Something else of value came from Steuben’s protracted stay in the capital that winter. The fight over the incorporation plan forged a new relationship between the inspector general and the commander in chief. The two men had corresponded throughout the season with a warmth and candor absent from their earlier letters. On an almost weekly basis Steuben poured out his frustrations, all of the details of his exasperating exchanges with the politicians, to Washington. Washington reassured him and gave friendly encouragement. To be sure, Steuben did ask for more money, but his principal business in Philadelphia was the fate of the army. Steuben put the Cause ahead of his personal interests, and that made a tremendous difference to Washington. Now Steuben was a friend and a trusted adviser. After two years of working side by side, Washington and the Baron had finally become partners in the stewardship of the army.
STEUBEN WAS GLAD to leave Philadelphia behind, but the journey back to Morristown was not one of his most pleasant travels. For starters, he had to leave Duponceau behind and make the trip alone. The secretary was still confined to his bed, too sick to travel, which worried Steuben to no end. Despite his crusty exterior and his casual attitude toward his own health, when it came to the members of his staff, the Baron was a doting nursemaid. He left $10,000 Continental behind to cover Duponceau’s medical expenses. But life just wasn’t the same without his exuberant twenty-year-old translator by his side.34
Nor was Morristown itself a welcome (or welcoming) sight. The snow had just recently receded, leaving a muddy, pestilent wasteland in its wake, populated by hollow-eyed shadows who had once been soldiers in the full vigor of their youth. Clothing and food were not yet reaching the camp in satisfactory quantities, and would not for some time to come. Even a full month after the Baron’s reunion with the army, the lack of food was so acute that two entire regiments of the Connecticut Line mutinied, threatening to go home if not fed. The prevailing mood at Valley Forge had been lively compared to this, but then, these men had suffered far more from every conceivable discomfort than the soldiers at the Forge had.
Yet for all that, Steuben resumed his duties as inspector with cautious optimism, or at least a feeling of resignation that came from a realistic appraisal of the limits that had been imposed upon him by Congress. He could not fix everything that needed to be fixed; he had come to terms with that fact. Without once bemoaning the circumstances of his position, he launched into what by now had become a familiar routine: a showpiece review of the army, followed by intensive training.
The occasion for the review was the visit of the new French ambassador Luzerne. Steuben had only a couple of days to cobble together an appropriate spectacle for the diplomat. Luzerne, Washington, Steuben, and other dignitaries watched from a specially constructed reviewing stand as about twelve hundred infantry staged a mock battle for their benefit. It “made a great noise, if nothing more,” according to one participant. Luzerne was impressed, and that had been the intention. That evening, Luzerne and the generals attended a ball and were entertained by a fireworks display orchestrated by Henry Knox’s artillerists. The men and the junior officers engaged in festivities that were more their style. Washington had rewarded them with a gill of rum per man. The raw liquor “took violent hold” of men with empty stomachs, who caroused, sang, and fought with all of the gusto that one would expect from drunken soldiers.35
There was little time for further levity, though, even if the British army remained inactive in New York and Clinton himself was occupied with the siege of Charleston, where Benjamin Lincoln’s pitiful remnant of an army sat bottled up and without hope of relief. Soon the Continental camp at Morristown bustled with activity again, much of it the Baron’s doing. Regular inspections of the army began anew in the first days of May, as Steuben resumed his twelve-hour, seven-to-seven work schedule. The inspections revealed nothing new, just the customary absenteeism and the perennial neglect of guard duty, and that expiring enlistments would soon whittle the army down from around ten thousand effectives to eight thousand.
