance with “His Most Christian Majesty King Louis the Sixteenth” on February 6.
Both nations pledged “not to lay down their arms, until the independence of the United States shall have been formally or tacitly assured by the treaty or treaties that shall terminate the war.” The starched language of diplomacy sounds so frumpy and therefore traditional that the reader almost forgets that this deeply weird partnership was history’s first military pact between an absolute monarch and anti-monarchist republicans.
