The Drillmaster of Valley Forge

by Paul Lockhart

  Dusk also denied Steuben his part in the glory of the final assault. At about 5:30 P.M., half an hour after the artillery on both sides had ceased their mutual exchange of fire, Washington sent for the Baron. The enemy was retreating “in confusion,” Washington related; Steuben must move up at once, bringing some infantry along to support the counterattack. Jumping at the chance to get back in the fray, Steuben took command of three brigades (then under Brig. Gen. John Paterson of Massachusetts), which he had just placed in a defensive position east of Englishtown. Here he encountered the dejected Lee, who tried to stop him, challenging the veracity of the intelligence that the Baron had received from Washington. The British, Lee told Steuben, could not possibly be withdrawing “in confusion”; there was no chance that the Continentals could have repulsed a determined attack by the enemy he so revered. Steuben ignored him, and hurried Paterson’s troops down the road to Monmouth. The British had fallen back, however, before Steuben’s detachment could make their grand entrance.13

  Thus ended the Battle of Monmouth. The performance of his army in the wake of Lee’s defeat gave Washington hope that he could seek a rematch early the next morning, but Clinton could see no good reason to stay in the vicinity. The entire British army silently crept away to the north shortly after midnight, and did not halt until it reached Middletown the next evening. American scouts discovered the empty British camps early on the morning of June 29. Instead of pursuing the British—which would have been sheer folly, given the exhausted condition of the Continentals—Washington led most of the army north toward the Hudson Valley, while Maxwell and Dan Morgan watched the British march to Sandy Hook from a safe distance.

  MONMOUTH WAS THE LAST GREAT BATTLE of the war in the northern states. Though, chronologically speaking, the war was not yet half over—the conflict had lasted for just over three years so far, and nearly another five would pass before the peace—it was the last time Washington would lead an army in an open fight against a British army. The clash was not especially costly, with fewer than four hundred total casualties on each side; neither could it be considered decisive. Clinton’s army still reached New York in one piece, and Washington’s army was barely bloodied. Monmouth does not stand comparison with earlier battles such as Trenton or Saratoga, for it neither boosted nor strengthened American morale in a significant way, nor did it weaken British resolve to crush the rebellion. Tactically, the battle was a draw, though both Washington and Clinton claimed it as a great victory.

  Monmouth did, however, reveal significant flaws within the Continental Army, particularly problems of leadership and command. Charles Lee would bear the brunt of the blame for the fact that, at Monmouth, the Continentals had missed the chance to destroy an entire British field army. Lee was an easy target, and made himself an easy scapegoat by arguing with Washington after the battle and demanding a court-martial to clear his name and redeem his honor. He did not realize until it was too late that attacking Washington was a poor political move, for virtually the entire officer corps rallied behind their commander in chief, and would gang up on Lee in the court-martial that followed. Junior generals who previously had quaked in Lee’s shadow now found the courage to condemn him.

  If there is any blame to be assigned for a “missed opportunity” at Monmouth, then Washington must surely share in it, and possibly claim a greater share than Lee. His decision to transfer forward command to Lee stands out as his greatest mistake—not because Lee would bungle the opening attack, but rather because a leader closer to Washington’s heart, like Lafayette, would perhaps have cooperated more effectively with his sub-commanders. But Washington, unlike Lee, redeemed himself by rallying the army and turning the day to his advantage.

  Monmouth was not a turning point in the war. It was, however, a turning point in the history of the Continental Army. Even with an uncertain chain of command and lackluster leadership, the rebels had performed magnificently. At Bunker Hill, Trenton, Princeton, and even Germantown, they had displayed great fortitude and bravery, but at Monmouth they showed discipline for the first time. Despite a disappointing early phase, namely Lee’s opening attack, the rebels had rallied once Washington arrived on the scene, and they did so quickly because they had never really panicked in the first place. The Continentals held firm as musket balls and solid shot slammed into their ranks, as fabled regiments like the Highlanders of the Black Watch advanced on their lines with bayonets levelled. They held their ground through all of these things, mounted a furious counterattack, and drove the Redcoats from the field. The British had retreated, not they.

