The Drillmaster of Valley Forge (25 page)

Washington was delighted with the final result. He, too, had a hand in the writing of the book. As Steuben fed him the initial drafts, Washington went over them line by line, and passed them along to Generals Stirling and Arthur St. Clair for comment. The three men disagreed with the Baron only on minor matters of language or on extremely trivial issues. Washington didn't like the command for aiming muskets—Steuben used “Present!” while his superior much preferred “Take Aim!” Stirling thought the distance between the officers' tents and the cooking fires in Steuben's model regimental camp was too short. Stirling and St. Clair were a tad confused by the concept of the oblique marching step. But all agreed that the Blue Book was a superior work, ideally suited to the American army. Washington was eager to see it put to practical use. “You will, I flatter myself, shortly have the satisfaction, so rarely enjoyed by Authors, of seeing your precepts reduced to practice—and I hope your Success will be equal to the merit of your work,” he wrote in final approval to Steuben.
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The Baron would indeed see his “precepts reduced to practice” very soon, though it could not be said that he would find much satisfaction in it.

I
T WAS THE VERY END
of April 1779 when Steuben reunited with Washington and the army at Middlebrook, New Jersey. The army was just beginning to stir from the lethargy of winter quarters. The winter of 1779 had been one of comparative luxury: the weather had been mild, the supplies more bountiful. For the generals the season had been most notable for the fine living and the number of parties and balls; and nearly every one of the generals' wives had shared in the revelry. The prevailing mood was one of guarded optimism. The French, it was presumed, would shortly be on their way to American shores. The end of the war couldn't be too far away.

The Baron was anxious to return to the army. His prolonged stay in Philadelphia was starting to get to him. He had assumed that since he could talk face-to-face with the Board of War at leisure, the organization of the inspector general's office would be worked out in no time at all. But it wasn't, even after General
Washington prodded Congress to do something. “The immediate establishment of the Inspectorship on some definitive plan,” he reminded them in early January, “…is a matter of the utmost importance.” Yet Congress did nothing, and Steuben's hands were tied. “Indeed this Department may be said to be only tolerated,” he complained. “It wants that Authority & support necessary to penetrate into the Abuses.”
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Congress also dragged its feet when it came to money. Steuben had asked for compensation for his work, and that of his staff, on the Blue Book. The amounts were perfectly reasonable, he thought: $4,000 for himself, $1,000 for Fleury, $600 for Ben Walker, $500 for L'Enfant, and $400 for Duponceau. The Board of War agreed; Congress did not. Steuben's main worry was for his staff, especially Fleury, who was deep in debt. He could think of only one explanation for Congress's refusal: there must be a plot to discourage foreign officers and force them to return to Europe. The Baron had heard rumors to this effect, rumors that implicated Silas Deane's many enemies in Congress…including Henry Laurens.

Since Steuben had taken up residence in Philadelphia that winter, French and German officers by the score had sought him out, asking for his intercession with Congress and Washington: Could the esteemed Baron get them a commission, obtain for them a transfer to a cavalry regiment, help them win a promotion? He became an unofficial advocate for the expatriates in the Continental Army, and he could not help but sympathize with their sad tales of neglect at the hands of Congress.

As he stewed over his predicament, the Baron became convinced that Henry Laurens must be behind Congress's refusal to pay bonuses to his staff. One cool April evening, Laurens invited Steuben to dine with him, and Steuben could not restrain himself from challenging the former president. Just before dinner, he confronted Laurens: Why wouldn't Congress pay his expenses, as they had promised him at York? Why wouldn't they help his staff?

Laurens, who was entertaining several friends besides the Baron that evening, was a bit put off by Steuben's tone of voice. Patiently, he tried to explain that the Treasury was practically empty, so Congress
just couldn't hand out cash to everyone who felt he deserved it. He advised Steuben to wait, and not to press his demands until the country's financial affairs were in better order.

Steuben allowed that he could wait, but his assistants could not. Fleury was so strapped for cash that if Congress did not pay him for his work on the Blue Book, he would have to return to France. “If the case be so, that Colonel Fleury cannot stay with us unless Congress will do something for him…the consequence will be that he must go home,” Laurens responded testily. “I shall be very sorry for it.”

The Baron, his face darkened and distorted by “Choler & rage,” snarled, “Then
I
shall go home. I will not stay.”

Laurens tried to turn the conversation to something less serious, joking with the Baron, but with no effect. Steuben felt betrayed. He remained silent through dinner, and left the table much earlier than he usually did.

