The Drillmaster of Valley Forge (22 page)

 

A
S HE RODE
from White Plains to Philadelphia, Steuben's temper cooled. The prospect of visiting the city was in itself an exciting one. It would be his first extended stay in the largest and wealthiest city in the United States, and doubtless there would be much to take his mind off of his predicament in the army.

In Philadelphia, too, there were men who genuinely liked him, enjoyed his company, and—after Valley Forge—considered him a miracle worker. His closest personal bond was with Richard Peters, the brilliant Philadelphia lawyer who served as secretary on the Board of War. Peters and Steuben had first met at York in February, and had struck up a warm friendship in no time at all. When the Baron rode into Philadelphia at the end of July 1778, Peters insisted that he stay with him and his young family in Belmont, their spacious mansion. The Peters clan—Richard, his wife, Sarah, and their little son, Ralph—adopted him as if he were a much-beloved uncle. Young Peters, only a toddler, took a shine to the affectionate Baron, who in turn showered him with gifts and called him his “little aide-de-camp.” Richard was infinitely indulgent of his Prussian friend. When Steuben
left the city later that autumn, Richard paid the Baron's debts—he had racked up quite a set of bills with a tailor and a saddler—without complaint, and laughed it off when Carl Vogel inadvertently took off with some of the Peters family's silver.
¹⁶
Going to Philadelphia was as close to going home as Steuben could get.

Though he was put off a bit by the high cost of living—“How unmercifully We poor Strangers are flayed alive by the people of this country,” Steuben grumbled to Richard Peters—the city did wonders for his mood. Best of all, Congress seemed to be taking him seriously, appointing a committee to review his proposals. Unaware that Washington had tried to undermine him, he wrote to thank the commander in chief for his support, vowing that he would work with Congress to create an inspector general's office “on such principles as may be agreable to your Excellency & the Army in general.”
¹⁷

In his quarters at Belmont, Steuben sat down with Ternant to draft a detailed proposal for the “constitution” of the inspector's office. Duponceau took notes and translated. The plan was based on the reports of Crénis and the Baron d'Arendt, but adapted to what Steuben believed were the guiding principles of the American republic. In France and in Prussia, inspectors wielded sweeping powers over all other officers. They could issue any orders they pleased concerning the discipline, training, and good order of the troops, and could countermand any orders given by another officer. In France, the authority of an inspector general superceded that of provincial governors. In both armies, inspectors were also field officers who commanded troops in accordance with their rank. Steuben was not about to ask for the right to order the state governors around, or to strike down Washington's orders at will, but he did believe, and fervently, that he should have the power to do anything necessary to make the army combat-ready, without regard for the objections of the other generals. In his proposal, the inspector general would also have the power to reorganize regiments and brigades as he saw fit, to maintain a uniform structure in the army. On the march and in battle, he would command troops like any other officer of his rank—therefore he, as a major general, would lead a full division.
¹⁸

Steuben's proposal was based on proven principles that had served European armies well. It was also bound to fail, with or without Washington's subterfuge. As a Prussian, Steuben was raised in a political climate that put efficiency ahead of all other virtues. The science of public administration—often referred to as “cameralism”—was all the rage in German princely courts. While cameralism emphasized talent over birth as the principal qualification for holding office, it was not democratic. Democracies are inefficient, and hence democratic thought had no place in a well-ordered army. Steuben as yet did not grasp the subordination of military authorities to civilian control, a principle to which Washington was dedicated. He certainly did not fathom that there were those who believed that standing armies were in themselves a necessary evil at best, and a tool of tyranny, a direct threat to liberty, at worst. Many of the men with whom the Baron had rubbed elbows while at Boston and York, men like Sam Adams and James Lovell, felt this way.

Congress, strangely, didn't do much to discourage Steuben, though Gouverneur Morris had promised Washington otherwise. “The Baron has a Claim from his Merit to be noticed but I never will consent to grant what I am told he requests & I think Congress will not,” he reported to Washington on August 2. “At least they wont if I can help it.”
¹⁹
But for some reason, perhaps fear of an unpleasant confrontation with a popular man, Congress held back. The committee appointed to hear Steuben's proposals, dubbed the Committee of Arrangement, consisted of three men who were not likely to find fault with the inspector: Joseph Reed, Elias Boudinot, and Samuel Chase of Maryland. After a brief meeting with the Baron, they made only a handful of recommendations, and these were on the least controversial points: that the inspector should compose regulations for the use of the army, and that he should review the troops regularly. With regard to La Neuville, the committee sided with Washington and Steuben, asserting that Gates's inspector must submit to Steuben or else resign.
*
The
committee said nothing about the rest of the proposal, which they left to Washington's consideration. They, in short, passed the buck.
²⁰

But Washington had his hands full elsewhere. The strategic situation in Rhode Island was deteriorating rapidly. D'Estaing, his fleet damaged by heavy storms, retreated to Boston for repairs, leaving John Sullivan's makeshift force of Continentals and militia to fend for itself against the British at Newport. Congress panicked; fearing that failure at Newport would turn popular opinion against the French alliance, they sent Steuben packing for Rhode Island to help Sullivan in any way he could. Sensing the possibility for action, the Baron did not object, but Washington stopped him en route at White Plains. He was needed with the main army, and since when did Congress have the authority to order
his
staff about? Steuben, confident that approval of his proposal was a mere formality now, didn't object to this, either, even though the wasted trip had wreaked havoc on his personal finances.
²¹