  Alex Hamilton, never one to give undue credit to his own army, assessed the performance of the Continentals with uncharacteristic enthusiasm:

  The behaviour of the officers and men in general was such as could not easily be surpassed. Our troops, after the first impulse from mismanagement, behaved with more spirit & moved with greater order than the British troops. You know my way of thinking about our army, and that I am not apt to flatter it. I assure you I never was pleased with them before this day.14

  Like Barren Hill, but on an infinitely grander scale, Monmouth was a soldier’s battle, in which any success the rebels could claim owed mostly to the qualities of the rank and file, not to brilliant leadership. And that, in turn, must be partly credited to Steuben. If anything proved the worth of the training program at Valley Forge, it was the performance of the Continentals at Monmouth.

  Americans could stand and fight in the conventional European manner, and could do so as well as their British counterparts. They no longer panicked at the glint of sunlight off burnished bayonets. Hamilton noted the change in the army’s conduct. He had watched in awe as Steuben, who had just arrived on the battlefield, rallied Lee’s Jerseymen and marched them in perfect order to take their place in the line. They had suffered a great shock that morning, and now they were advancing under heavy musketry, moving as calmly and precisely as if they were on parade. Until that moment, Hamilton later told Ben Walker, he had never fully understood the concept of military discipline.15

  The battle was a high point in Steuben’s life, too, one that in many ways he would never surpass. His name was linked inextricably to the rebirth of the army, a rebirth that had taken place in the snows of Valley Forge. If Valley Forge and Monmouth had been his sole contributions to the Continental Army, that would have been legacy enough. But the battle brought his talents to light in other ways, too. His pre-battle reconnaissance, his actions in re-forming the army at the West Morass and Englishtown—these reassured the Baron that his tutelage under Frederick and Prince Henry had not been for naught, that he understood the art of war and of leadership.

  Curiously, though, the performance of the army that bore his indelible personal stamp was not Steuben’s main point of pride. It wasn’t that he didn’t take pleasure in the achievement of the men, his men, with whom he had bonded so deeply during the crash course in military discipline that winter. He did, but he was also immensely proud of himself. His reconnaissance before the battle, which he had conducted with the boundless energy of a much younger (and trimmer) man, had provided Washington with vital intelligence. And, most important, he had led troops under fire.

  That was what he desired above all things, the ambition he had carried with him from boyhood. At heart he was a soldier and not an administrator. There was nothing he wanted more than the pulsing thrill of battle. He had been denied that visceral joy for nearly two decades. Monmouth brought it all back to him, enlivening his memories of that bloody day outside Prague in 1757 when he had first drawn his sword to lead his blue-clad company through the maelstrom of fire and smoke and toward the waiting Austrians.

  Monmouth vindicated Steuben as an organizer; it proved him as a battlefield commander, and he had the profound satisfaction of watching his creation work. When he wrote about the battle to his friends in Europe, he characteristically exaggerated his role. His inflated account was full of blatant falsehoods: he had, he claimed, commanded an ent
ire wing of Washington’s army and had all but defeated Clinton single-handedly. “I was fortunate enough,” he wrote to Chancellor Frank, “to decide the day to our advantage…every soldier wished that he was under my command.” Even his counterfactual boasting revealed his heart’s loftiest aspirations.16

  The Baron was on his way to great deeds, great responsibility, and greater glory—of this he was convinced. And why not? Six months ago he was just another European émigré in search of a job; four months ago he was a gentleman volunteer without rank or assignment. Now he was a general, with a track record of administrative success and command skills proven on the field. Surely Washington could see that. Surely a real field command would be his, and soon.

  This was the unfortunate legacy of Monmouth for the Baron de Steuben: it sent his hopes soaring skyward. He felt that he deserved a field command, although he had never asked for one and one had never been promised to him. Over the following year, this conviction would try his patience—and that of Washington and Congress—and test the depth of his devotion to the Cause he claimed to have adopted as his own.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Blue Book

  [JULY 1778–APRIL 1779]

  I know very well that whatever be one’s Circumstances, the best is to put on a cheerful face, or as the French term it: faire bonne mine à mauvais jeu.

