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.”*
Steuben’s use of the title “baron,” like his claim to noble status, would later become a matter of some controversy, just one of many pieces of evidence that he was a self-promoting fraud. A fraud indeed he was, but not because of the title, a title he was granted eight years before he even thought of coming to America. The German title Freiherr was not an inherited one, and did not imply landownership or wealth. It was a purely honorary distinction, one frequently bestowed by German princes upon deserving subjects of noble birth, and nothing more.* But in one other way, harmlessly, the newly minted Freiherr did change his identity. Until 1769, he was known by his Christian name, the one given to him at baptism in 1730: Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf Gerhard Augustin von Steuben. For some reason, when he forwarded his family tree to the court of Baden-Durlach, he rendered his name differently. From that point on he would be known as Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand von Steuben. He never gave a reason for doing so; perhaps he was seeking to make a symbolic break with the past, to sever his ties with a time and place he longed to forget.
Titles and knighthoods were not enough to keep Steuben at Hechingen. After the family’s return from Montpellier, his paltry salary shrank, and he pined for the life of a soldier. So, in 1775, Freiherr von Steuben began to look for military employment.
Actually, he had already started to look for an army that would have him. During a brief stay in Lyons he made the acquaintance of a prominent Englishman, Philip Howard of Corby Castle, who promised to find him a job in the army of the British East India Company. That fell through—the East India Company, Steuben found, was not interested in hiring foreign-born officers—but the experience encouraged him to cast his net wide. More promising leads followed. A high-ranking officer in the Strasbourg garrison offered him a colonelcy if he could persuade Prince Josef to raise an infantry regiment for service in the French army. That, too, came to nothing, even though it initially had the backing of the French crown.
Undeterred, Steuben turned to Prussia’s other great adversary, Austria. One of many influential friends he had made while in France was none other than Charles-Joseph, Prince de Ligne, a soldier, diplomat, and personal companion of Emperor Josef II. Like so many of Steuben’s casual acquaintances—men he met at elegant soirées or in raucous, smoke-filled taverns—the Prince de Ligne was instantly taken by the chatty Prussian with his obvious knowledge of military theory and practice. The prince, one of the most celebrated military authors of his day, was no mean judge of martial talent, and he considered Steuben a prime catch for the Austrian service. But he was unable to arrange a personal meeting between Steuben and the emperor, or to sway the leading Austrian generals in Steuben’s favor, and so that opportunity also proved to be illusory. An appeal to the Margrave of Baden, the same man who had decorated Steuben with the Order of Fidelity, likewise yielded nothing concrete.8
First Britain, then France, then Austria, then Baden—all dead ends. It was not that Steuben had failed to impress. Quite the contrary. The French officer at Strasbourg who had offered him a colonel’s rank was so distraught when their proposed arrangement came to nothing that he tried to broker a marriage between Steuben and a young woman from a prominent local family, hoping that he could at least solve his new friend’s financial problems. The Prince de Ligne saluted Steuben unsolicited: “When I heard you speak of military affairs with the talent that distinguishes a pupil of the hero [i.e., Frederick the Great] from whom you have learned so much…I believed that it would be very fortunate for our service to have you amongst us.”9 But admiration did not translate into employment.
When Freiherr von Steuben did come across a legitimate opportunity—the opportunity—it came not through the good offices of one of his friends, but from a complete stranger.
While visiting Karlsruhe in May 1777, Steuben struck up a conversation with another visitor, one Peter Burdett, an English cartographer in the margrave’s employ. Burdett gave the Freiherr a detailed lesson on the current political situation in Britain’s rebellious colonies. The Briton knew the topic well, making it clear that his sympathies lay with the rebels and not with his own king. Unbeknownst to Steuben, Burdett was also an agent in American pay, one of many informants working for the newly arrived American commissioner in Paris, Benjamin Franklin.
Franklin and his partner Silas Deane, Burdett revealed, were actively scouting for battle-hardened military leaders. There was no shortage of European officers willing to risk their all for fame, glory, and riches fighting for the American cause, but precious few of them had any significant experience in the higher levels of military leadership and organization. Steuben’s eyes widened as he listened. Coyly, he indicated to Burdett that he himself might be interested, if a position were truly available, and he gave Burdett an account of his own exploits in the service of Old Fritz.
Burdett was suitably impressed, and Steuben was hooked. He would go to Paris to meet with Burdett’s friend Franklin. Burdett wrote immediately to Franklin; receiving no reply that month, he penned another letter for Steuben to take directly to the American’s hands.
The Bearer [of this letter] is Baron Steuben of whom I had the honor to write to you by the hands of a Friend about a month since. He is a Gentleman of Family, Merit and great experience, well known to some of the First Personages in Europe, and hereby gives you sir a strong proof of his Ambition to make the Acquaintance of Docter Franklin in actualy performing a Journey from Germany to Paris for that Purpose.10
Steuben was jaded from so many abortive offers of employment, and this one sounded no more or no less promising than the others. It also entailed greater risk, a much longer journey, and therefore a greater outlay of his own cash. But there was something about Burdett’s sales pitch that drew him in, and he wasted no time. The Freiherr immediately took to the road and headed for Paris, with virtually no money to his name. He paused only briefly at Strasbourg to have a new suit of clothes made for the occasion—it would not do to present himself in that glittering city while dressed in travel-worn clothing. It would not be the last time he would overspend on sartorial splendor.
