The Drillmaster of Valley Forge (36 page)

The Baron's main duty, when he wasn't fishing for whales in the Hudson, was working out the details of demobilization. He had hoped for a dramatic send-off. The men deserved that much, he believed. He envisioned a ceremony that would demonstrate to the soldiers that their leaders, their Congress, and their nation regarded them as heroes. A grand review, perhaps, like that at Valley Forge, just one last time, before the individual regiments marched off to their home states. They would do so with colors uncased and flying proudly, fifes and drums ringing out the lilting tunes that had led them into battle at Brandywine, at Monmouth, at Yorktown.
³⁸

It would have been a fitting end to eight years of heartache and sacrifice, but it was not to be. Congress could not afford to keep the army a day longer than was absolutely necessary, but with the British still in possession of New York, it would be risky to get rid of the troops altogether. The compromise arrangement was to be a mass “furlough” of the army. Those men who had enlisted for the duration of the war were to disband and go home, taking their muskets with them. If their country needed them before the British departed American soil, they could be recalled to the colors, ready to fight if need be. A handful of men, whose enlistment terms had not yet expired, would remain at West Point until all affairs were settled.

On Congress's order, Washington began the process on June 2, 1783. There was none of the ceremony that Steuben had envisioned, only the sadly undramatic spectacle of a camp breaking up as the men said their goodbyes to their brothers in arms and went their separate ways. During the first two weeks of June, they took to the road in small bands, with little in their pockets but promissory notes for back pay and a few scraps of food.

It was difficult for Steuben, or any officer, to part with the army for good; it was even harder to see it trickle away to nothing, man by man,
without the satisfaction of viewing his creation on parade one last time. Years later, a former Continental officer recalled the very last drill session conducted by the Baron. His bitter melancholy came through that day at Newburgh. After giving his men the order to “March!” he added in a growl loud enough to be heard by everyone, “…into the river and drown yourselves!”
³⁹

Yet there were consolations. The men did not forget him. Disillusionment was rife in the now-defunct army, as many were convinced that the furlough system was just a clever way of disposing of the army without paying it. Washington, rather unfairly, took much of the blame for the circumstances of the disbandment. Steuben did not, and in fact he received unrestrained accolades. The officers of the New York and New Jersey regiments expressed their affection in a heartfelt but florid letter. The testimonial, written soldier to soldier, could not have failed to move the Baron.
⁴⁰

 

T
HE
B
ARON
had better luck memorializing the contributions of the officer corps. That May, while still at Newburgh, Henry Knox had the idea of forming a fraternal association of officers, to perpetuate the friendships forged over eight long years of war, and to honor those who had given so much in the service of their country. The result was the Society of the Cincinnati, named for the Roman citizen-soldier
cum
political leader Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. Cincinnatus, who had reluctantly put aside his plow to serve as dictator of Rome in a moment of national emergency, only to shed his political powers as
soon as the crisis had passed, had long been held up as a model of selfless republican virtue and civic duty. This made him a perfect namesake for this new society, which saluted the Continental officers for exactly the same qualities.

The first formal meeting of the Cincinnati was held at Steuben's Fishkill headquarters, the Verplanck house, on May 13, 1783. Washington was elected president of the society by universal acclaim, but as he was not present, Steuben served as acting head. At Steuben's insistence, Pierre L'Enfant designed the society's seal and insignia. The basic aims of the society—among other things, to provide charitable assistance to American officers and their families who had fallen on hard times, as so many would—were harmless and above reproach.

Membership in the society was to be hereditary, passed down from father to eldest-born son. Herein lay the source of the controversy that would surround the group in the next few years. The Cincinnati, with its exclusive character and distinctive heraldry, struck many Americans as being too much like a noble order, an innovation that was highly suspect to a people who trumpeted liberty and equality. As a charter member and a titled nobleman himself, Steuben would naturally come to be seen as the author of such an alien and dangerous idea.

 

W
ITH MOST OF THE ARMY
on the road home, Steuben's formal duties as inspector general had gone from being an unworkable burden to almost nothing overnight. He did not have a family anxiously awaiting his return home, as most of the Continental generals did. Washington therefore selected him for a truly unconventional assignment: a diplomatic mission to General Sir Frederick Haldimand, the British military commander in Canada.

