The Drillmaster of Valley Forge

by Paul Lockhart

  It was not a novel concept. Conway had suggested the same thing several months before. But the general-in-chief had not been inclined to accept anything Conway had to offer. The idea meant much more coming from Steuben. On March 17, Washington ordered the formation of a “model company,” one hundred strong, to be drawn from each brigade in the army. They were to be assigned temporarily to Washington’s headquarters guard of fifty Virginians, and were to assemble on the Grand Parade at guard mount on Thursday morning, there to await the Baron’s instructions.3

  Together, on the Grand Parade, the model company and the Baron would attempt to settle a question that had vexed the Cause since the beginning of the war three years before: Was it possible to turn a collection of farmers, landless laborers, tradesmen, and Irish and German immigrants into an army, one capable of taking on the Redcoats? Britain did not have the greatest or most modern army in Europe, but it was still infinitely better, man for man and battalion for battalion, than anything the Americans had been able to put in the field. Could the Americans effect the transformation, and in time?

  Steuben and his pupils were going to try.

  His assistants trailing behind him, the Baron drew up in front of the assembled company, halted, and proceeded to dismount. Those watching could not help but notice a curious juxtaposition. The immaculately dressed, well-fed, and bejewelled German nobleman looked very much as one would expect of a Prussian soldier: his hat of fine black beaver, a bicorn blocked in the French style, sitting atop queued and powdered hair; dark blue cloak; knee-high riding boots wrapped impossibly tight around his calves. Standing before the company—a little soft, perhaps, in the midriff, but still at attention without being rigid, his Exerzierstock gripped in his right hand—he appeared to be the very embodiment of Old World society, of aristocracy and privilege, the very same values the men were fighting against. He beamed confidence and optimism. And opposite him, the men, representing nearly every state in the union, dressed in a kaleidoscopic array of tattered clothing, hats and coats of every description, with some wearing blankets in lieu of overcoats. They were gaunt, maybe even a bit jaded, and had the look of men who had traveled far and seen much—heartbreak and hardship both.

  Steuben did not take much time to reflect on the sight. With Ponthière and the newest member of his staff, Jean-Baptiste Ternant, standing deferentially behind him, the stumpy Prussian with the stern manner and kindly face pulled out the sheaf of notes he had scrawled the night before and went straight to work. Duponceau, Hamilton, and Laurens were close at hand to aid in translation.

  The Baron started, appropriately enough, at the beginning, treating the model company as if it consisted of raw recruits—not from condescension, but from necessity, as the men had been trained in so many different ways. “The only part which retained a shadow of Uniformity,” Steuben observed with some annoyance, “was the least Essential of all, the Manual Exercise, as it was nearly an Imitation of that Established in the English Army.” First things first—how to march. “The most Essential part which is the March & Manœuvring step,” the Baron reported, “was as varied as the Colour of our Uniforms.”4 That would have to change, and fast. It mattered little if the men could handle their muskets in unison—that was what Steuben meant by the term “Manual Exercise,” the manual of arms—if they could not even keep step with one another.

  On Steuben’s order, the oversize company stacked their muskets and re-formed, unarmed and in a single rank. At one hundred and fifty men, it was too large a body to be taught anything as a group, so the Baron first selected a twenty-man squad. He gave his instructions verbally to the squad as the rest of the men looked on, reading laboriously from the notes he had written with the help of his aides. First he explained the “Position of the Soldier,” the eighteenth-century version of “Attention”: the soldier was to stand straight, feet slightly apart and spread at the toes, forming a loose V; his shoulders back, chest forward; with his head cocked slightly to the right so the left eye formed a straight line with the buttons of the waistcoat—for those soldiers fortunate enough to possess such a garment.

