Not that Lafayette’s arrival guaranteed victory. Far from it. The marquis had only around nine hundred Continentals plus three thousand militia. The main British force, now commanded by Benedict Arnold—William Phillips having succumbed to disease on May 15—numbered four thousand. Cornwallis marched into Petersburg with around fifteen hundred Redcoats and Loyalists, and a further fifteen hundred reinforcements sent by Clinton arrived in the Chesapeake the next day. Facing seven thousand seasoned enemies, Lafayette was seriously outgunned.
No longer in charge of field operations, Steuben resumed the preparation of troops for Greene. All he had at the moment was the newly raised battalion of Col. Thomas Gaskins, Jr., numbering around five hundred men. Certainly they could be of use in their home state, but both Steuben and Lafayette—like most military men in Virginia—still labored under the mistaken impression that the real war was going on in the Carolinas, not Virginia. As soon as Gaskins’s men were made ready to march, they would go south.
Steuben would go with them. “My presence in this State has become entirely useless,” he wrote to Greene. “Never was a man more disgusted than I am at the conduct and proceedings in this quarter.” His prayers were answered immediately. On the very same day he wrote these words to the Quaker general, he received orders from Greene to join the Southern Army. “I find myself so beset with difficulties that I need the counsel and assistance of an officer educated in the Prussian school, and I persuade myself I shall find in you both the friend and the General I want.”4
When he wrote these orders, Greene had no way of knowing that Cornwallis was going to lunge into Virginia. Not until May 23 did he learn otherwise, and once he found out, he immediately countermanded his latest orders to Steuben. Neither the Baron nor any of his troops should leave Virginia, Greene told Steuben. Unfortunately, Steuben never received the order. A British patrol intercepted it. The last Steuben had heard from Greene, he was supposed to march to the Carolinas.
Steuben needed no urging, but he hesitated anyway. He could not move. Not yet. Gaskins’s battalion was “Neither cloathed nor equipped.”5
On May 24, Cornwallis’s heavily reinforced army set out from Petersburg, crossing the James and marching on Richmond. Lafayette retreated north, hoping to link up with Anthony Wayne’s slow-moving corps, and all of central and western Virginia lay open to the invaders. As the people of Richmond fled from the British for the third time in five months, it struck Steuben that Gaskins’s ill-equipped battalion was the only American force in the region. The new temporary capital, at Charlottesville, was vulnerable. So, too, was the only significant stockpile of state-owned military supplies. Since the time of the Phillips invasion, this stockpile was stashed away on the narrow, triangular jut of land at the confluence of the Rivanna and upper James rivers, forty-five miles northwest of Richmond. Locals called this the Point of Fork.
Steuben had no great desire to do any favors for the state of Virginia, but he understood that the stores at Point of Fork needed to be moved or guarded, and only Gaskins’s men were available to do the job. He sent them from the “new” Continental recruit depot at Albemarle Barracks, a former prisoner-of-war camp near Charlottesville, to Point of Fork on May 28, catching up with them the next day.
The Baron was wracked by uncertainty. Greene’s orders for him to move south made little sense in light of the current situation. “Please let me have news of you,” he begged Lafayette on June 3. “I do not know where you are or what has become of Cornwallis.” The sorry state of Gaskins’s battalion immobilized him. A recent shipment of newer French muskets from Philadelphia allowed Steuben to arm the Virginians, but they were lacking in every other necessity. “There is this poor battalion camped in the forest, perishing without the power to employ it in the service,” Steuben appealed to Archibald Cary, speaker of the Virginia Senate, “without even the power to drill the men, because they lack shoes and shirts.” Inadequate accommodations at Point of Fork—the men were lodged in “two very bad Negro Quarters”—exacerbated the rate of sickness among the men, which was already disturbingly high. “Two-thirds of [the men are] very bad cases.”6
Cornwallis did not wait for the rebels to prepare for battle. The aggressive Briton had been on Lafayette’s tail for a week. He gave up the chase on June 1, but not before sending out two raiding parties to the exposed west. One, led by the ruthless cavalry commander Col. Banastre Tarleton, was ordered to raid Charlottesville, capturing Governor Jefferson and the members of the General Assembly if possible. The other, under John Graves Simcoe, was to seize Point of Fork.
