The Drillmaster of Valley Forge: The Baron de Steuben and the Making of the American Army

349 Pages·2008·2.73 MB·English

by  Paul Douglas Lockhart

The Drillmaster of
Valley Forge
The Baron de Steuben and the Making
of the American Army
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PAUL LOCKHART
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To my dearest Jo Anna
I miss you more than I can say
Contents
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List of Maps and Figures • v
1 • The Finest School of Warfare in the World • 1
2 • Courtier and Supplicant • 23
3 • This Illustrious Stranger • 47
4 • A Man Profound in the Science of War • 69
5 • On the Parade-Ground at Valley Forge • 95
6 • Jealousies and Hindrances • 117
7 • Trial by Combat • 141
8 • The Blue Book • 169
9 • The True Meaning of Discipline • 197
10 • Tormenting the Governor • 229
11 • From Virginia to Fraunces Tavern • 259
12 • An Old Soldier in Peacetime • 285
Notes • 303
Index • 321
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
List of Maps and Figures
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1. Map of the northeastern United States, 1777 • 60
2. Map of the northern theater of the war, 1778–80 • 149
3. Map of Virginia, 1781 • 236
4. Diagram: Infantry battalion deploying from column
to line of battle by wheeling • 111
5. Diagram: Infantry battalion deploying from column to
line of battle by Guibert’s method • 193
Chapter 1
The Finest School of Warfare
in the World
[ 1730–63 ]
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If there is a war, I promise you, at the end of the second
campaign, that your friend will either be in Hades, or at
the head of a regiment.
Steuben to Count Henkel von Donnersmark,
June 4, 17541
In the majestic but stark interior of Magdeburg’s Re-
formed Church, one-week-old Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf
Gerhard Augustin von Steuben was christened on Sep-
tember 24, 1730. It was a simple ceremony—everything the
Calvinists did in church was simple, stripped of pomp—but it
was noteworthy for reasons other than its liturgical plainness.
Two of the men surrounding the preacher at the carved stone
baptismal font that stood before the nearly bare altar wore the
uniform of the Royal Prussian Army—hardly unusual, since
Magdeburg was a garrison town, one of the largest in this part
of the kingdom of Prussia. Yet these were distinguished sol-
diers with considerable social ties. The baby’s given name re-
flected the exalted station and honorable life into which he had
been born. He was named after his godfathers: Ludolf von
Lüderitz, royal forester in Magdeburg; Gerhard Cornelius von
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2 T H E DR I L L M A S T E R OF VA L L E Y F ORGE
Walrave, colonel of artillery, a Catholic of Dutch birth who would
shortly become the highest-ranking engineer officer in the entire army;
and Augustin von Steuben, the infant’s paternal grandfather and pa-
triarch of the Steuben clan, a prominent theologian.
These three men, and two noblewomen, stood close to young
Friedrich’s parents, who had been married only one year before, in this
same church. The fourth godfather, however, was noticeable primarily
by his absence. No one expected that this final sponsor would actually
show up for something so mundane as a baptism. He didn’t have to.
Just the fact that he had agreed to list himself as a godfather, and to
allow the boy to be named after him, spoke volumes about the ranking
of the Steuben family.
That man was Friedrich Wilhelm I, king in Prussia, the living
head of the Hohenzollern dynasty. Friedrich Wilhelm—who loved his
army more than he loved his own children, more than anything other
than his serious and vengeful God—would not have agreed to stand in
as godfather to just anyone. His doing so for this baby that day showed
that the Steuben family was high in his favor, that Friedrich’s father
was on his way up in the world, and that baby Friedrich would not
have an ordinary life. Should he survive into manhood, he would grow
up to be a soldier, too, and great things would be expected of him.
What no one present that day could have anticipated was that Fried-
rich von Steuben would win his fame not on the battlefields of central
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Europe, but in distant America.