  Von Steuben Instructing Troops at Valley Forge, by Edwin Austin Abbey (1852–1911). Abbey’s imagining of the Baron drilling the “model company” in March 1778 is probably not too far off the mark, although Steuben spent most of his time with the model company teaching marching and maneuvers, and very little on the use of the musket (the “Manual Exercise”). (Brian Hunt & Pennsylvania Capitol Preservation Committee)

  Then he demonstrated that stance himself so that each man could see him clearly and imitate him exactly. He walked down the line from flank to flank, checking each man’s position, not hesitating to point out deficiencies, his big hands roughly pushing men into the correct posture as if he were arranging scenery on a stage. His ministrations were gruff and never tender, but even when playing the role of drill sergeant he could not hide his essential affability. He complimented those who got it right; he joked and swore, effortlessly, at those who did not. The men found it difficult to suppress the occasional chuckle. Steuben did not discourage them from finding humor in the lesson, and sometimes laughed with them.

  Next he taught the men how to dress their ranks, to turn their heads and cast their eyes to the left or right, each soldier aligning himself on his neighbor so that the ranks became perfectly straight. And then the marching step: the key ingredient to well-ordered infantry tactics, which in the Baron’s estimation was the most obvious shortcoming of the Continentals. Driven on by his barked commands, the men learned to move forward at a uniform gait and at a consistent pace, the “common step” of seventy-five paces per minute, each step covering precisely twenty-eight inches.* Step, step, step, step…each man’s left heel touching the ground at the same moment as that of his fellows on either side of him, and along the same imaginary line drawn upon the ground, so that the line of men maintained a straight front as it moved forward. The speed of marching was entirely new to the soldiers, who were accustomed to the standard British pace of sixty steps per minute. As one observer noted approvingly, “Slow Time is a Medium between what was in our service slow and Quick Time[;] Quick Time is about as Quick as a Common Country Dance.”5

  Finally, the men were taught how to face 90 degrees to the right, 90 degrees to the left, and to face to the rear, which must always be done by spinning 180 degrees clockwise on both heels. And that was it. It was all over in about an hour.

  In mid-afternoon the model company fell in again for another lesson. After reviewing the morning’s lesson as a single body, the men broke once again into squads to practice wheeling. In performing a wheel, the entire line would march forward in a giant arc, swinging like a gate upon a pivot fixed at either the right or left flank of the squad. As simple as it sounds, of all the basic maneuvers it was by far the most difficult to master, for unless the soldiers kept their intervals and their pace, the line would collapse into an inchoate muddle of confused men before it even described a quarter of a circle.

  And collapse it often did, despite the best efforts of the men. Sometimes they simply misunderstood the Baron’s fractured English, or just did not recognize a shouted command. Frustrated by his failure to communicate and his assistants’ inability to help, Steuben would become wroth with himself when basic movements went awry. At such moments his complexion darkened visibly, and he began to sputter. He vented his exasperation in streams of shouted invective and profanity, directed at no one in particular. To a civilian, these outbursts would have appeared inappropriate and maybe frightening, but the men of the model company—like soldiers everywhere—were discriminating connoisseurs of foul language. They approved heartily.

  With dinnertime, the day’s work on the drill field came to an end. The model company broke ranks and returned to their fires to cook what few scraps their messmates had been able to scrounge, and to tell their less fortunate comrades of the day’s excitement. Pervasive boredom was almost as much a hardship as hunger; the school on the
Grand Parade, driven by the eccentric but no longer mysterious Baron, was the stuff of great storytelling.

