The Drillmaster of Valley Forge (17 page)

Lee's greatest public sin, apart from his uncouth manner and his preference for low-born women, was that he despised Washington. To Lee, the general-in-chief knew little about tactics and less about the art of command. He
knew
that he was Washington's better in these regards, and his vanity and envy overcame his better judgement. He could not hide his contempt for Washington, nor did he try to, and for that reason alone he made a poor subordinate. As the functioning second-in-command of the army, a man upon whom Washington should have been able to rely, Lee proved instead to be churlish and uncooperative, obeying Washington's orders at his own pace and only when it suited him.

Yet there was no getting rid of him. None of the other major generals dared challenge the man, for he had an indefinable mystique that lent great authority to his opinions. Other men seemed to defer to him, whether they liked him or not. Washington valued Lee's experience and wisdom, and tried his best to work with him, but over time it became more and more difficult to do so. Washington did not like Lee, but he respected him, probably more than Lee deserved.

There was more to their mutual dislike than a clash of egos. Washington and Lee had two very different strategic philosophies.
Washington aspired to lead an army built on the European model, while Lee subscribed to the Whiggish idea that freedom-loving, virtuous Americans were much better equipped to fight an irregular “war of posts” than they were to meet the Redcoats head on. Any attempt, therefore, to fashion the Continentals into a professional army would be misguided and fruitless. “It is in vain for Congress to withstand british Troops in the Field,” Lee proclaimed to Elias Boudinot, Continental commissioner for prisoners. Washington only underscored his own egotism by claiming otherwise.

After more than a year in British hands, Lee was exchanged on April 21, 1778, and was honored with a reception at Valley Forge two days later. He spent the next month in York, hobnobbing with his friends in Congress, and returned to the army on the very day of the scrap at Barren Hill. Washington was not pleased to see him come back. Lee was not pleased with what he found upon his return.

The army he found at Valley Forge was much different than the one he had left in December 1776.
That
army had been on the verge of dissolution, low in morale and with so many enlistments due to expire at year's end. It vindicated Lee's ideas on the conduct of the war.
This
army was a reasonable facsimile of a professional European army, at least in bearing, and it contradicted Lee's beliefs regarding Americans and war. Unable to concede that he might have been wrong, Lee instead steadfastly refused to admit that anything had changed. As he remarked to Boudinot, the army at Valley Forge “was in worse shape than I had expected,” and Washington was still “not fit to command a sergeant's guard.”

It was only natural that Lee's disapproval would extend to the Baron de Steuben. Steuben had superceded Lee as the army's resident expert on military affairs, and had displaced Lee's ally Conway as inspector general. He was a newcomer, too, and close to Washington. Steuben encouraged Washington's irrational belief that American soldiers could be made the equal of their British foes.
And as if to rub salt into a raw wound, Steuben made no attempt to conceal his low opinion of the British military. To Steuben, the British army was second-rate at best, a haven for mediocre talent, its officers unimaginative, ignorant, and negligent of their men. Steuben's prejudices reflected the common sentiment of military men in continental Europe, but as Lee thought the British army to be without parallel in the modern world, Steuben's ideas rubbed him the wrong way.

Lee adamantly refused even to acknowledge that Steuben existed. He preferred to undermine the Baron indirectly, by instigating dissatisfaction with the new inspector general within the officer corps. Alex Hamilton knew this firsthand. “You have no doubt heard while you were with the army,” he reported to his friend Boudinot, “of the obstacles thrown in [Steuben's] way by many of the General officers, excited to it by Lee and Mifflin I believe, in the execution of the Inspectorship.”
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It was not sheer coincidence that most of the subsequent complaints about Steuben came from officers in Lee's command.

