The Drillmaster of Valley Forge

by Paul Lockhart

  Only a month later, Washington struck again, and from a different direction. In the early morning hours of August 19, 1779, Maj. Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee led a tiny mixed force of infantry and cavalry in a raid on the British fort at Paulus Hook, immediately across from New York City, in present-day Jersey City, New Jersey. Lee was unable to gain possession of the fort, but he managed to escape with nearly 160 British and Hessian prisoners—and all practically within cannon-shot of Clinton’s main army.

  Stony Point and Paulus Hook did wonders for American morale. No one was prouder than Steuben, who was so overjoyed about Stony Point that he personally arranged for a triumphal entry when Wayne’s aide-de-camp brought the news to Philadelphia. “I came into the City,” the aide reported, “with colours flying, trumpets sounding, and hearts elated, drew crowds to the doors and windows, and made not a little parade…. These were the Baron Steuben’s instructions, and I pursued them literally, although I could not help thinking that it had a little the appearance of a puppet show.”20

  Certainly the consensus among Washington’s generals and the delegates in Congress was that Steuben’s reforms had given the Continentals the discipline and proficiency with the bayonet that allowed them to take Stony Point and raid Paulus Hook. Even the Baron was cautiously optimistic. As he wrote to Benjamin Franklin early that autumn,

  I leave it to your other correspondents to give you an Account of the present State of our Army; if they tell you that our Order & Discipline Equals that of the French and Prussian Armies, do not believe them, but do not believe them neither, if they compare our Troops to those of the Pope, & take a just medium between those two Extremes. Tho’ we are so young that we scarce begin to walk, we can already take Stoney Points & Powles Hook with the point of the Bayonet, without firing a Single Shot.21

  THE BARON DID NOT DELUDE HIMSELF. The Continental Army was still incapable of outmastering the British in sustained operations without substantial French help, and without further improvements, the Americans would be shamefully dependent on the French—if, that is, the French ever came to their aid.

  A year and a half had passed since Valley Forge, and nearly a year since the painful object lesson of Overkill, but many of the problems of military discipline had still not been addressed. Guard duty remained neglected, soldiers were free to wander about camp—or out of camp entirely—without constraint, “the natural consequence of the Regiments being without Officers.” Independence might be the heart of the Cause, but independence had no place in the ranks. When the Baron wrote to Ben Franklin in September 1779, he added in a cautionary tone: “We have still many Weaknesses which bespeak our Infancy. We want, above all, the true meaning of the Words Liberty, Independence, &c. that the Child may not make use of them against his father, or the Soldier against his Officer.”22

  Steuben was not just bewailing individual acts of insubordination within the army. The problem went much deeper than that: not only the discipline of the soldier, but also of the nation and the people. The states were unwilling to fill their assigned recruitment quotas, and Congress was unwilling or unable to compel them to do so. Until this changed, the army would be undermanned and undersupplied, and the British would hold every advantage over them. If the Americans wanted to win the war, they would have to commit everything they had. Steuben had said as much to John Hancock and Sam Adams back in 1777. It was no less true now.

  As the months rolled on and 1779 drew to an anticlimactic close, the condition of the army didn’t get any better. It did, in fact, get much worse.

  Actually, everything got worse, and the weather itself was in large part to blame. The winter of 1779–80 was the worst since the war began. Storms pelted the army with snow and sleet in late November, as the troops converged on Morristown, New Jersey, to settle in for the winter. The serious snowfall began shortly after Christmas, before huts could be built to accommodate the men. A three-day blizzard in early January dumped upward of six feet of snow on the ramshackle tent city at Jockey Hollow, burying soldiers as they slept. The army was paralyzed; roads were shut down by the drifting snow, making travel to and from the camp impossible. Fierce winds tore through the men’s tattered clothing and ripped tents apart as if they were made of paper. At Valley Forge, the weather had been unpleasant; at Morristown it was lethal.

  The army was as close to complete dissolution as it had ever been or would ever be. Enlistment terms for many soldiers were about to expire; starvation would have compelled many more men to leave were it not for the snow-blocked roads that prevented them from deserting en masse—a dark blessing for the army, as Nathanael Greene would observe.

  Many officers left as soon as they could, but Steuben stayed on. Washington, ever the optimist, wanted a frank assessment of the army’s strength so he could plan operations for the spring—therefore the inspections continued, snow or no snow. The general-in-chief had no idea just how bad things were until Steuben showed him the stark arithmetic on paper.

  The Baron had not pulled any punches in the spring inspections, but the observations he made in December 1779 were absolutely scathing by comparison. The underlying problems had not changed since the army came to Jockey Hollow. It was the magnitude of those problems—absenteeism, low morale, inadequate clothing, lax discipline—that had ballooned.