Thus dazzlingly attired, freshly unemployed, and again in debt, Freiherr von Steuben set out alone from Strasbourg for Paris.
STEUBEN WAS SUPREMELY CONFIDENT that a commission in the American army was his for the asking. Still, he had no idea what he was getting himself into. He may have been a more worldly man than most Prussian officers of his grade, but he had never been in a city the size of Paris before. Here he was an innocent.
Paris in the age of the Enlightenment was a city of stark contrasts: of great wealth and great poverty, of rigid noble privilege and egalitarian ideals, where the last great bastion of ancien régime monarchy in western Europe clashed with the radical social and political ideas of the philosophes, the prophets of the Age of Reason. And in Paris, the American rebellion was all the talk, at least among the intellectual elite and in the salons of its well-to-do citizens. To them, even those who admired Britain’s parliamentary monarchy as the most freedom-loving and progressive government in Europe, the American rebellion was a noble experiment, a chance to see if a nation founded on the concepts of civil liberties and representative government could survive.
The rebellion was being closely watched at court, too, but for reasons that had more to do with realpolitik than concerns over liberty and inaliena
ble human rights. Young Louis XVI, then not quite twenty-three, had been king for only three years, having inherited a country that still smarted from the drubbing it had suffered at the hands of Britain and Prussia in the last war. That defeat had robbed France of much of its colonial empire, devastated its national pride, and, worse still, left the kingdom with a huge national debt. The American rebellion offered the chance to set at least some of that right. By backing the rebels, France could slake its thirst for vengeance, weakening the British empire, while simultaneously gaining a loyal and lucrative trading partner in North America. But its involvement would also result in open war with Britain, and that in turn meant higher taxes and even greater debts. Would it be worth the price?
Some of the most important decision makers at Versailles thought so. The foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, pushed for active confrontation with Britain, and public opinion in Paris backed him up. But there were also naysayers, who pointed to the forbidding costs of renewed war with Britain. The king was torn: like any self-respecting monarch, he found it difficult to sympathize with those who would take up arms against their God-anointed sovereign, but he also ached for revenge on the rival nation that had humbled his father and his kingdom in 1763.
It clearly would not do to rush into war with Britain. For the time being, the hawks at court were content to provide the Americans with covert aid until the moment was right to throw off the thin mask of official neutrality. Money and muskets could be sent overseas, so long as it was done without the king’s official involvement. War would come soon enough, but the fictitious neutrality of the crown would allow breathing space so that the nation could gird itself for war.
On the other side of the Atlantic there was a dilemma of a slightly different sort. Within the Continental Congress there were some who harbored an abiding distrust of France, and others who feared any kind of foreign partnership. Material support from a major European state or two would be helpful, so long as there were no strings attached, and therefore a genuinely reciprocal alliance was out of the question. This sentiment changed as the war dragged on and defeats outnumbered victories. The idea of a French or Franco-Spanish alliance grew increasingly alluring—but only if it did not amount to trading one European master for another.
Of all the European powers, however, only France welcomed American diplomats as emissaries of a sovereign state. Congress sent Silas Deane of Connecticut to Paris in early 1776 to represent American interests there; Benjamin Franklin joined him near the end of the year. Deane negotiated the first, unofficial, shipments of arms and other supplies from France to America, but Franklin quickly overshadowed him. The aging Franklin, disarmingly unpretentious and yet learned and courtly, became an instant celebrity in Paris.11
Working from Franklin’s residence—a pretty little garden house at the Hôtel de Valentinois, in the village of Passy, immediately outside Paris—Franklin and Deane did their best to present the case for French intervention in the American war. They also acted as employment brokers for the Continental Army. Steuben was hardly the first European soldier-adventurer to see in the American rebellion an opportunity for career advancement. Some, like Steuben, were unemployed and down on their luck. Others, mostly officers of line rank—captains, lieutenants, subalterns—knew full well the bleak calculus of their career trajectories in peacetime Europe: without war there were no casualties, and without casualties their chances for promotion and advancement were slim.
They hounded Franklin and Deane incessantly. “I am well nigh harrassed to death with applications of officers to go to America,” Deane griped to Congress in November 1776. Franklin was more explicit: “You can have no Conception,” he wrote, “of the Arts and Interest made use of to recommend and engage me to recommend very indifferent Persons. The Importunity is boundless…the Numbers we refuse incredible.”12 The two commissioners, who knew little of the art of war, were ill equipped for the task, and undoubtedly passed along some undeserving candidates to Congress, but Congress as a body was even less capable of discerning the qualities that made a good officer. It was all too easy to be fooled by a neatly tailored uniform and a haughty manner. Congress handed out commissions in the Continental Army with reckless abandon.