The substance of those complaints came down to one thing: the Baron de Steuben wielded too much authority over his fellow generals. Some of the measures the Baron had adopted during the training program, though they were necessary and had Washington's full approval, irritated a few of the brigade commanders. Steuben had prohibited the use of any drill but his own or the introduction of any maneuvers that he had not approved, and he temporarily suspended the right of the colonels and brigadiers to exercise their men except when under the supervision of brigade inspectors. He had even dared to lecture the field officers on the need to be patient and kind with their men. The men “are not to be used ill, Either by abusive Words, or otherwise but their faults are to be pointed out with patience,” Steuben had ordered. “There will be no other punishment for the soldier who is inattentive to Instruction but to make him Exercise for a whole hour after the others have done.”
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Who was he, a stranger without rank, to tell honest and long-serving American officers how to treat their men?
Even worse, by restructuring the regiments into temporary battalions, Steuben had temporarily deprived some officers of their commands. This would not do.

Steuben's most vocal critic, Brig. Gen. James Mitchell Varnum of Rhode Island, was a brigade commander under Lee. He would be Lee's mouthpiece. Precisely one day before the Grand Review, Varnum raised his concerns about Steuben with Washington in a long, rambling grievance. “I have observed for some Time since,” he wrote, “the progressive Encroachment of a newfangled Power, which, if not checked, may prove destructive to this Army. I mean the Office of Inspector.”

The Baron, as the head of this “newfangled Power,” threatened the integrity and harmony of the army in several ways, Varnum argued. First, he and his assistants were given unlimited access to sensitive information, including precise strength reports from each brigade. Only the commander in chief should be privy to these statistics. Certainly they should not be entrusted to ordinary staff officers, and never to a foreigner. With Loyalists and spies everywhere, it would be all too easy for these strength reports to be leaked to the enemy. When, therefore, Steuben directed the brigade inspectors to collect current reports of all men fit for duty two days before the Grand Review, Varnum was “filled…with Horror.”

But security, Varnum claimed, was a lesser issue. What really troubled him was what he saw as the unreasonable reach of the Baron's authority. “If the Baron, by his Aids, & Inspectors can manage my Brigade without my Orders, his Power is directly in Opposition to your Excellency's, and there are two commanders in Chief at the same Time.” That this power could be granted to a foreigner made it that much more galling. Varnum portrayed Steuben as knowledgeable but condescending to the native-born officers. He was “too much prejudiced against the American Officers from an ignorance of their Abilities…[and] may have extended his Authority farther than he otherwise would.”

This was largely what Varnum's grievances boiled down to: Steuben was a foreign know-it-all. “I am sensible,” he concluded, “that great Politeness and Respect are due to the Foreign Officers; But our complaisance should never subjugate our Reason.” For so many of the foreign officers didn't have the talents they claimed to, or even “Qualities worth Emulation.” “The world will laugh at us,” Varnum concluded, “when they view the List of Appointments and Promotions in their favor.”
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T
HERE WAS SOMETHING
to be said for these criticisms. Trustworthy though Steuben may have been, Varnum's concern about sensitive information was a valid and understandable one. So, too, is there a grain of truth to the complaint about the scope of the Baron's authority. While the training was in full swing, Steuben's power over the troops was indeed second only to Washington's.

On the other hand, Varnum's complaints—which were by no means voiced only by the Rhode Island brigadier—reflected social, political, and cultural differences between him and Steuben. Although the Continental Army was striving for professionalism, there was something very egalitarian about the officer corps. Continental officers, as a group, were loath to give up their authority, even if only temporarily, not even when the reasons were solid ones. They were very sensitive about their “rights,” even when the protection of those rights stood in the way of progress.

The Baron, however, came from an army in which neither officers nor men pretended to have rights, and from a society in which competency and efficiency were prized commodities. From his perspective, the good of the service was the goal; it came before the feelings of individual officers. Training the army in such a short time required the concentration of all the necessary powers into the hands of the most qualified leaders. Good officers would understand this; others would just have to come to terms with it.