The transfer of British-held military posts to American hands was a potentially tricky matter, not only in New York, where thousands of Loyalists cringed at the thought of retribution by vengeful Patriots, but also in the frontier outposts to the north and west of the thirteen states. Washington wanted to make sure that the British did not aban
don their frontier forts until the Americans were prepared to relieve them. This would be Steuben's job—to work out the details of the transfer with the British authorities, and to visit the British forts as far west as Detroit in order to determine what kind of forces were needed to garrison these strongpoints.

It was fortunate for Steuben's health that the mission was an unmitigated failure. The Baron ventured north through Albany into the dense wilderness of northern New York, and via Lake Champlain toward Quebec. Haldimand, alerted to his intended purpose by William North, who had gone ahead to make contact with the British general, intercepted the Prussian at the town of Sorel on August 8. He treated the Baron with kindness and tact, but firmly told him that he could not visit any of the British outposts. Haldimand did not have the authority to allow it, and certainly he had received no orders to evacuate. The mission was over. Steuben reversed course, took some time to recover his strength at Saratoga, and returned to duty.
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A
LL THAT REMAINED
at New Windsor was the pitiful detritus of the army: the sick, the maimed, those too weak to journey home on their own. These he tended to as best he could, arranging hospital care for some, transporting others to West Point so that they could recuperate among the skeleton force guarding the Hudson there.

The Baron wrote very little during the autumn of 1783, keeping his thoughts to himself as he presided over the last lingering, tentative heartbeats of the army he had done so much to create. We can only guess at his emotions as he filled out his last reports, while the days grew shorter in his beloved Hudson Valley, the approaching winter setting the Highlands ablaze with fiery color. The army, the thing that had been his salvation and his home, was passing away before his eyes, and he had nowhere to go.

He did, however, have the advantage of closure of sorts, for since he was compelled to stick it out to the mournful end, he was witness to the final acts of the Continental Army. He rode alongside General
Washington on November 25, 1783, at the head of the procession that reclaimed New York City as the British withdrew to their transports in the harbor, while Patriot crowds thronged the streets to cheer the victors. He returned to Washington's side nine days later, sitting by him and Knox at a table on the second floor of Fraunces Tavern, embracing his general during the round of tear-filled farewells after Washington said his parting words to his officers there. He left New York that day with Washington, and shared with him the barge that took them to the New Jersey shore and the road to Philadelphia.

The general and the Baron parted ways in Philadelphia. The Baron would stay there to tend to his final business as inspector general. But Washington's military career was over. He left for Annapolis, where Congress now sat, to tender his resignation at noon on December 23, 1783. Before Washington quit public life—for good, as he thought at the time—he performed his last act as general-in-chief: he wrote a letter of thanks to the Baron de Steuben.

E
ARLY IN
1778, the Baron de Steuben had declared to John Hancock that he was “an American for life.” He didn't really mean it then, not
exactly
. He can be forgiven a bit of ingratiating talk, perhaps, for at that time he was a job applicant, and it was important that he demonstrate attachment to the Cause in order to secure a commission. The Baron did sympathize with the Cause, even if he knew little about America or Americans. Over time, he grew to form a strong bond with his hosts and with the land itself.

But he also had the dreams and ambitions of a younger man, ambitions that made him hope for further martial glory in Europe, in the French army. Repeated rebuffs from Gérard and Luzerne squeezed the life from that hope. Yet in December 1782, while he was talking money with Alex Hamilton's committee in Philadelphia, he made a final appeal to France—directly to Vergennes. He reminded the foreign minister that “a
peace glorious to France” was in the offing, and that the peace was in part Steuben's doing. “You cannot forget the instruments whose services you have made use of to attain this important object.” What he requested, as a token of Louis XVI's favor, was not an actual command in the line, but an honorary commission as major general and a pension—enough to “enable him to end his days at ease in the dominions of the King.”
²

Vergennes had not forgotten his “instrument.” He could not, for Steuben's fame in Europe was nearly as great as it was in America. One could buy an engraving of the Baron's likeness at any bookshop in Paris; Lafayette, while traveling through Europe in 1786, found that nearly everyone in Prussia had heard of their native son's exploits in the New World. Yet the French foreign minister felt no pressing obligation to reward him. “The King owes no recompense to the Baron de Steuben,” the minister informed Luzerne. He let Steuben down more easily, but not by much. “You have rendered essential services to the United States,” Vergennes wrote him in July 1783, “and I have no doubt of your reaping those rewards you have so much right to expect.” Steuben would have to seek his fortune through Congress, for France had none to give him.
³

