The Drillmaster of Valley Forge (16 page)

The “battle” of Barren Hill had been a close scrape and a near disaster. “It was a very Luckey afair on our side, that we Did not Loose our whole Detachment,” noted Henry Dearborn, lieutenant colonel of the 3rd New Hampshire Regiment.
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Lafayette could count himself very lucky indeed, having lost only six Canadians during the initial clash with the dragoons on the Ridge Road. It could have gone much, much worse. The entire force could have been taken captive. The loss of one fifth of Washington's army would have wrecked American morale and negated any chance Washington might have had for a successful offensive in the summer. Washington, Steuben, and Greene had done much to boost the spirits of the army over the winter months; Barren Hill could have undone their handiwork in a matter of hours.

Lafayette credited his “victory” to his own quick thinking. In public, Henry Laurens and George Washington encouraged that notion, praising Lafayette's consummate skill as a tactician. Privately, Washington expressed some doubts as to Lafayette's readiness to handle an independent command. Lafayette had been careless to have been ensnared so readily. But it would not do to express such sentiments openly. Reprimanding the marquis would serve no purpose other than to dampen morale, cast Washington's leadership in a bad light, and embarrass America's French allies.

Among Washington's generals there were accolades, too, but the praise went not so much to Lafayette as to the men themselves. Lafayette's corps had escaped because the men had kept their cool, responding quickly and smartly to the orders given them. Barren Hill, if it can be called a battle at all, was a soldier's battle.

And that was the lesson of Barren Hill, the significance of which was far greater than the anticlimatic encounter's minimal strategic importance: that American soldiers, properly trained, could maneuver with disciplined precision and order as well as most European armies.

The Continental Army could not have performed so well, in similar circumstances, before April 1778, before a down-on-his luck Prussian nobleman taught them the basics of modern tactics. That transformation had been Steuben's doing, and his contemporaries gave him full credit. To the clergyman William Gordon, who had befriended the Baron in Boston, “The orderly manner in which the Americans retreated on this occasion…is to be ascribed to the improvement made in their discipline owing greatly to the Baron De Steuben.” Henry Laurens was just as impressed by the response of the main army at Valley Forge to the alarm on the morning of May 20: “To the honour of Major General Baron Stüben, the whole Army in fifteen minutes were under Arms formed & ready to March.”
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S
TEUBEN DID NOT RECORD HIS THOUGHTS
on the Barren Hill episode. It was not the kind of operation he would have approved if it had been his place to do so. He knew better than anyone the extent of the army's battle-readiness, and the perils of sending an expeditionary force under an inexperienced commander deep into enemy territory. In allowing the operation to go forward, Washington had gone against his better judgement. Eager to test his reformed army, the commander in chief was willing to take dangerous risks.

Steuben knew what this implied for rebel strategy: Washington was not going to sit quietly in Valley Forge and wait for the British to attack
him. He intended to take the field that spring and move directly against the enemy. If the army were to be ready for a campaign of that sort in the summer of 1778, then the Baron had much more work to do.

The task that now faced Steuben was much less daunting than the one he had taken upon himself in late March. He was no longer a stranger; he had a smoothly functioning staff and a formidable hierarchy of sub-inspectors and brigade inspectors, and the army was already well versed in the basics. There still existed a huge disparity in the sizes of individual regiments, but that could not be fixed overnight, and the Baron would just have to work around it, as he had done so far. What he could do was focus his attention on grand maneuvers, putting the largest units possible—usually entire divisions—through the paces of complicated maneuvers. Barren Hill had shown just how important this could be.

Practice maneuvers for larger units had actually commenced before the Grand Review, but they were held more frequently afterward, and even more so after Barren Hill. These were taxing all-day affairs from which no soldier or officer was excused. The division and brigade commanders took them very seriously, viewing poor performance at drill as a stain upon their honor. Steuben did not command these maneuvers per se—the major generals and brigadiers were qualified to do that by now—but he supervised them in person, and he set out in detail the specific movements that each brigade and division was to perform.

The division maneuvers were designed to teach rapidity and precision in movements that would most likely be used in battle. One example should suffice. On May 16, 1778, Steuben scheduled a drill session for the four brigades led by Generals Learned, Paterson, Muhlenberg, and Weedon. First, the men had to be organized into units that were roughly equal in size. Steuben was uncomfortable with the organizational structure of American military units, so he temporarily—just for purposes of drill—would reconfigure the regiments in the Prussian manner. In the American service, the regiment was the basic tactical unit; it usually consisted of a half dozen to a dozen companies. In the Prussian service, the battalion was the basic unit of in
fantry. Two or more battalions made up a regiment, with the latter acting more as an administrative unit. Each battalion was then divided into four or five companies, and each company into two platoons. As Steuben would point out time and again, it didn't matter what terminology was used, so long as all units of the same type were close to one another in size.