Still, Steuben would work with what he had at hand. The task of training the remaining troops began in mid-May. There were few raw recruits in the army, so Steuben and his inspectors could skip over the elementary levels of the Regulations and proceed straight to brigade and divisional maneuvers. By month’s end, Steuben introduced mock battles as part of the training program—not for show this time, but with the intent of demonstrating just how the grand maneuvers would actually work in combat. He tried to simulate battlefield conditions, employing cavalry and artillery in the scenarios, while the field music lent the skirling of fife and drum to the din.36
The only real blow to morale came from Charleston, where Lincoln’s battered command finally fell to Clinton on May 12. This was no minor setback. It was, in fact, an absolute disaster, perhaps the worst American defeat of the entire war. Any despondency over the loss of Charleston and its defenders, however, was quickly offset by much more encouraging intelligence, news that Washington, Congress, and indeed anyone with rebel sympathies had longed to hear: the French were coming. Six thousand royal troops, under the command of the Comte de Rochambeau, were already en route to America. There was no questioning it this time; Lafayette himself, having just returned from his trip to Paris, brought the good word to Congress. Another six thousand French soldiers, the marquis reported, would shortly follow Rochambeau’s corps.
The imminent arrival of French forces electrified both Congress and the high command. Congress, rather belatedly, pressured the states to fill their recruiting quotas and bring their Continental regiments up to strength. Washington’s thoughts turned again to the attack. But before he could make any definite plans, the British made up his mind for him. On June 6, 1780, six thousand Redcoats and Hessians left the safety of their camp on Staten Island, crossed into New Jersey, and began to march toward Morristown.
THE BRITISH PROVED STEUBEN RIGHT. Steuben had told Congress and the Board of War, again and again, that their neglect of the army was bound to encourage the enemy. It did. Deserters from Morristown, picked up by British patrols in New York and northern Jersey, told their captors of how badly the Continental Army had suffered that winter and spring. There were only four thousand troops left in Morristown, they said, and those few were themselves on the verge of desertion, and had no fight left in them. The British commander in New York took this to heart, deciding that he would be irresponsible if he sat by and did not capitalize on the rebels’ misery.
The British commander in New York was not actually British. He was Wilhelm, Reichsfreiherr zu Innhausen und Knyphausen, lieutenant general under Sir Henry Clinton and the ranking officer of all the German mercenaries commonly (if inaccurately) known as Hessians. Clinton had left him in command at New York while he went to reinforce Cornwallis in the south. He really had very little independent authority—Clinton treated him as just another division commander—but Knyphausen took it upon himself to take the initiative in Clinton’s absence.37
Knyphausen anticipated an easy expedition. He would march toward Morristown, take up a position near Springfield on the first day’s march, and force Washington to come out of his encampment and give battle. Since the Continentals had so few horses—so the Hessian general had heard from his informants—Washington would have to abandon most of his supplies.
The British-Hessian-Loyalist force did not quite reach their destination. Jersey militia turned out in unexpectedly high numbers, leaving their homes with musket in hand to contest the invasion. After hot fighting and a difficult march, Knyphausen withdrew his men back to Elizabethtown to observe the Americans and wait for a better opportunity.
Washington reacted quickly to the enemy incursion. On June 7, while the New Jersey militiamen were making life difficult for the Hessian light infantry, he prepared his army for battle. He would not abandon Morristown, but neither would he wait passively for the arrival of the enemy. Especially not for the Hessians. Deserved or not, the German auxiliary troops had earned a
reputation for barbarism, and few things seemed to anger the rebels more than the imagined depredations of Hessian troops—except, perhaps, for those of the perfidious Loyalists.
The Baron de Steuben on horseback, ca. 1780–83. Steuben was a knowledgeable connoisseur of fine horses. His favorite stallion, Cincinnatus, attracted admiring comments in Virginia even when the Baron did not. The Baron sold Cincinnatus in late 1788 to pay off some of his debt. (Library of Congress)
Washington mobilized several brigades for the march toward Springfield and Elizabethtown, grouping them into three divisions. The first line of troops was divided into two wings, one under Nathanael Greene, the other under Lafayette. The second line, consisting of the brigades of Edward Hand and John Stark, he entrusted to Steuben.38
The ensuing campaign was brief but not pointless, for Knyphausen, even if poorly served by his sources of intelligence, presented a real threat to the undermanned American army. The French had not yet arrived, and there was no guarantee that the French fleet would be able to penetrate the cordon of warships with which the British had sealed off the American coastline. If Knyphausen could deal Washington a stinging blow, he just might be able to shift quickly northward and wrest West Point from Washington’s grasp.
