Undeterred, Steuben took up the project again in January 1784, with the same fevered intensity with which he had attacked the Blue Book five years earlier. Duponceau reunited with him at Annapolis to work out the details. Both the regular army and the militia, Steuben suggested, should be organized into “legions”—self-contained all-purpose units that included line infantry, light infantry, cavalry, and artillery. Altogether, in wartime, the regular army and the organized militia would number twenty-five thousand men—enough to discourage any would-be invader. Steuben forwarded a draft proposal to Washington, now living as a gentleman farmer at Mount Vernon. The former general endorsed it enthusiastically as a plan calculated “to insure us the blessings of peace.”7
The Baron formally submitted his proposal to Congress on March 21, 1784, the same day he tendered his resignation. Again, there was no response.8
Steuben’s passion about the peacetime military establishment would not permit him to let the matter rest. Working from his new residence in New York City, he dispensed with Congress altogether and made a direct appeal to the people. The result was a pamphlet, A Letter on the Subject of an Established Militia, and Military Arrangements, Addressed to the Inhabitants of the United States, which he published that summer at his own expense. It was the same plan with a friendlier face. Yes, he admitted to his readership, he did advocate a standing army, but it would be unrealistic for militia to constantly guard the immense western frontier against “savages…who are unalterably your enemies.” A five-thousand-man army should not be the object of fear, for it would be “composed of your brothers and your sons.” “Are they not your natural guardians?” he asked his audience. “And shall it be supposed [that] a cockade and feather…can alienate either their affections or their interest?”9
Though the Baron’s body was already beginning to fail him, his mind remained agile, skipping easily from one military topic to another: on the characteristics of practical military clothing (which should definitely not follow European fashions), on the establishment of cannon foundries and powder mills, on the training of the militia.10 His most valuable counsel centered on military education. Steuben had long been an advocate of a national military academy. The regular army would require professionally trained officers, but the militia would need them, too. In wartime, the United States could not risk putting its fortunes into the hands of amateur leaders. “The merchant may read Marshall Saxe, the Mathematician Monsieur Vauban, but it is the soldier alone who regards their lessons and takes up the sword,” he wrote in his Letter.
In a document he wrote for Secretary at War Lincoln, the Baron laid out the salient characteristics of the American military academy—down to the last detail, including the conduct of cadets in the mess halls. One hundred and twenty cadets would be selected every three years for matriculation, all at least fourteen years of age and with a basic grammar-school education. A faculty of five professors and seven “masters of arts” would instruct them in the vital disciplines: mathematics, history, geography, civil and international law, “natural and experimental philosophy,” eloquence, civil engineering, drawing, French, horsemanship, fencing—a classic liberal arts education, with an emphasis on the art of war.
The overriding concern, as with all of Steuben’s suggested reforms, was uniformity. Cadets, he argued, should not be forced to take a commission against their will, but no man should ever be promoted to an officer’s rank in the army unless he had completed his studies at the academy.
CONGRESS DID NOT ACT IMMEDIATELY on Steuben’s plans. They also ignored his claims for money and recognition.
Recognition was still very important to him. Much like his friend Nathanael Greene, he wanted to be thanked. He harbored a little bit of resentment toward generals who, in his opinion, had done less and been rewarded more than he—such as Lafayette, whose fame in Europe and America was greater than his own. “I know well that in the [French] queen’s quarters, the history of the American Revolution has produced only one young hero,” he complained to his old army friend, the Freiherr von der Goltz, now the Prussian ambassador in Paris. “But then you know how women always need a little miracle-performing Jesus.”11
Overall, though, Steuben felt appreciated in his new home. The men whose opinions mattered most to him continued to sing his praises. And he did not dwell excessively on the past. Only in his appeals to Congress did he relive his past glories and achievements, and there his motivation was not mere sentimentality. He wanted, and needed, money.