It wasn't long before his hopes were dashed. Washington finally reviewed Steuben's proposals and passed them along for his generals to examine. The generals—fourteen of them—were far from happy with the plan; in fact, they
hated
it. They “view[ed] with concern that resolves so dangerous in their consequences to the united States…should ever have been penned.” The inspector's “inquisitional authority” would “form a new fangled system of powers…uncontrolled and unchecked.” The only good thing they had to say about the proposal was that Congress had not approved it yet.
²²
Washington was kinder, but not by much. His main concern was the reaction of the other generals, their “jealously and disapprobation.” “The authority of those Officers in their respective Corps is reduced to a shadow [by Steuben's plan] and no man of spirit will continue in the service.”
²³

A blind man could have seen this coming. Yet Steuben did not. He was taken by surprise by the universally negative reaction, and it dealt him a hard blow. What he had proposed reflected reason and experience, and established practice in the great armies of the civilized world. Americans, whether in Congress or in the army, were beginning to strike him as disingenuous: to his face, they praised his abilities and
craved his advice, but none of his suggestions was ever good enough. As he saw it, his presence in the United States so far had meant nothing. He vented to the French resident ambassador in Philadelphia, Conrad-Alexandre Gérard:

What made this lack of discipline even more depressing, Steuben thought, was that it pointed to a certain complacency on the part of Congress and the American people, an unwillingness to see the war through. “It is said that Congress has given the order to suspend recruitment in all the states,” he railed to Gérard. “Are we to believe that the war is already over? I desire it, but I very much fear that we are deceiving ourselves…I believe that a peace treaty signed at the head of a strong army is always more advantageous.”
²⁴

The frustration was almost more than he could bear. “[W]hen I see that a solid formation of this army is so absolutely opposed,” he groused, “…I put away my papers and reassert my regrets of having made a mistake when I left the position of lieutenant general in the service of the margrave of Baden, where I was fine in all respects.”
²⁵

It was bad enough that the Continental Army was leading itself to its own demise by ignoring his prescriptions. What made it worse was the idleness. His resignation threat had been a bluff; he had nothing to do and nowhere else to go. He was stuck at his headquarters in the sleepy little hamlet of Fredericksburg, New York, miles from anything
that even vaguely resembled civilization. “The inactivity in which I now live, and the little use made of my Military Talents makes me despair of ever having a Right to ask for so high a Reward as the Town Majority of Fredericksburg,” he intimated to Richard Peters.

“Experience teaches me that Offered services do not always prove acceptable,” Steuben continued. He had done all that he could. “If the Arrangements I have proposed for the Good of the Army are not accepted of, by having fulfilled a Duty I had imposed upon me I have acquitted what I owed to myself, as Well as to all the Military.” He would “wait in respectful Silence for the Orders of Congress” and ride out the war until he could get a better offer elsewhere.
²⁶

 

T
HE SKIES OVER NORTHERN
N
EW
J
ERSEY
were clear but moonless on the night of September 27, 1778, when the scarlet-clad soldiers emerged, silent as ghosts, from the woods and fields along the Kinderkamack Road, not far from the border-town of Old Tappan. Their features—indeed their very presence—were completely obscured by the impenetrable darkness. Unbetrayed by the soft glint of moonlight on polished musket barrels, or by the cry of an alarmed sentry, they crept stealthily toward a stone house and its outlying barns.

The Redcoats, twelve companies of elite light infantry, were on no ordinary night patrol. Nothing showed that better than the fact that the man breathlessly urging them along was one of most distinguished commanders of His Majesty's troops in North America. General Charles “No Flint” Grey was something of a legend in the British army. He had earned his chilling sobriquet the year before at Paoli, Pennsylvania, where he had caught Anthony Wayne's detachment completely unaware in the night, his men rushing into the American camp and bayonetting the slumbering Continentals in their tents. He had, it was said, ordered his men to remove the flints from their muskets so that they would not be tempted to shoot. They would have to rely on their bayonets and on the crushing force of musket butts swung by brawny arms.

Grey's men had a similar intent this night. In the barns and stone buildings that lay ahead of them in the thick darkness, near a stream crossing that bore the ominous Dutch name of Overkill, were around one hundred men of the Third Continental Light Dragoons. They were Virginians mostly, whose nickname—“Lady Washington's Guards”—gave them a chivalric air. Part of a larger mixed force of local militia and Continentals, they had been screening Lord Cornwallis's incursion into New Jersey.

Grey's advance toward Old Tappan had already scared off most of the militia, who had scampered away without alerting the men of the light horse. The dragoons were bedded down for the night in the six barns belonging to old Isaac Blauvelt. Their commander, Col. George Baylor, set guards on the bridge at Overkill to the south, and along the road north of the Blauvelt house—though the guards complained that the night was so black that the pickets were of no use. No one could possibly see an approaching enemy in that darkness.

Their reports proved to be tragically prophetic. The British took to the road at ten o'clock that night, enveloping the Blauvelt farmstead and cutting off any chance of escape. Sometime after one o'clock in the morning, the Redcoats materialized from the darkness. They were upon the hapless American pickets in a flash, dispatching them with bayonets and clubbed muskets before they even had a chance to utter a sound. Grey and a few men took possession of the Blauvelt farmhouse, where Colonel Baylor and his second-in-command, Maj. Alexander Clough, were quartered. According to local tradition, Baylor and Clough tried frantically to hide themselves in a chimney. Baylor escaped; Clough, who was discovered, was bayonetted repeatedly as he pleaded for mercy.

The rest of the British force closed in on the barns, forcing their way in, and the killing began in earnest.

A few of the Americans were alert enough to effect an escape, melting into the safety of the nearby woods. Most were not so lucky. Some were bayonetted as they slept, others as they searched clumsily for their weapons; some fought back with pistols or sabres but were quickly overcome. A great many of the Continentals, seeing the hopelessness of
their predicament, surrendered. Some were granted quarter, while others were coldly taken outside and bayonetted anyway.