Friedrich von Steuben was, and is, frequently described as
“German” or, more specifically, “Prussian.” He was both and nei-
ther, though he rarely was so specific in identifying his homeland.
Steuben proudly acknowledged his service in the Prussian army, which
began early in his life, but he always referred to his origins, his family,
and his pretended landownership as “European.” This lack of affinity
to a particular place might appear odd to modern minds, but it made
perfect sense to Steuben. It reflected the political realities of eigh-
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T H E F I N E S T S C HO OL OF WA R FA R E I N T H E WO R L D 3
teenth-century Germany and the peculiar circumstances of Steuben’s
life in Europe.
“Germany” per se did not exist before Otto von Bismarck created it
with blood and iron in 1871, and in Steuben’s time the word was a
mere geographical expression, referring to the German-speaking lands
of the old Holy Roman Empire. Before Napoléon Bonaparte forced its
dissolution at bayonet point in 1806, the Empire was a strange con-
glomeration of some three hundred quasi-independent “territorial
states.” These states varied dramatically in size, power, and prestige,
and were ruled by an equally wide variety of titled nobles—electors,
princes, dukes, counts, margraves, landgraves, and so forth. At their
head stood the emperor, an elected sovereign, and invariably a member
of the ancient Habsburg dynasty. The emperor wielded little real
power over the Empire’s constituent members; he was more akin to the
president of a contentious federation. The individual German princes
retained almost total authority over their respective subjects. They
maintained their own armies, levied their own taxes, enforced their
own laws, and minted their own coin. The princes obeyed the emperor
when doing so suited their interests. By the time young Friedrich von
Steuben reached adolescence, the princes of the Empire had polarized,
coalescing around two rival power centers: to the south, Catholic Aus-
tria and the emperor’s court at Vienna; to the north, the upstart Prot-
estant kingdom of Prussia.
Prussia was the great political and military success story of eigh-
teenth-century Europe. In the previous century, as the Electorate of
Brandenburg, it had been politically inf luential but poor and sparsely
populated, cursed with some of the worst farmland in all Germany.
The Thirty Years’ War of 1618 to 1648 had all but destroyed the im-
poverished territory, as marauding armies, economic distress, and
plague laid waste to entire villages. In the second half of the seven-
teenth century, however, clever statecraft on the part of its rulers—
the Hohenzollern dynasty, the very same family that would produce
the German emperor Wilhelm II, the infamous Kaiser of First World
War notoriety—allowed Brandenburg not only to recover from the
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4 T H E DR I L L M A S T E R OF VA L L E Y F ORGE
devastation wrought by the Thirty Years’ War but even to expand its
territories and build up a respectable army.
In Steuben’s day, the Hohenzollern ruled over a scattered but vast
collection of territories, stretching eastward from the Rhine valley to
East Prussia. Now it was known as Brandenburg-Prussia, or simply
“Prussia.” Its rulers proudly bore the title of king, a distinction unique
among all of the German princes. The second king and Steuben’s god-
father, Friedrich Wilhelm I (1713–40), single-handedly transformed
Prussia into a major military power. Through scrimping and saving,
Friedrich Wilhelm created a modern and very large army—dispropor-
tionately large, given the modest size of his subject population. Plain-
living, coarse, and unimaginative, Friedrich Wilhelm shunned the
refinements of fashionable French culture, but he made his beloved
army the centerpiece of his regime. He attracted much international
attention for his personal bodyguard, a regiment of “giant” grenadiers,
each of whom exceeded six feet in height. Yet for all that, he was a
peaceful ruler. His son and successor, Friedrich II—better known to
posterity as “Frederick the Great”—would not show the same re-
straint.2
Prussia’s was a thoroughly militarized society, in which everything
was geared toward the needs of the army. It was, in Mirabeau’s biting
words, an army with a country and not the other way around. Nearly
80 percent of the state budget was earmarked for the use of the army,
which was the fourth largest in Europe, even though the kingdom
ranked tenth in territorial size and thirteenth in population. All Prus-
sian males, without exception, were registered for conscription at birth.
Still, Prussian manpower was a precious national resource, so in order
to spare the economy the loss of so much valuable labor, the Prussian
kings relied heavily on foreign recruits to fill out the ranks of the army.
Roughly two thirds of Prussian soldiers in the eighteenth century were
foreigners.3
It was on its officer corps that Prussia placed its heaviest demands.
Officers were recruited almost exclusively from the lesser nobility, the
Junker class. Military service was not required of the Junker, but it was