Granted, the Baron’s claims were probably a bit high, considering that Congress was not in a position to be generous. But Steuben was not alone: some of the most powerful men in the republic—Richard Peters, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Elbridge Gerry—gave him regular counsel, encouraging him to expect munificence from Congress. “I will forgive many of their Sins,” Peters vowed to Horatio Gates, “if they make the Atonement of doing this valuable & worthy Officer Justice.”12 The Baron’s friends presented proposals for compensation ranging in amount from $8,000 to $45,000. Even Thomas Jefferson, who apparently nursed no grudge against his former tormentor, moved that Congress grant Steuben $10,000. All failed. At first Congress would agree to give him only $2,000, a gold-hilted sword, and an official vote of thanks, though after much wrangling the amount was increased to $10,000 credit “on account”—still well short of the total back and bonus pay that was already due him.13
The emptiness of the Treasury was not the only reason for Steuben’s failure to make a positive impression on Congress. The Baron made some powerful enemies, whose collective power outweighed the considerable influence of his friends.
The Baron’s high standing in the Society of the Cincinnati was the first thing to attract unflattering attention. Many in Congress viewed the Cincinnati as an insidious cabal “formed in Europe to overturn our happy institutions.” One of them was Aedanus Burke of South Carolina. Under the pseudonym “Cassius,” Burke wrote a pamphlet attacking the Society as “a Race of Hereditary Patricians or Nobility,” singling out the Baron as the “creator” and “Grand Master” of the order. “I have the honor to inform Baron Steuben,” he wrote, “that an order of peerage may do well under the petty princes of Germany, yet, in America, it is incompatible with our freedom.”14
Steuben, who joined the New York chapter of the Cincinnati in 1786 and served for several years as its president, shrugged off the ridiculous accusations. “À ça, Monsieur le Cincinnatus,” he wrote in jest to Henry Knox, the real guiding hand behind the Society, in November 1783, “Your pernicious designs are thus revealed. You wish to introduce dukes and peers into our Republic. No, my Lord, no, my Grace, that will not do…. Blow Ye the Trumpet in Zion!”15
Laugh as he might at the carpings of the “Bostonians and gentlemen of the Holy Land” and their “modest and Presbyterian airs,” the truth was that the Baron’s position damaged his standing with Congress. Massachusetts delegate Rufus King jabbed at him:
I know that he was a Soldier of Fortune and a mercenary in Europe; and notwithstanding his affected Philanthropy and artificial Gentleness, I hold his character the same in America; the only difference is this: in Europe he received little money and less flattery…. He has from this circumstance of preference and from the adulation of sycophants, been buoyed up to the preposterous Belief that his military Talents are superior to those of any Soldier in America.16
Once Steuben perceived this prejudice, once he determined that Congress would not deal with him fairly, he dropped any pretense at tact when discussing politics, no matter whom he offended. “As long as I live in this D___ Republic, I will at least have the Liberty of laughing When Ever I feel a disposition for it—wich God knows is very seldom.”17
In the autumn of 1786, high taxes and forced foreclosures sparked an insurrection among the farmers of the western Massachusetts hill country. The episode came to be known as Shays’ Rebellion, after its leader, a former Continental officer named Daniel Shays. Most of the Baron’s former
comrades in the Continental command spoke out vociferously against the rebels. To people like Henry Knox and Alexander Hamilton, the nearly bloodless uprising highlighted the need for stronger central government.