  No regiment was up to strength—not even close. One company of Moses Hazen’s Canadian Regiment consisted of nothing more than a drummer and two privates, and two other companies had no officers whatsoever. Edward Hand’s brigade, “the worst composed in the Army,” contained two Pennsylvania regiments that Steuben pronounced “almost ruined for want of care.” Some of the many absent men in the brigade had been missing for two years. The New Yorkers “exhibit the greatest picture of misery that ever was seen”; the average New York Continental did not have clothing “sufficient to cover his nakedness in this severe season,” while their officers looked so shabby they were “ashamed to appear even in Camp.”23

  The army inspections at Morristown, December 1779. This is a typical report from the inspections done by Steuben himself. Evaluating the condition of Sherman’s 8th Connecticut Regiment, the Baron writes: “Four companies of this Regiment are left without Officers too many being on furlow. This Regiment has near Thirty Men dispersed in the Country in improper Commands. Some near two years absent and many of those returned Sick absent have been absent two even three Years. [signed] Steuben, inspector General.” (National Archives)

  Washington was already overburdened with paperwork, so it took him some time to sift through the mountain of reports that Steuben and his sub-inspectors had piled on his desk. When he did get to them he was shocked. “I am extremely disappointed to find,” he wrote Steuben, “that most of the corps in the army are in worse shape than I had flattered myself.” Some units had even “gone backward.”24

  Many of the problems, Steuben knew from experience, could be remedied with hard work and the return of better weather. But the real evils, the things that truly threatened the army’s continued existence, were beyond the powers of the high command to fix: numbers, recruitment, and organization. Organization had been the chief concern at the time of the spring inspections. There was too much disparity between unit sizes, as there had been at Valley Forge. Then, as now, Steuben advocated reducing the number of regiments and collapsing them into fewer but larger units of a standard size—preferably around five hundred rank and file per regiment. It would not be a popular solution, especially among the officers who would lose their posts. But it would be brutally effective, for both administrative and tactical purposes.25

  That was in the spring. Since then, the individual states had become increasingly negligent in meeting their assigned manpower quotas. The national economy, if it could be called that, was headed toward complete collapse, as Continental currency depreciated in value faster than anyone could have imagined. In January 1779, one gold dollar was worth eight Continental dollars; by December, it took forty-two Continental
dollars to equal one in specie. One Connecticut soldier remarked that the currency issued by Congress was “fit for nothing But Bum Fodder.”26 The army deteriorated as the economy did, and by the time the first snows fell at Morristown, the army was already dying.

  Organization, therefore, took a backseat to numbers. Washington and Steuben were of one mind on this issue. Performing a sort of institutional triage, they temporarily pushed reform to the side in order to focus on bringing the army up to strength.

  Unfortunately, the prevailing sentiment in Congress had come around to Steuben’s previous proposal: the consolidation of the army into fewer but larger units. In the Board of War this had come to be known as the “incorporation plan,” and it was sponsored by New York delegate and Board of War member Robert R. Livingston. It was an attractive solution for a Congress lacking money and to command authority, where so many delegates distrusted the simple notion of a standing army. The plan required no outlay of cash, and did not compel them to press the states for more men. And it had the blessing of the inspector general himself. If French aid was so close at hand, why would it be necessary to keep anything more than a skeleton army in the field?

  This was a dangerous way of thinking. It assumed that the British would remain passive, and that the French would be true to their word—and the survival of the country could not be gambled on either of these dubious conditions. The army had to be restocked with men, and for that, Congress would have to act.

  Congress was not quite the same animal in 1780 as it had been two years before. Relatively few of the delegates who had greeted Steuben at York still actively represented their states in Philadelphia, and the acrimonious dispute over Washington’s leadership had by now subsided. The main thing keeping Congress from supporting the army was not ideological division or personal spite, but “the grand cause of all our misfortunes, the bad state of our finances.”27 It would be difficult to cajole Congress into spending more on the army when the delegates perceived everything in terms of dollars and cents.

  The army needed its own voice to be heard in Philadelphia. Washington decided that Steuben would be that voice. No soldier but the Baron had so much experience in dealing with Congress and still held Washington’s trust; no other officer commanded such professional respect in Independence Hall. And certainly no one else knew the facts and figures of Continental military strength as Steuben did.

  At the commander’s request, Steuben and Duponceau left Morristown for Philadelphia on January 16, 1780. After six days of pushing through snowdrifts the height of a man and riding precariously along treacherous, icy roads, the two men arrived in the city, setting up their headquarters at a boardinghouse on Front Street. They did not so much as pause to catch their breath. Steuben presented his written report on the state of the army only four days after his arrival.

  That report made for doleful reading, though the members of the Board of War couldn’t have been too surprised. Using the devastating statistical evidence of the army’s weakness to make his case, the Baron attacked the notion of “incorporation.” Incorporation might save money in the short term, but it would not make the army any more capable of defending the country. It would sap morale, sacrifice experienced officers, and send a message of encouragement to the British and the Loyalists: that the rebels were tiring of the war and were no longer capable of supporting an army. The only possible solution was to enlarge the army through vigorous recruitment, to a minimum strength of thirty thousand men, including a larger cavalry arm.28