After two days of marching, Steuben’s division was handed over to the command of Lord Stirling, while the Baron himself was transferred to a position of greater responsibility and risk: commanding the advance guard, a mix of Jersey militia and Continental troops, including William Maxwell’s brigade and Light-Horse Harry Lee’s legion. With this force, Steuben was to scout Knyphausen’s positions outside Elizabethtown. Washington anticipated that Knyphausen would either attack the Continentals outright or make a mad dash for the Hudson and West Point. Either way, Steuben would act as his eyes and ears, and—in the case of an attack on the Continentals in New Jersey—his first line of defense, too.39
This was not a promising assignment. The Baron was firmly convinced that the real target of Knyphausen’s onslaught was West Point, not Morristown, and he knew well that West Point was in no condition to withstand a determined assault. That was where he wanted to be, where he felt the decisive blow would fall.
The worst thing, however, was that he found himself commanding forces that did not quite live up to the standards he expected from soldiers. Within a few days of Knyphausen’s retreat to Elizabethtown, the Jersey militia grew restless and bored, and soon they were straggling back to their homes. While making his rounds of the American advanced posts on the morning of June 20, the Baron found that two of these posts had been completely abandoned by the militia assigned to man them. He was dumbstruck that the militia could be so careless and negligent while Loyalists and Hessians were burning homes and farms in the countryside. “With a very inferior Force I have hitherto labor’d to keep at Bay an Army very respectable in their Numbers & prevented their ravaging your Country,” he wrote to the state governor, William Livingston. “I am liable however every moment to be defeated by those few Men who constitute my Command.” Feeling very ill, and fearful that his reputation as an officer would be destroyed not by his own actions but by the incompetence of the men under his command, Steuben begged Washington to send him to West Point instead. Washington, who agreed with the Baron’s assessment of British intentions, complied immediately.40
Steuben’s instincts were dead-on. While Knyphausen was holding tight at Elizabethtown, Clinton and his troops returned from Charleston, sailing into New York Harbor on the very same day that the Baron requested a transfer. Sir Henry was not the least bit pleased with Knyphausen’s independent action, but he thought it wise to turn the New Jersey invasion to good use. He would reinforce Knyphausen’s force, presenting an even greater threat to Morristown, and so enmire the Continentals that a thrust up the Hudson toward West Point could be executed. Again Knyphausen’s army surged forward, and again the offensive failed. Washington moved with the main body of the army to West Point, where Steuben was already helping to organize the small garrison and beef up the defenses. Greene’s division remained behind, alone, in New Jersey. At Springfield, on June 23, the intrepid Rhode Islander and his men held off Knyphausen’s assault in fine fashion, convincing the Hessian to give up and retreat to New York.
Greene was the one who took most of what little glory was to be gleaned from the anticlimactic Knyphausen invasion. The battle at Springfield, perhaps the most unjustly forgotten clash of the war, was a telling demonstration of the effectiveness of the revamped Continental Army in the hands of one of its star generals. It was also the only real pitched battle of the entire campaign. Steuben, by contrast, could not count himself quite so fortunate.
But it was not without significance. Washington had given him a field command, and not just the responsibility of moving troops. It was a sure mark of esteem from the commander in chief, a sign that Steuben had finally earned the trust that he thought he had won at Monmouth. Even better: none of the brigadier generals had complained about the Baron’s preferment. He was no longer an inspector general with the rank of major general; he was one of Washington’s generals, a bonafide and permanent battlefield commander in the Continental Army.
In a mere six months, Steuben would come to regret this with every fiber of his being.