Steuben lamented the rebellion as a harbinger of bad things to come, the “collapse” of the “edifice we struggled for seven years to build.” But as the uprising spread, his sympathies took a surprising shift. Like Thomas Jefferson—a man who in so many ways was Steuben’s political opposite—the Baron sided with the rebels. The farmers, many of them Continental veterans, were being forcibly impoverished by a state government dominated by merchants and speculators, men who had profited handsomely from the war. To Steuben, the farmers’ plight illustrated what he saw as the central problem with the American republic: those in power had exploited the common man in the War for Independence, and continued to do so after the war was over.18
In private, to Billy North, Steuben poured out his contempt for the Massachusetts authorities in letters dripping with vicious, theatrical sarcasm. “This mob,” he wrote to North in October 1786, referring to Shays’s rebels, “consisted of men of the Vilest principles, Desperate in their fortune etc.—therefor a disgrace to human nature.” The leaders of Massachusetts, on the other hand, were “Gentlemen of property & Consideration. This alone gives us a sufficient superiority over these Retches.”19
The Baron could not restrain himself from making his views public. He published a scathing article in the New York Daily Advertiser lampooning the army’s efforts to quell the rebellion. He wrote the article under the pseudonym “Bellisarius,” but everyone of importance who read the article knew it was the Baron. Many of them were not amused.20
Steuben’s response to Shays’ Rebellion highlights the Baron’s conflicted relationship with American government. A republic worked well when its leaders were virtuous, he felt, when they held the common good above all other considerations and interests. But the leading men in American politics after 1783 no longer had the kind of virtue that had made the leaders of 1776 great. “It seems to me that we have neither the virtue nor the wisdom [necessary] to be a democratic republic,” he wrote shortly after the end of the war. Government was now in the hands of those who sought only their personal gain, measured in dollars, and cared nothing for the plight of the men who had fought and died for them and for independence.21 Such a nation could not long survive. When George III’s son, Prince William Henry, expressed an interest in visiting the United States in 1786, Steuben wryly remarked, “It doesn’t surprise me. Eagles are always about when the scent of carrion is in the air.”22
The conduct of Congress so sickened the Baron that he contemplated—briefly—supporting the creation of an American constitutional monarchy. He wrote to Prince Henry of Prussia to sound him out: Would the prince care to accept the crown of an American kingdom if it were offered to him? Henry expressed mild and cautious interest, but the Constitutional Convention assembled in Philadelphia before anything could come of the venture.23
CONGRESS DID NOT DO RIGHT BY STEUBEN; the delegates never fully honored the vague promises that had been made to him at York in 1778. But that in itself did not condemn Steuben to poverty. He did that to himself. He would never really moderate his profligate spending habits in his declining years, spending what money he received from Congress as soon as it reached his hands. Worse, he even spent money before it reached his hands. “He is and will be all eternity,” North once groused to Walker, “eating the calf in the cow’s belly.”24
Shortly after the end of the war, the Baron leased a large house in what was then the countryside of Upper Manhattan. He christened it “The Louvre,” and though it was run down, he was determined that it should rival Belmont in stately elegance. There he planned to entertain his friends among the notables of New York society. He lavished nearly all of the money he squeezed from Congress in 1784 on renovations, new furniture, and books; he splurged on unsupportable luxuries, including three new carriages. The spending reduced him to penury in no time at all. He could not afford to entertain his friends, and for much of 1786 he stayed in the house alone with only Azor—who had remained faithfully by his side through the war years—to keep him company. Unable to keep the house up, he relinquished his lease at the end of 1786. For much of his life thereafter, he failed to maintain a permanent residence anywhere, drifting from one boardinghouse to another or living with Ben Walker and his new bride, Polly, in their Manhattan home.
It was not quite the way he had envisioned his retirement, and understandably it sometimes brought him to despair and bitterness. “Vive la liberté!” he wrote to North as his dream of transforming the Louvre into a gentlemanly gathering place faded before his eyes. “In this country the laborers are barons and the barons are beggars.”25 But overall he kept his spirits up. “Whatever be one’s circumstances, the best is to put on a cheerful face,” he had once told Henry Laurens, and he stood by that code now. Even though he felt ashamed of his indigence, so much so that he refused dinner invitations that he could not reciprocate, he gleefully immersed himself in the social life of New York City. He was naturalized as a citizen there, on the Fourth of July 1786, and stayed within the city most of the time.26 Besides his position in the local chapter of the Cincinnati, he served as president of the German Society of New York from 1786 until his death, and was an active member of the German Reformed congregation.