Steuben could not comprehend how anyone could raise objections to his actions as inspector general, especially when all orders concerning training had been issued through Washington's headquarters and not his. The results spoke for themselves.

Hence resistance to his methods troubled him. Innumerable petty objections absorbed much of his time and energy. In early June 1778, for example, he directed the brigade inspectors to find out how many soldiers each brigade furnished daily for guard duty, so that he could work out a rotation schedule that drew guards equitably from each regiment. He also asked for the names of all field officers, so that regimental drills could be scheduled at General Washington's pleasure. One of his brigade inspectors immediately ran into problems with these harmless requests. The major of his assigned brigade refused to provide him with the information desired: he was under strict orders, he said, not to provide “returns”—reports of unit strengths—to anyone.

In the face of such unyielding obstinacy, there was little the Baron could do. Territorial squabbles between him and the Varnums of the army kept him from doing his job. As John Laurens pointed out sadly to his father a few days later, “some Jealousies against [Steuben] have occasioned him great trouble, and interrupted his progress in the Military instruction.”
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Steuben's response to this kind of resistance revealed that he did not fully understand the politics of the army, or the kind of pressures Washington had to deal with on a day-to-day basis. If individual officers were going to protest the extent of his authority, and if those protests kept him from doing what Washington had ordered him to do, then in his mind there was only one possible solution: to expand his authority even farther.

It did not help that Congress had not yet decided exactly what the inspector general was supposed to do, or how far he could go in doing it. There was more to being inspector general than just teaching drill, but Congress had not yet bothered to stipulate what those responsibilities might entail, or even where the inspector general fit within the chain of command.

So, late in May, Steuben began work on a proposal for the organization of the inspector general's office, to be submitted to the Board of War for its approval. His early draft proposals reflected his frustration with the “obstacles thrown in his way.” Some of his ideas were clearly excessive. One, for example, gave the inspector general total authority over all “matters of discipline and military police”; without exception, any officer or enlisted man who did not obey the orders of the inspector or his assistants would be subject to immediate court-martial.
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The Board of War did not raise any significant objection to the tone or scope of Steuben's proposed regulations. The Board, after all, was happy with the Baron. He had accomplished what Washington's generals had not been able to, and as Steuben had made no demands on them, financial or otherwise, they were inclined to give him whatever he wanted.

But the Board, prudently, decided to sound out Washington, and Washington did what he did best: to keep peace within the army. Washington knew Steuben's worth, and did not feel threatened by the Baron in any way, but he recognized the rancor that would result if Steuben's ideas were implemented. So, instead of trying to negotiate with Congress and the Baron, the general-in-chief took the matter into his own hands.

In orders dated June 15, 1778, Washington made his own provisions for the conduct of the inspector general and presented them to the army. The purpose of the inspector general's office, he declared, was to institute “a System of Rules & Regulations for the exercise of the Troops in the Manual & Manœuvres,” to establish some order in guard duty and the “internal Police of Camps and Garrisons.” These “Rules & Regulations,” however, would first have to be approved by the commander in chief, and then they would be issued as orders by Washington himself—not by Steuben. From now on, generals and field officers would take charge of drilling their respective commands, although a representative of the inspector's office would attend to assist them and to ensure that the regulations were indeed being followed.

It was a brilliant order, demonstrating the very qualities that made Washington such a great leader. He reduced Steuben to the position of a mere staff officer, who could not act independently of the commander in chief, thereby negating any complaint about the inspector's excessive authority. At the same time, he made the generals and the field officers responsible for seeing to it that the new regulations were enforced and the new drill put into practice. If Steuben's regulations were not followed to the letter, then the generals and the regimental commanders would have to answer to Washington, not to the Baron. Finally, Washington's order married Steuben's authority to his own. Since every measure the inspector introduced would have to go through general headquarters, the inspector spoke for Washington. At one stroke, Washington silenced those critics who thought the inspector's power excessive, and yet augmented that same power so that it was unquestionable.
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