  STEUBEN TO HENRY LAURENS,

  OCTOBER 1, 17781

  STEUBEN’S PRIMARY DUTY to the army was as inspector general. He had not been able to attend to that duty since the opening of the campaign in mid-June, and it was not probable that he would be able to resume his work for some time. It was too late for the Continentals to ambush Clinton again, but the army would have to position itself in such a way as to keep the British bottled up in New York. And there was another piece of army business that Washington could not allow to fall by the wayside, even though taking care of it could delay the march north.

  That piece of business was Charles Lee. Lee’s performance may not have been anywhere near as negligent as his many enemies liked to imagine it, but he had been insubordinate in the past, and while Washington had tolerated these earlier incidents with saintlike patience, he could not afford to do so any longer. Lee must be made an example of.

  So Charles Lee would stand before a court-martial. The trial was a perfunctory affair. Lee didn’t stand a chance. His fellow generals stood shoulder to shoulder with Washington, providing the court with reams of damning testimony. If Lee had shown even a modicum of contrition, he might have escaped with little more than a verbal dressing-down and a bruised ego. But he remained unrepentant to the end. As late as October, he proudly proclaimed to Henry Laurens that “I am myself inflexibly persuaded, that I am not only guiltless, but that the success of the 28th of June ought principally, in justice, to be ascribed to me.” The court did not agree; it found Lee guilty and sentenced him to a one-year suspension from command.2

  Lee’s removal from the service, though it deprived Washington of a genuinely capable general, was a great boon to the army, for it helped to restore harmony to the high command. Steuben also benefitted, for Lee and his sympathizers had been foremost among those who had caused problems for the Baron at Valley Forge. At the moment, however, the court-martial was a tremendous inconvenience. Washington wanted to move the army north to join forces with Horatio Gates, so that the Continentals would be prepared to cooperate with the French when Admiral D’Estaing’s fleet arrived. The Comte D’Estaing was expected to appear off the southern New England coast any day now; time was of the essence. But because all of the army’s major generals and many of its brigadiers were involved in the court-martial, no commanders were available to lead the troops from the New Brunswick area to the Hudson Valley.

  Washington did the best he could with what he had at hand. He could most readily spare the foreign generals. So he split the army into two large wings, giving one to Baron de Kalb and the other to the Baron de Steuben. Steuben officially took command of his three brigades on July 2. Four days later, his wing left New Brunswick for White Plains.3

  FOR STEUBEN, the march was a great adventure, and his spirits soared. He knew that there was little possibility of battle, and that the command was only temporary—Washington had been careful to make that point crystal clear—but he took it as a positive sign anyway. Right after his wing crossed the Hudson at Kings Ferry, New York, on July 20, he rendezvoused with Gates, and together the two generals conducted a thorough reconnaissance of the Connecticut shore along Long Island Sound. It didn’t matter that there was no sign of D’Estaing’s ships; just the fact that Steuben was doing things that commanding generals did was a tremendous boost to his ego. And if the French did indeed manage to land an expeditionary force, there would be action, and Steuben would be in the thick of it. High-ranking French officers would be there to see the army he had reformed and to see him in command.4

  The Baron was so happy with this turn of events that he scarcely noticed that not everyone shared his joy. Washington’s decision to give him the command was based on purely practical concerns, but that did not console many of the brigadiers, who complained that a foreigner with little time in rank had been given a responsibility that by right should have gone to one of them. John Laurens caught wind of the angry whispers that flitted through the officer corps, and they troubled him. “Unfortunately there is a prejudice against foreigners in many of our Officers,” he wrote his father. “It is not without uneasiness that some of them see Baron de Steuben…appointed to the temporary command of a division in the absence of so many Major Generals.”5