As Gaskins’s men loaded the state’s military supplies on the few wagons they could find, Simcoe pushed his corps mercilessly forward in a series of forced marches that wore the men’s shoes to nothing. But because they moved with extraordinary stealth, taking prisoner every soul they encountered to ensure secrecy, Steuben did not have any idea that the enemy had been on the move until June 3.
The details came the next morning, and they were not reassuring. Just before dawn, a Continental dragoon officer galloped into Point of Fork, his horse winded and frothed after a long chase. He had nearly been captured by a mounted British patrol but had seen enough in the meantime to give him a good fright. Two columns, he informed Steuben, were rapidly converging on Point of Fork: a small force of British cavalry coming from Goochland Courthouse to the east, and nearly a thousand enemy infantry from Louisa Courthouse to the north-north-east. Cornwallis himself was approaching Goochland with the main body of troops. Goochland was only twenty miles away from Point of Fork; Louisa, a mere fifteen. The British would be upon Point of Fork in no time at all.
Right then and there, Steuben decided to retreat. From what he had been told, the entire British army in the state was headed toward him from two different directions. Even with the addition of Gen. Robert Lawson’s command of 250 militia, who arrived later that day, Steuben’s position was untenable. The British far outnumbered and outclassed him; Point of Fork had no fortifications, no high ground worthy of mention; and the James was swollen to flood stage. There could be no escape once the Redcoats got close. “I thought it absurd to be making a Bravado with a small number of bad Troops against such a force,” Steuben wrote in his official report.7
Hoping at least to save his men, Steuben ferried most of them across the James. Simcoe’s four hundred infantry and one hundred cavalry crossed the Rivanna early on the morning of the fifth. By noon, they occupied the Point in plain view of the rebels on the opposite bank of the James. Only one hostile exchange of fire occurred that day, and it quickly confirmed the wisdom of Steuben’s decision to retreat. Simcoe directed his men to fire a three-pounder cannon at one of the American picket posts. The rebels, to a man, fled in terror as the small projectile whizzed harmlessly overhead. “It was with much persuasion and threats [that] they were brought back again,” the Baron noted sourly.8
The Baron waited for the cover of darkness and then retreated as fast as his men could move. Simcoe awoke early on the morning of the sixth surprised to discover the rebel camp deserted. He had fought against Steuben at Blandford, and he expected another fight now.
Steuben was right to be prudent. Mere hours after the rebels withdrew, Tarleton’s dragoons returned from their raid on Charlottesville and joined Simcoe near Point of Fork. The next day, Cornwallis brought the main army to Elk Hill, only five miles downriver. Had Steuben delayed his retreat by a few hours, his troops would have been destroyed. All of the truly valuable stores had already been evacuated. The loss of the few supplies left—a modest quantity of cloth and a few hogsheads of rum—would hardly have justified the sacrifice of his entire command.
Cut off from Lafayette by a much larger and highly mobile British force to his north and east, the Baron led his men south. He did his best to raise the alarm as he went, sending letters to the county lieutenants to call out their militiamen. Leaving Lawson’s militia at Charlotte Courthouse, he took Gaskins’s battalion to Cole’s Ferry, on the S
taunton River, a march of seventy miles in five days. At Cole’s they paused for a couple of days so the men could catch their breath and tend to their blistered feet. Steuben tried to relax, too, enjoying a local culinary delight that he had just discovered: he had acquired a taste for black snakes, and he detailed several of his men to scour the woods around Cole’s for the reptiles.9
Here Steuben first found out about Greene’s lost order, that he was to stay in Virginia and help Lafayette as best he could. Abruptly changing course, he drove his troops back north toward the James, even faster than he had retreated. On June 19, less than two weeks after the evacuation of Point of Fork, the bone-weary Baron reported in person to Lafayette, then encamped on the South Anna River northwest of Richmond. With Steuben were precisely 408 of Gaskins’s men and about 500 militia.
STEUBEN’S CAUTIOUS ACTIONS in May and June 1781 may not have been glorious, but they were militarily sound. There could be no comparison with Blandford. There he had good ground and enthusiastic troops; at Point of Fork he had neither.