Prior to instruction, Steuben would line up all the men in each brigade, and he and his assistants would then count them off and reapportion them, making battalions of around four to five hundred men. These battalions were then subdivided into eight platoons of roughly fifty men each, plus officers. There was a distinct advantage to this system. The men learned to work with different officers and different comrades, a process of homogenization that made for a more efficient army.
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Then the maneuvers could begin. This took up most of the daylight hours. The four brigades, organized as two divisions, formed two divisional lines of battle, each two ranks deep. They practiced forming “columns of platoons.” If the order was given to form column of platoons to the right, each platoon would wheel ninety degrees clockwise, pivoting on the rightmost man in the platoon. Now each division would be formed up in a deep, narrow column, its width being equal to the battle-line width of one platoon, twenty to twenty-five men across (forty to fifty men formed in two ranks), with the platoons following closely upon one another in succession. Such a column could move forward much more rapidly, and was much more maneuverable, than a division in line of battle. When the order was given to form into line, the column would halt and the platoons would wheel ninety degrees counterclockwise on a left-hand pivot, placing the platoons back into their original positions in the line. This was practiced in the opposite direction (i.e., to the left) as well. Then the same maneuver was executed again, but this time in “column of divisions”—the term “division” here meaning a group of two platoons. Finally, this maneuver was combined with firing drills. When a column of divisions wheeled back into line of battle, each
division would unleash a volley of musketry as soon as it resumed its position in the grand line of battle. In this way, an entire brigade or larger unit could be moved rapidly and directly into a firefight in column, wheel into line of battle, and begin to pour a rolling fire into an oncoming enemy in a matter of seconds.

Further exercises included the practice of “moving fire,” something for which the Prussian army was renowned. “Firing by platoons in retreat”: as the battalions did an about-face and marched away from the enemy, individual platoons would take turns covering the retreat by halting, performing an about-face, firing a volley into their pursuers, doing another about-face, and marching at the quick-step to resume their place in the line of the retreating battalion. A similar maneuver involved volley fire by platoons while the line of battle was advancing toward the enemy.

These movements sound hopelessly complicated to modern ears. They
were
complicated, which is why they required constant practice. But they also made the difference between an army that could attack, retreat, and change formation quickly, and an army that found it an almost insurmountable challenge just to form up for battle. It was this marriage of fluidity, rapid motion, and constant firepower that had set the Prussian army apart from its foes and allies.

The accolades poured in unsolicited. A Pennsylvania militia officer watching one of the divisional drills of May 1778 wrote in astonishment to a friend that the Continentals he saw were “as well disciplined as any of the british troops can be, they performed several manovres [
sic
] with great exactness & dispatch, under the direction of Baron Stuben, and…I am informed that our whole army are in as good order as them 15 regiments.”
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In Congress, too, admiration for Steuben's work in May and June was nearly universal. William Henry Drayton, friend of Henry Laurens and new congressional delegate from South Carolina, congratulated the Baron. Because of the “rapid advance of our young Soldiers in the art military under your auspices,” he wrote, “you are my Dear Baron, intitled to the thanks of every American.”
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Rich
ard Peters told his fellow Board of War member Timothy Pickering that he

 

S
TEUBEN HIMSELF
was not quite so satisfied with his progress. As he reported, with evident dissatisfaction, to Congress at the end of May:

He did not elaborate much upon these “Circumstances” in writing, but those closest to him knew exactly what he meant: Steuben had begun to make enemies. They were not the same as Washington's, not precisely. The Baron's popularity in Congress was universal, and cut across party lines. Washington liked and admired him, as did most of the major generals. To them, he was frank, erudite, witty, and warm; but to others he was tactless, abrasive, imperious, and power-hungry.
To some of the brigadiers, he was a foreign parvenu, and that was enough in itself.

Thomas Conway was one of those enemies—naturally, since Steuben had replaced him. The former inspector general still had powerful adherents at Valley Forge who shared his sentiments. One of these former allies stood out—in rank, reputation, and influence—above all others: Maj. Gen. Charles Lee.
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Lee, the senior-most of Washington's major generals, was not present at Valley Forge when Steuben arrived in February. In December 1776, before the crossing of the Delaware and the Christmas miracle at Trenton, Lee had been captured by a British cavalry patrol as he sat in a tavern at Basking Ridge, New Jersey, still dressed in his nightgown.

Steuben was probably the most experienced officer in Continental service, measured by the richness of his experience in the Seven Years' War, but Lee had the longest service record. A Briton by birth, and a soldier by profession from the age of twelve, he had served for nearly thirty years in the British and Polish armies. Few, if any, of his fellow officers in America could match him in military learning. None knew so much as he did about the inner workings of the British army, whose recent crop of leaders—Howe, Clinton, Charles Cornwallis, Thomas Gage—he could count among his friends. Lee considered himself to be the foremost American authority on the art of war in Europe, and he was not far off the mark in thinking so highly of himself.

Later events would cast Lee in a most unflattering light; no American officer, save Benedict Arnold, has been so vilified as he. To some of his detractors, he was little better than a traitor; even his defenders acknowledged that while in British captivity he had given Clinton advice on how best to fight the American rebels. He did not intend to betray his adopted country, but rather hoped for a compromise peace between Britain and her former colonies, a peace that he himself would broker. In his defense, though, it should be pointed out that Lee considered himself an American. He had spent much of his British service in the colonies during the French and Indian War, marrying the
daughter of a Seneca chieftain, and returned after the end of his British career in 1773 to settle down in Virginia. Like Washington, he became a gentleman-planter and a patriot, speaking out against British misrule and openly espousing the cause of independence.

But the similarities with Washington ended there. Washington had the outward appearance and the inner character of a great leader. Lee, by contrast, cut a poor figure. Short, thin, and perpetually stooped in stature, with a large hawkish nose jutting prominently from his pinched face, he was known—even among his friends—as a coarse and vulgar man. There was no doubting his intelligence, but that intelligence was tempered by neither modesty nor tact. In the words of one acquaintance, he was “a good scholar and soldier…full of fire and passion, but little good manners: a great sloven, wretchedly profane, and a great admirer of dogs.”
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