  Such complaints embarrassed the idealistic Laurens, ashamed of his fellow officers for being so self-centered and parochial. Washington, on the other hand, did not have the luxury of taking the moral high ground. He had an army to run, and as the protests piled up on his desk, he could not ignore the sentiments of the aggrieved. The brigadier generals, he explained to Henry Laurens, did not mind that Steuben was inspector general, and “have said but little about his rank as Major General, as he had not had an actual command over ’em.” But the temporary command, “tho’ founded in evident necessity and not designed to produce to the Brigadiers the least possible injury, excited great uneasiness and has been the source of complaint.”6

  Steuben’s own conduct did not help his case. Just as his division was setting out from New Brunswick, he arrested his divisional quartermaster, Capt. Reuben Lipscomb, for daring to take possession of a house in Paramus that Steuben had already earmarked for his personal headquarters. The transgression was trivial, but it ruffled Steuben’s plumage. Charging Lipscomb with “treating [him] in a disrespectful manner,” the Baron convened a court-martial on the spot. The court cleared Lipscomb of all charges with honor after giving him a mild reprimand for “Impropriety.”7 The court-martial was a poor political move on Steuben’s part; it made him appear as an oversensitive, pompous martinet, and did nothing to improve his standing with his American-born colleagues.

  So Washington wasted no time. On July 22, as Steuben’s force approached White Plains, he ended the Baron’s command—cordially, without the slightest hint of reproach, making sure to thank him for his “Care & Attention to the Troops during their March.”8

  The order devastated Steuben—not so much the termination of command, but rather the way in which Washington had worded it: “Baron Steuben will please to resume his Office of Inspector General & make his Arrangements accordingly.” Steuben had demonstrated that he could lead troops, and had deluded himself that he was on his way to a field command, yet he remained a staff officer. If he could remain inspector general and still command troops in the field, as was the practice in the French and Prussian armies, he would have been more than satisfied. But the administrative side of the inspectorate, taken by itself, held no real interest for him. Picking through the contents of cartridge boxes and knapsacks, accounting for lost property, filling out reports—these were the duties of lieutenants and clerks, not of major
generals.

  Even those duties would have been more bearable if only Congress and Washington could agree on the limits of the inspector’s authority, on what he could and could not do. When Steuben had submitted a plan for the inspectorate at Valley Forge, the other generals and the politicians had to meddle with it—they “mutilated” it, according to Alex Hamilton—and as a result he did not have a clear mandate. It was hard to get fired up about a position when no one would tell him what that position entailed.9

  Aggravating his frustration was a situation that had recently arisen in Gates’s Northern Army. Gates had his own inspector, Louis-Pierre de La Neuville, another French import. Gates thought highly of La Neuville. So did Congress. The same committee that had recommended Steuben as inspector general deemed La Neuville a capable and valuable officer, appointing him to the post of inspector for the Northern Army at the rank of brigadier. Steuben was La Neuville’s superior, but La Neuville would not accept a subordinate position, and when the Baron arrived at White Plains in July, he told Steuben so to his face, “My rank in France, the assurance that Congress gave me…does not permit me to serve second under baron Stubben’s as Inspector.” La Neuville vowed to resign if he were not made Steuben’s equal. The Baron had no taste for a confrontation, but clearly he could not work with such a man. “I foresee some difficulties in the way,” he told Washington. His irritation was directed less at La Neuville for his willful insubordination than at Congress for not clarifying the chain of command.10

  Since Congress had not done that, since they had not given him a plan for action “that would comprehend all the essential Duties of my Office,” the Baron explained to his commander, there was nothing he could do. “I beg your Excellency to postpone my entering into the Office of Inspector General untill [sic] Congress have you[r] Opinion & directions about the matter finally pronounced.” In the meantime, he requested Washington’s permission to “take this Opportunity of making a tour to Philadelphia to see my Friends.”11 Steuben’s request was not as innocuous as it appears. Since he was unable to get what he wanted—both explicit guidelines and a field command—he intended to go over Washington’s head and try his luck with Congress.