That is not to say that Deane and Franklin could not find any talented officers. Deane himself had given the green light to the likes of the Marquis de Lafayette and Johann de Kalb, the giant Bavarian who had proven himself in the French army during two wars. But these were rare exceptions. Regardless, the flood of foreign volunteers demanding, and receiving, Continental commissions could not help but kindle resentment among American-born officers, who felt no less entitled to rank in their own army. By the middle of 1777, the two Americans at the French court were under a great deal of pressure to choke off the flow of foreign officers to America.
It was at this point that Steuben chose to come to Paris to ask for a commission. Had he made the trip just a few months earlier, he could have expected a warm welcome and an easy commission—maybe even a quick promotion to major-general, such as Lafayette and the Baron de Kalb had recently been granted. Rather, Steuben arrived at the worst possible moment, when Franklin and Deane were still smarting from the rebukes of Congress for being so generous to foreign applicants.
Steuben did not go directly to the Valentinois, thereby denying the Americans the chance to turn him down flat. Desperate and impatient though he may have been, Steuben had been a supplicant before, and he knew better than to rush blindly into such an important interview. He would need a testimonial or two, preferably from someone the American commissioners knew and trusted. Fortunately, he did have just such a friend: Claude-Louis, Comte de St. Germain, former field marshal in the French army and currently minister of war to Louis XVI.
Steuben and St. Germain had known each other for some time. Actually, they had been enemies at Rossbach in 1757, though neither would have known this. Their first face-to-face meeting took place in Hamburg in 1763 or 1764. St. Germain was not then in French pay. He had made a name for himself in the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War as a capable but blunt and sharp-tongued French commander, but his undisguised admiration for the Prussians, combined with his tactless criticisms of his mediocre superiors, led to his forced resignation in 1760. The king of Denmark cleverly grabbed him, gave him high rank, and set him to reforming the Danish army along Prussian lines. Upon becoming French minister of war in 1775, he urged the adoption of Prussian-like reforms in his native land. The idea was no more popular then than it had been in 1760; the backlash from the officer corps was one of the factors that would lead to his resignation near the end of 1777.13
Benjamin Franklin. History has ascribed to the colorful Franklin the credit for recruiting Steuben, but the truth is that he did not give Steuben much encouragement. (Library of Congress)
Caron de Beaumarchais. French playwright and advocate of the American cause. He befriended Steuben when the latter was in Paris, and introduced him to Deane and Franklin. (Emmet Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
Their shared regard for the Prussian army drew Steuben and St. Germain together. It proved to be the vital connection, for it opened to Steuben avenues that would have been closed to him otherwise. When Steuben arrived in Paris in June 1777, St. Germain was still a man with much political clout. He was happy to see Steuben, and happier still to help him. Without hesitation, he granted the Prussian an audience, penned a glowing reference for him, and then introduced him to even more influential men: first the Comte de Vergennes, Louis’s foreign minister, and then the famous—some might say infamous—businessman and playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais.
Beaumarchais was the most ardent advocate of American independence then living in France; certainly he was the oddest. Just a couple of years younger than Steuben, Beaumarchais—whose irreverent play The Barber of Seville brought him insta
nt notoriety—was the founder of Roderigue Hortalez et Compagnie, an export firm that secretly sold munitions to the American rebels with the clandestine blessing of the French crown. As a highly literate man, and a friend of Voltaire and other men of letters, he was a perfect match for Steuben; and since he was on friendly terms with Silas Deane, he was an invaluable professional contact. Steuben and Beaumarchais hit it off immediately. Before long, Steuben made his temporary residence at Beaumarchais’s house on the Left Bank. The Baron now had three substantial allies: St. Germain, Vergennes, and Beaumarchais. How could the Americans refuse him?14
Beaumarchais arranged for Steuben to meet the American commissioners at Franklin’s Passy residence on June 25, 1777. Steuben had been in Paris for about two weeks when he strode that evening along the picturesque garden walk, between rows of elegant statuary, that led to the front door of the house at the Valentinois—unless he was ushered quickly and quietly into the partially hidden back entrance. The Americans were primed for the meeting by Beaumarchais’s enthusiastic endorsements. Deane, a frequent visitor at Beaumarchais’s house, had already met the Baron, albeit briefly. The three men made an odd group as they sat together in Franklin’s salon. Steuben, now forty-six, was beginning to show signs of middle age, growing heavy in the face and the midriff, yet was still energetic, almost fidgety, resplendent in his new finery; Deane, the slave-owning Yankee aristocrat, was slim and serious, every inch the diplomat; and bespectacled Dr. Franklin, the oldest of the three by a quarter century, was dressed in the plain, almost peasant-like frock that had drawn so much comment at court. They chatted for a while in French, though Deane was still halting and uncomfortable with the language.15
The Drillmaster of Valley Forge Page 4