These facts made little difference to those in the state government who already had cause to dislike the Baron. To them, Steuben’s conduct before and after the incident at Point of Fork smacked of cowardice and incompetence. Benjamin Harrison, speaker of the lower house of the Assembly, asked congressional delegate Joseph Jones to try to get Steuben cashiered. The Baron, he asserted, had “600 fine men” who “lay Idle” because he refused to lead them against the British. “I believe him a good officer on the Parade,” Harrison concluded, “but the worst in every other respect in the American Army.”10
Six hundred “fine men”? Had Harrison seen Gaskins’s half-naked, disease-ridden troops—“more ragamuffins than soldiers,” as Steuben described them—he might have whistled a different tune. But once the news of the loss of Point of Fork, and of Steuben’s retreat, came to the new capital at Staunton—the next in line of Virginia’s ad hoc wartime capitals—the criticism got much, much worse.
The mood at Staunton was understandably black in mid-June. Virginia had been ravaged, and the Assembly was hungry for scapegoats. One of them was Jefferson himself, whose term as governor expired in early June. Gen. Thomas Nelson was elected in his place the following week. Although Nelson had been one of Steuben’s most vocal supporters, he made no effort to deflect the barrage of criticism the Assembly was firing at the Baron. The members of the Assembly did not know exactly what had happened at Point of Fork. They assumed that Steuben had fled before an inferior force, and in doing so lost thousands of muskets and tons of ammunition. The State Council opined that the Baron should be hanged for negligence of duty. The Assembly then demanded an inquiry into Steuben’s conduct, asking the Marquis de Lafayette to take the lead.11
Lafayette refused, correctly noting that he was too busy to attend to the affair. He understood that the Virginians’ fury at Steuben came in part from their deep dislike of the Baron’s methods, even if they had done much to earn his scorn. He reassured the Baron publicly that he did not share the prejudice of the state officials at Staunton, but in private he expressed much different thoughts. Even after Steuben told the marquis his side of the story, Lafayette wrote in confidence to Washington that the Baron’s conduct at Point of Fork had been “unintelligible.” The American force at Point of Fork, he asserted, was larger than Simcoe’s corps, and could easily have held the Point for another twenty-four hours—enough time to evacuate the remaining stores and still retreat in good order. Steuben’s retreat from the Point was a panicked one, alienating Lawson and the Virginia militia, who deserted him in protest.12
On every point, Lafayette’s recounting of the affair at Point of Fork was wrong. Over time, he modified his views, once he came to realize that the lost stores were inconsequential and that Steuben had no hope of holding out at the Point. One cannot help but sense, however, that a strange and uncomfortable relationship existed between the two European nobles, and that if there was indeed bad blood, it came from Lafayette’s side and not Steuben’s. When the marquis wrote his account of the American campaigns years later, his assessment of Steuben was not a kind one. He saw the Baron as little more than a drill sergeant, “an old Prussian whose methodical mediocrity perfected the organization and tactics of the army.”13
Even those who supported Steuben in everything he did, however, knew that his feud with the civil authorities was far past the point where it could ever be patched up. As William Davies informed Greene, “The Baron has however become universally unpopular, and all ranks of people seem to have taken the greatest disgust at him…. A very little, however, has raised all this Clamour; but at all events his usefulness is entirely over.”14
STEUBEN WOULD NOT DISPUTE Davies’s prognosis. He no longer had a purpose in Virginia, nor even the possibility of one. And he was truly sick. “The heat of the season, uneasiness of mind and a thousand other things” worked their cumulative effect on his body and spirit. For a couple of weeks he tagged along with Lafayette, but had nothing to do. In mid-July his strength left him completely, and with Lafayette’s permission he took up residence in a “country house near Colonel [John] Walker’s,” in the vicinity of Charlottesville. Tended by Walker’s physician father, he remained in bed for much of July and August, suffering from a serious “skin eruption,” recurring flare-ups of gout, and general exhaustion.