Steuben's attitude toward the United States might, at first glance, appear to be ambivalent. He showed every sign of adopting America as his home. He bragged about its peculiarities to his friends in Europe; he was driven almost to madness by those Virginians who quailed in the face of peril instead of springing to the call to defend their country. When he wrote out his will in the summer of 1781, he left the bulk of his estate to the eldest son of his sister, the impoverished Baroness von Canitz, but on several conditions: that the young Canitz must move permanently to the United States, reject “the title Baron or any other sign of nobility,” and take up American citizenship “as a good republican.”
⁴
Why, then, was Steuben still so eager to leave at the end of the war?

The answer is simple. Steuben was exhausted. His activity in the Revolution drained him, aging him well beyond his fifty-three years.
He felt it in his bones, in his increasingly frequent fevers, in the recurring and painful flare-ups of gout that left him unable to ride a horse. His patriotism was not a sham. When he appealed to Vergennes in 1782–83, he did not do so as a mercenary looking to move on to bigger and better things under a different master, but rather as a tired, old man who wanted only to live out his last days in honorable comfort. The Baron suspected that he would not find such tranquility and ease in the United States.

His suspicions would prove correct.

 

T
HE
B
ARON DID NOT FLY
from public service at war's end. Instead he launched himself into a project that had been very much on his mind since 1779: the creation of a permanent military establishment for the new republic. Steuben understood that as much as he favored the armies of Prussia and France, the United States could not and should not imitate them. Congress and indeed most Americans were dead set against a standing army. Aside from its cost, it would also raise the specter of military dictatorship à la Oliver Cromwell. Though the dark days of Cromwell's Protectorate had ended more than a century ago, it was as fresh in the minds of educated Americans as if it had happened the week before.

The major powers of Europe, Steuben therefore argued, should most definitely
not
serve as a model for American military organization. He turned instead to the few existing republics in Europe for inspiration. One in particular struck him as especially pertinent: Switzerland. Like the fledgling United States, Switzerland was cash-poor and relatively undeveloped. Yet for centuries, even before attaining formal independence in 1648, it had managed to shake off the yoke of any foreign prince who laid claim to the land. It did so by relying on a well-organized, home-grown militia of ordinary peasants and woodsmen.

The main reason that the military security of the Swiss rested on their militia was economic: “the Want of the necessary means to main
tain a Standing Army.” America had even better grounds for such a military system. Switzerland was small and compact; America was expansive, with a long, vulnerable coast and a long, vulnerable frontier. If the United States entrusted its national defense to a standing army, that army would necessarily have to be very large indeed to cover so much territory. “It is to our Militias that We must find the real Strength which we are to oppose to that of Great Britain.”
⁵

The thought remained on his mind over the next four years, so when Washington—prompted by Hamilton in April 1783—asked his generals for their ideas regarding a peacetime army, Steuben's pen practically flew. He submitted two long memoranda. The first, addressed to Secretary at War Benjamin Lincoln, covered military academies and manufactories. The second, written for Washington five days later, revealed the heart of his vision.

The defense of the United States, Steuben argued, could not be left entirely to impromptu musterings of militia. There would have to be a permanent army no matter what, but it could be kept small—fewer than five thousand men. It was needed to garrison “a chain of small posts along the frontiers,” to protect overland trade and to serve as “a check upon the Indians.” But five thousand men would not be enough to deter a full-scale assault by a European power. That was where the militia came in. No matter how large the militia was, no matter how it was organized, it would have to be uniform in composition. All units would have to be the same size, and they must be trained in the same manner, using the official
Regulations
already adopted by the Continental Army.

“As long as our Ambition is confined,” Steuben concluded, “to promoting the happiness of our citizens within our limits,” then a small professional army, supplemented in wartime by the trained militia, would do the trick. “A system of this nature will make us more respectable with the powers of Europe than if we should keep up an army of fifty thousand men.” And it could all be done without “the enormous expence which a large land and sea force would subject us to.”
⁶

Washington approved. Steuben's ideas formed the core of the
general's “Sentiments on a Peace Establishment,” which he tendered to Congress in May 1783. It had no immediate effect. Congress was far more worried about how it would rid itself of the army it had than it was about the way it would raise the next army.

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.

 

C
ONGRESS 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