CHAPTER 10
Tormenting the Governor
[JULY 1780–MAY 1781]
I must confess that I have not yet learnt how to beat regular troops with one third their number of militia.
STEUBEN TO GEORGE WASHINGTON,
JUNE 11, 17811
WHILE CONDUCTING INSPECTIONS at West Point in early October 1780, the Baron de Steuben ran across a name in the muster rolls of the 3rd Connecticut Regiment that caught his eye. Inspection days were busy ones, without much time for idle banter, but Steuben found the man’s name so intriguing that he simply had to investigate. As the regiment stood stiffly at attention, the inspector general summoned the man to report front and center. Jonathan Arnold, a twenty-three-year-old tenant farmer from East Hartford, stepped nervously to the front and saluted.
Only a couple of weeks before, the name “Arnold” would not have merited a second glance, but that had changed. On September 25, Benedict Arnold, one of Washington’s favorite generals and the unsung hero of Saratoga, had tried to sell out West Point to the British. Arnold’s treason was detected before any real damage could be done, but the act devastated Washington and infuriated the entire army. Steuben shared in the communal, visceral hate. He sat on the court that tried Arnold’s British accomplice, Maj. John André, as a spy. Like most of his comrades, Steuben admired the cultured, gentlemanly André, and would have far preferred to have seen Arnold, and not André, dangling from the gibbet at Tappan.
Somehow it struck Steuben as odd that another man from General Arnold’s native state could possibly bear the same surname as the perfidious traitor. When Jonathan Arnold came before him that day, the Baron asked him how he could stand having such a name, as if it were a matter of choice. The terrified young soldier stammered out that he hated the name but didn’t think he could do anything about it. Delighted at the response, Steuben put Arnold at his ease. Assuredly the name could be changed, he said, and offered “Steuben” as a substitute.2
Neither man forgot the episode. As soon as he was discharged from the army in 1783, Jonathan Arnold petitioned the Connecticut General Assembly to change his name. “Pitying the misfortune of any person Friendly to the American cause” with that unspeakable name, Steuben supported the petition, and further asked the state of Connecticut to pay Arnold a lifetime pension of two dollars per month. The Baron and the Connecticut farmer, now Jonathan Arnold Steuben, would remain linked for the rest of their lives.3
This kind of informal fellowship with the common soldier came easy to Steuben, especially now that he had accepted the fact that America was likely to be his permanent home. Two years before, the notion that he might never leave the New World would have struck him as inexpressibly depressing.
His gentleman’s agreement with St. Germain, assuring him of a commission in King Louis’s army, had been his hope and his comfort. Only gradually did he come to realize that that hope had been but a phantom.
The sad truth was that France had forgotten him. St. Germain had died in January 1778, and any arrangement he had made with the Baron went to his grave with him. Beaumarchais no longer held much influence at court. Of those men privy to the deal, only Vergennes remained, and Vergennes did not care what became of Steuben.
The Baron searched both Gérard and Luzerne for any sign that he might have a future in France, but in vain. After escorting Luzerne from Boston in the summer of 1779, it finally dawned on him: “I saw that he knew nothing of me,” Steuben confided to his memoirs, “and that the French ministry had not informed him how it happened that I came to this country…. They had set me adrift and…I was to manage for myself as well as I could.”4
That was a discouraging epiphany, but things could have been worse. Steuben had to admit that he liked America and Americans, and he had come to think of their Cause as his own. Historians and a few hostile contemporaries would later describe the Baron as a “mercenary” to whom the concept of liberty meant little. Such an assessment is both unfair and wrong. Like many educated Europeans of the Enlightenment, Steuben idolized Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire, men who sincerely believed in the equality of humankind and the sanctity of freedom. To him, as to Lafayette, the American bid for independence was a great experiment, one that would, he hoped, prove that these were not the mere musings of abstract philosophy.
The Drillmaster of Valley Forge Page 24