  And so it went for the next four or five days. The process had the semblance of order and careful planning. No one beyond the Baron’s little circle knew that he was making it up as he went along. Each evening when he retired to his quarters, he took a quick dinner before returning to his desk and working out the lesson for the next day in his hastily scribbled, inelegant French, which he then gave to Duponceau for translation and revision. After several hours working by candlelight, he turned in, only to rise again at three o’clock in the morning to do it all over again—to dress, drink his coffee, and smoke his pipe, to study the day’s lesson and practice the words in English.6

  Then, promptly at nine o’clock, just as on the first day of training, he and his staff galloped through the snow to the Grand Parade. “There was no waiting for a tardy aide-de-camp, and those who followed wished they had not slept,” one of his assistants recalled. “Nor was there need of chiding. When duty was neglected or military etiquette infringed, the Baron’s look was quite sufficient.”7

  The instruction of the model company followed the same pattern each day: the review of old lessons, the separation into squads, the explanation of the new lesson for the day. Steuben’s assistants would give personalized instruction to each of the squads. The Baron, in the meantime, flitted about from one squad to the next, fussing, fuming, correcting, praising. When he was satisfied that the men had been coached enough, the company reassembled and performed the new lessons again, together. And thus the instruction proceeded each morning and each afternoon. Soon the men were marching in two ranks, and making use of the faster marching pace, the “quick step” of 120 paces per minute.

  The members of the model company weren’t the only ones who learned from the exercises. From the very first day of instruction, the drill sessions on the Parade attracted quite a crowd of spectators. Men and officers turned out in force each day, lining the perimeter of the Parade to watch with a mixture of amusement and awe as the Baron put the company through its paces. The men found welcome diversion in what transpired there, in the occasional comic blunders of the company, in the frantic energy of the excitable German, who acted in a manner that none of them had ever seen in an officer before. Mostly, though, what they witnessed was the complete transformation of the model company. After three or four days on the Parade, the company was able to march, wheel, and change front with a precision and speed not yet seen in Continental troops.

  Steuben was aware that he and his students had become the center of attention, but he did not shrink from it. On the contrary. He drew strength and self-assurance from the admiration his men attracted, from the newfound confidence that animated their faces and buoyed their undernourished spirits as they performed increasingly complicated maneuvers to the cheers of the crowd. And the Baron, always the showman—one might say exhibitionist—gloried in the laughter that accompanied his extraordinary fits of anger when something went wrong. Pretty soon he was playing to the amusement of the crowd, intentionally exaggerating his anger in order to make the drill sessions true spectacles. He stomped and he cursed, shaking a fist or gesticulating violently with a huge finger as he called for the wrath of the gods to rain down upon his clumsier men.

  His cursing was a blend of French and German obscenities, linked together by a few words of English. It was virtually unintelligible to anyone save him, but he took care to punctuate his shouted profanity with his favorite English oath, the only one he knew: “Goddam!” So long as he kept his calm, he might ask one of his bilingual assistants to translate his curses for the benefit of the men, though they really needed no translation. Sometimes he was so transported by the ferocity of his over-dramatized wrath that he sputtered until he ran out of oaths. “My dear Duponceau,” he would then call out to his translator, “come and swear for me in English, these fellows won’t do what I bid them.”8

  Certainly many of the Baron’s apoplectic fits were genuine, but just as many were feigned, acted for the benefit of the company and the crowd of onlookers. It amused the men, but they never found Steuben to be clownish or ridiculous. His tantrums bonded him to the men; they humanized him. He would always insist on appropriate military decorum—not allowing private soldiers to address him unless asked to do so, for in his mind it was necessary to keep some distance between those who led and those who were led. But at the same time he wanted the men to know that he was a soldier, too, that he shared their privations and their coarser instincts.

  This kind of behavior came naturally to Steuben. He liked to be liked; he enjoyed working a crowd. It was also calculated, reflecting a deeper understanding of the soldiers under his command than one might expect from a foreigner who had been in America for all of four months. True, soldiers were soldiers, whether in Valley Forge or in the Breslau garrison, but there was a difference between these Americans and the Prussians he had led in his youth. Prussian soldiers, and European soldiers generally, were peasants, bred to deference. They obeyed their officers in part because they feared the consequences of disobedience, but also because they were accustomed to obeying those who ranked above them in the social hierarchy. They did not expect any kind of interaction with their officers.