Plus he had Walker and North. Ben and Billy had families of their own now, but they continued to look after the Baron long after they were no longer being paid to do so. North, who remained in the army as inspector until 1788, fussed incessantly over Steuben and monitored his expenses. He and Walker tried, repeatedly, to put the Baron on a budget, and they admonished him for his extravagance. Regardless of their stern advice, the Baron looked instead to gain easy money as he latched onto one get-rich-quick scheme after another, most of them centering on the financial fad of the moment: land speculation. He pursued several such ventures, all equally fantastical—one of them a plan to create a Spanish “military colony” on the Mississippi, where Continental Army veterans could live free on rich farmland in return for military service. Like all of the Baron’s postwar business ventures, this arrangement with “Don Quixote Countrie” never panned out.
North feared that sometimes he pushed the affable old man too hard. “God knows I would as soon wound myself as wound him,” he wrote to Walker, “but his sore must be probed.” Indeed, the ministrations of his surrogate sons did grate on the Baron sometimes, and he chided North for his miserliness, “the only vice that increeses with Age.” “‘With these Castles in Air, the Old fool goes still on in his extravagant expenses,’ So says Billy,” the Baron lashed back at North in 1788. “Silence, Mr. Billy, I hear you…you are not always in the Right…. I live & must live poorer than I ever did.” Yet overall he took great comfort in the fact that his “kids” cared so deeply for him. “It is true that he often scolds me,” Steuben wrote to North, describing his friend in the third person. “But it is because he wants me to be better than I really am…. He wishes that I were one of the seven sages of Greece, but my passions often make a fool of me.”27
The Baron was not entirely without assets. He was cash-poor but land-rich. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York had all given him substantial tracts of wilderness land in gratitude for his services, and even Virginia—before Steuben made himself persona non grata there—offered him a large, as-yet-unsurveyed plot of land in the Ohio Valley. Steuben sold his New Jersey and Pennsylvania estates, but he stubbornly held on to the sixteen thousand acres promised him by the state of New York and his old ally Governor George Clinton. He chose for himself a remote, completely undeveloped parcel deep in the wilds of the Mohawk Valley, just north of what was then called Fort Schuyler.*
Here, on the estate that he called “Steuben,” the Baron intended to live as a country squire. He would build a manor house on the property, invite land-hungry New Englanders to clear the land and set up farmstea
ds, while he lived off of his share of the harvest from the fecund soil. Proximity to the Mohawk River would facilitate easy export of surplus crops.
Steuben did indeed have a cabin built on the property, though never the grand mansion he had envisioned. A few tenants came to work the land—one of them was Jonathan Arnold Steuben, the Connecticut soldier who had changed his traitor’s name at the Baron’s suggestion—but few of them stayed for very long. But as Walker and North frequently reminded him, the endeavor took far more effort than it was worth. The costs of developing the land put Steuben deep in debt long before the estate yielded even marginal profits.
THE BARON RETURNED TO PUBLIC LIFE only once more, when the new constitutional government of the United States took form in New York City in the spring of 1789. His prestige had not entirely faded, and he enjoyed a prominent place near George Washington on the balcony of Federal Hall as the new president took his oath of office on April 30. Soon President Washington called on Steuben for his advice, the two men falling easily into their old roles again—Washington as the commander in chief, the Baron as his military adviser—as they discussed the structure and mission of the postwar army and its employment on the western frontier. Steuben was delighted by the gesture. “I have dined with the great man,” he told North that May, flattered that his old general still held his opinion in high regard when Congress had consistently ignored him. “I have had a talk with him tête-à-tête for four hours, a horseback ride from nine in the morning until two o’clock.”28
With Washington at the helm of the new government and Alexander Hamilton as secretary of the treasury, the Baron hoped he would get the recompense he had earned, that he deserved. But their presence in government made little difference. Despite Hamilton’s strivings on his behalf, Congress would go no further than to authorize a $2,500 annual pension for him.
The Drillmaster of Valley Forge Page 31