He was too weak and listless to even be a bystander as the young marquis, who had been spared the tribulations of preparing Virginia for war in the first half of the year, garnered the glory of a successful campaign against Cornwallis. He could only fulminate against the administration that had robbed him of his chances of winning some of that glory. “I have seen so many atrocious villainies since I have been in this state,” he intimated to Richard Peters, “that I can no longer be surprised at anything.” The final straw was the uproar over the evacuation of Point of Fork, which he attributed to “the dastardliness of the government, the absurdity of the laws and the pusillanimity of those who should have executed them.”15
Greene summoned him to join him in the South, which the Baron intended to do, though a painful recurrence of the gout delayed his plans. A letter from Lafayette then changed everything: Would the Baron care to join the army at Williamsburg?16
Though a half-invalid and more than a hundred miles distant from the army, Steuben knew that Lafayette and Wayne had been gradually wearing down Cornwallis, who had since withdrawn his forces toward Yorktown in hopes of being rescued by sea. But the British general, in George Weedon’s pungent words, was caught in a “pudding sack.” Washington had been counting on a Franco-American assault on Clinton in New York, but Cornwallis’s predicament was too good an opportunity to be missed. Washington and the overall French commander, Rochambeau, decided on a joint expedition to Virginia. By great good luck, the French royal fleet, under the Admiral François-Joseph-Paul, comte de Grasse, came up from the West Indies, ran into the British fleet of Sir Thomas Graves, and on September 5 the French admiral bested Graves in a slugging match off the Virginia capes. Admiral de Grasse landed 3,200 French troops, Washington and Rochambeau were on their way with 7,000 Continental and French soldiers, and the French controlled the seas off the Chesapeake. “It will be a miracle if [Cornwallis] escapes,” Steuben exclaimed in delight to Ben Walker on September 9. “If he saves himself from this, Cornwallis will be immortal in his homeland.”17
The summons from Lafayette lifted Steuben’s spirits as nothing else could. “My gout was cured at once,” he told Walker. He set out immediately for Williamsburg, with Billy North and John Walker in tow, arriving there on September 10. Washington and Rochambeau had not yet appeared, but already the French, Continentals, and Virginia militia vastly outnumbered Cornwallis’s 7,500-man army.
The Baron had little to do there, at first. He could not consult with Lafayette, who was himself sick in bed and not taking visitors. But for two months now, Steuben had been bored and desperately lonely. Fairlie had been taken prisoner by Simc
oe’s patrols at Point of Fork, Ben Walker was in Philadelphia, and there were few friends in Virginia. There was only Billy North, who had also taken ill while still on the road. Steuben feared that his “poor lad” might not survive his serious fever.
Washington’s arrival on September 14 at least brought Steuben another friend, a much-missed one, and the Baron easily slipped back into the familiar role of inspector. At last he was surrounded again by soldiers, and not by carping, vindictive politicians. “This, my dear General,” he wrote to Greene, “is the decisive moment—the happiest time I have spent in America.”18
Washington, however, had other plans for his inspector. As French and American engineers started to dig siege works around Yorktown, tightening the noose on Cornwallis, the general-in-chief reorganized his forces. He divided the Americans into four divisions: one of Virginia militia under Thomas Nelson, who had just resigned as governor, and two Continental divisions under Lafayette and Benjamin Lincoln. A third division of Continentals, consisting of the Pennsylvania brigade of Anthony Wayne and the Maryland brigade of Mordecai Gist, he entrusted to the Baron de Steuben.
One gets the sense that Steuben’s appointment was a consolation prize of sorts, given to him as a token of friendship from Washington. Nathanael Greene felt bad for his would-be collaborator who had so damaged his own career in his earnest efforts to support the Southern Army. He hoped that Washington would do something to reward Steuben. “Baron Steuben seems to have got into some kind of disgrace, and I believe it without cause,” he wrote to Washington in mid-September. “I wish your Excellency would write him a letter to console him.” The general-in-chief did not wholly exculpate all blame from Steuben. He had heard too much damning, if inaccurate, testimony from Lafayette to do otherwise. “The Baron from the warmth of his temper had got disagreeably involved with [Virginia], and an inquiry into a part of his conduct must one day take place,” Washington responded to Greene. But for all that, “I have for the present given him a command in this army which makes him happy.”19
The Drillmaster of Valley Forge Page 28