  But Americans, Steuben found, were not like this at all. Over the generations, they had shed much of that ingrained deference to established authority. They did not respect officers just because they were officers. Steuben’s experience on the Grand Parade confirmed his initial assessment of the Continentals. On occasion, the men of the model company were not content merely to do what they had been told to do; they wanted know why they should do it. “The genius of this nation,” Steuben wrote to an old comrade in Prussia after the war, “is not to be compared…with that of the Prussians, Austrians, or French. 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.”9

  Taken to extremes, this kind of attitude, Steuben knew, could be dangerous. Commanders could not lead effectively if their men were too familiar with them. But since this aspect of the American character could not be entirely suppressed, the Baron learned to work around it. Indeed, he made it a virtue, and an integral part of his training regimen. When composing his lessons for the model company, he could have relied entirely on an established military manual, picking it as the standard for the army. He could have translated the official Prussian regulations into English, for he knew these by heart. But he did neither. He created his own system, based on his experience, but one stripped of every nonessential movement, every element that did not have a practical purpose. There was no sense, with time in such short supply, in teaching the men things that they would never use and didn’t need to know.

  Whatever Steuben did, it was working. General Washington already wagered that it would. On March 19, the very day the model company began its training, he took the first tentative steps toward the creation of a functioning inspector general’s office—without inviting or even making a single reference to Thomas Conway. The general announced the imminent appointment of an inspector general, and asked brigade commanders to nominate suitable officers as “brigade inspectors,” who would serve as Steuben’s assistants in each brigade staff. Three days later, obviously impressed by the progress Steuben had made with the model company, Washington prohibited all brigade commanders from conducting drill on their own until the “new Regulations”—for such he was already calling Steuben’s embryonic, still-evolving system—were put in place and distributed in writing. This was a serious step, for in writing this order, Washington was limiting the command authority of his generals. In time it would cause him some grief.10

  THE RETRAINING of the entire army at Valley Forge began in earnest on March 24, 1778. Washington’s order of March 22 had ruffled some feathers among the colonels and the brigadiers, but not enough to make him back down. He had already seen enough of the “happy
Effects” of the Baron’s handiwork to know that he had made the right decision, and the painful awareness that the army was in a race against time compelled him to throw the full weight of his support behind the quirky Prussian. Horatio Gates, whom Steuben had been politic enough to keep apprised of his progress, said the same thing: “…few Armies want Discipline more than Ours…. Our Time is short, and we have much, too much to do; therefore, we should only attempt to do that which is most for our present Benefit.”11

  Early on the morning of the twenty-fourth, Washington gave the order: “At nine oclock precisely all the Brigades will begin their exercise, each regiment on its own parade, and the Inspector Genl will attend the exercise.”12

  General Washington was now referring to Steuben publicly as “Inspector General,” a great compliment and a mark of high favor, to be sure, but an onerous burden as well. Steuben was no longer a mere volunteer, drilling a single company of men. He was now responsible for training all of the Continental infantry at Valley Forge. Washington’s order put him temporarily above all other officers in the army, making him answerable to Washington alone.

  The pressure to perform would be great; the grueling physical pace would be even worse. Steuben would have to supervise the training of thousands of men, riding from brigade to brigade, observing each regiment at drill, taking notes, pointing out recurring problems. And he would have to extend his “system”—which was not fully worked out yet—from the level of the company to that of regiments and brigades.

  Fortunately, he would not be entirely on his own. He had the core of his staff—Duponceau, Ponthière, Francy, and Des Epiniers—and two valuable new additions, picked up by the Baron at Valley Forge as he scouted the army for untapped talent. The first of these was Lt. Col. François-Louis Teissèdre de Fleury, a brilliant twenty-nine-year-old engineer. Fleury, who had entered the Continental service early in 1777, had previously served as a staff officer in the French army; when Steuben and Duponceau made his acquaintance at York in February 1778, the Baron knew instantly that Fleury’s administrative experience would come in handy.