  The Board weighed Steuben’s new proposal against the incorporation plan for more than a month. In the meantime, its members wanted more specific figures on manpower, showing just how many troops would be available when the new campaign began in the summer. Hence a hefty delay, as the sub-inspectors scrambled to compile accurate returns from each and every regiment, at a time when much of the army was scattered around Morristown and the foul weather made routine headcounting an arduous chore. Steuben became so impatient that he could barely contain himself. If recruiting did not start soon, there would be no time to prepare new troops for combat. “We shall Certainly lose two months at a Time when we ought not to lose two Days,” he grumbled to Washington.29

  These were not his only headaches. Unbeknownst to him, Congress and Washington had added yet another set of tasks to his department’s unmanageable workload. In mid-January, Congress abolished the office of the mustermaster general and assigned its duties to the inspector general’s office. The mustermaster had supervised recruiting and kept tabs on regimental strengths. That department had been defunct for quite some time. Steuben and his assistants had already been taking up the slack for several months, and the merger of the two departments had been under discussion for just as long. But the Baron resented the final decision all the same, because it was presented to him as a fait accompli, “without my knowing any thing of the Matter.” He did not have enough assistants to handle the added labor, he was not allowed to appoint assistants, inflation had diminished his pay to almost nothing, and Congress had not seen fit to give him an expense account to cover the costs of his necessary travel.

  Sick at heart—the Board was inclining perceptibly toward Livingston’s incorporation plan—and physically ill as well, Steuben lapsed into a despair almost as deep as that he experienced after Monmouth. He felt that he had been backed into a corner. “My dear friend,” he wrote in French to Ben Walker at the end of February, “there is a letter on my table for the Honorable Congress, which has been sealed for a week. It contains my resignation from the office with which America has honored me. The bad state of my private finances compels me to quit a game which I can no longer play.”30

  By vowing to resign—something he had done before, but without result—Steuben shook Congress more than he could have imagined. Unlike his earlier threats, this was not an empty one. He did not say he would resign his commission and return to Europe. Instead, he swore that he would resign his “office,” meaning the inspectorship. If he did so, he would remain a major general, but without the extensive travel and extra duties that came from being inspector general. And since Nathanael Greene had also tendered his resignation as quartermaster general, it must have seemed as if the entire army staff was about to abandon ship.31

  Congress took him at his word. Only two days later, the Board of War received congressional authorization to negotiate Steuben’s finances. A few days after that, Congress voted to grant the Baron two bills of exchange: one for his expenses in coming to America in 1777, another for his expenses in office to date, for a total of 796 louis d’or. The amount was not huge, given the circumstances. Steuben had to accept a 40 percent discount when he cashed the first bill; the second was given to him at face value, as just over $150,000 in Continental scrip. Yet it was satisfactory, and far more than Steuben had a right to expect from a Congress that had devoted itself to pinching pennies.32

  Steuben had not only saved himself—temporarily—from financial ruin, but he had also saved the army.

  Early in February, Congress had given its stamp of approval to one of Steuben’s recommendations, setting the size of the Continental Army for the 1780 campaign at thirty-five thousand troops. This was five thousand more than Steuben had recommended. The Baron was pleased, though he knew that the number meant nothing if Congress didn’t strong-arm the state governments into disgorging their assigned quotas. The Board of War, in the meantime, was not quite so accommodating. On March 16, before harried Ben Walker could get all of the regimental returns forwarded, the Board voted to accept Livingston’s incorporation plan. If Congress approved, which they almost certainly would, 25 percent of the army’s regiments would disappear in very short order.

  This was sheer madness, Steuben thought. Even if the army were increased in size, consolidating the army at this stage of the game would only cause confusion, absorbing all the attentions of the high command at a time when training and preparations for the coming campaign should be the paramount concerns.
For all of the effort he had put into showing the Board the disadvantages of incorporation, he might as well have been arguing with the walls.

  That was the last straw. The Baron told his opponent Livingston so, adding that he would return immediately to Morristown, where he was needed. If the Board of War would not listen to him and to reason, then he certainly was of no further use there.

  Coming so close on the heels of his February letter, his statement to Livingston might as well have been a resignation threat. The Board was afraid of just that, and they had no desire to alienate a man who had earned for himself the reputation of miracle worker. Livingston himself begged Steuben to stay on in Philadelphia for a little while longer, promising him that he could present his arguments against incorporation directly to Congress. And the Baron, with just a trace of smugness, assented.

  To Congress the Baron brought his best and most eloquent arguments against incorporation, citing the damage it would do to morale and to the discipline of the army. The regiments should instead be left intact, and new recruits fed into them until each regiment reached a standard size of 315 rank and file.

  Congress listened. Only five days after Steuben’s plan was introduced, on March 25, the delegates voted to table the incorporation issue altogether until December 1780 at the earliest. There would be no incorporation that year. The army could focus on recruitment and training, on working with the French, and on beating the Redcoats.

  Steuben remained in Philadelphia for another two weeks, hounding the Board about recruiting and looking after Duponceau, who had taken quite ill. The Baron was not entirely satisfied, for despite his qualified victory over the Board of War, Congress had taken no positive steps to bring new recruits into the army. There were, however, signs of hope. In the first week of April, Congress decided to dispatch a special committee to Morristown, to observe the army and discuss the strategic situation with Washington.33