It saddened Laurens to “upbraid a Man with whom I wished to have continued in friendship,” as he later told his son, almost apologetically. “But the times are distempered & the Divide of avarice & ambition are indefatigably improving them to their own advantages.”

The friendship between Steuben and Henry Laurens ended when the two men parted company that night. Laurens scarcely ever mentioned Steuben's name again, and Steuben continued to hold Laurens responsible for driving away foreign talent. “Doth yet Mr. H___y L_ ___ns,” he asked Richard Peters several months later, “send back the Officers who have come over here to defend his Country?” He added in a cold, oblique, but unmistakable reference to the Carolina shipping magnate: “I believe that in order to reconcile Heaven to us we should begin by hanging some Merchants who have troubled our affairs in such a manner by their mercantile spirit.”
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A
MONG THE MILITARY HEROES
of the Revolution—Washington, Greene, Knox, Wayne, Lafayette—Steuben stands out as more flawed than most. It was not difficult to befriend him. “I was much
pleased with the Baron,” said Polly Duane, daughter of New York politician James Duane, upon meeting Steuben for the first time in 1783. “There seems to be so much candor & honesty in his composition.”
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It took, however, a very patient and tolerant soul to sustain a friendship with him over the long haul. Fortunately there were such people in his life. Steuben's friends saved him repeatedly, not just from his enemies, but also from himself.

The Baron had neither home nor family to speak of. He had very limited written contact with his parents or his siblings, and he remained a lifelong bachelor. Without a conventional family to lend him emotional support, Steuben learned to assemble a makeshift family as he drifted through life. The friends he made—almost effortlessly—in Europe and in America became his surrogate family. In America, he attracted scores of admirers, men and women drawn to him by his wit and his frank, open manner, and by the way in which he seemed to embody the literary sophistication of the Enlightenment. Relatively few of these admirers, though, got to know the Baron as a man of flesh and blood.

This was because he let very few people see him that way, for despite his sociability he was actually a very guarded man. Everyone in the army knew Drillmaster Steuben: a showman, loud and brash, who was both sharp-tongued and clownish at the same time, yet dedicated and hardworking. His friends in the high command—Knox, Wayne, Greene, Washington—knew him as a military expert of unparalleled learning, and as a bon vivant who enlivened raucous parties and elegant high-society gatherings alike with his deep, easy laugh. They knew, too, that he could be sensitive and short-tempered, and was prone to grandstanding, but they accepted this. When critiquing the first drafts of the
Regulations
, Arthur St. Clair and Lord Stirling suggested that the inspector general might benefit from incorporating portions of William Galvan's drill manual into his own. They soon thought better of it. “Whether this could be recommended without hurting the Baron's delicacy may be a doubt,” they concluded.
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That delicacy could be very trying to those who became convenient
targets for Steuben's occasional angry outbursts, which were all too often directed at those he trusted most. Richard Peters was such a target on more than one occasion, but he was quick to forgive, just as Steuben was quick to apologize for his misdirected wrath. After a minor disagreement over the printing of the Blue Book, a dispute caused by Steuben's paper-thin patience, Peters observed:

No one was more familiar with those “little feverish Flights” than Steuben's two principal aides, Ben Walker and William (Billy) North. North, a young Massachusetts Yankee who was fluent in French, joined Steuben's staff sometime in the autumn of 1779. Walker and North stayed by the Baron's side to the end of his days, sharing his table and managing his finances as best they could. Steuben treated them like sons.

Loyalty was the quality Steuben treasured most of all in any of his friends. But he was not so egocentric that he demanded blind devotion. Walker and North did not hesitate to tell him when he was unreasonable, ignorant, or wrong. He wanted and needed this kind of advice. Once, when North rebuked him for his financial carelessness, Steuben reassured his protégé: “I would be as sorry to have my friends blind to my faults as to have them insensible to my good qualities. No, my Friend, never cease to tell me the truth and I shall never cease to love you sincerely.”
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But those who betrayed him were never readmitted to the inner circle. Henry Laurens was one of these; Beaumarchais's nephew Des Epiniers was another. When the Frenchman sided with Charles Lee in the fall of 1778, quitting Steuben's staff, he lost his master's affection
forever. He later repented and tried to reconcile, but Steuben rebuffed him with cold silence. Not even appeals from Francy and Beaumarchais would move the Baron to clemency. After reading one of Des Epiniers's self-abasing pleas for forgiveness, Steuben wrote to Ben Walker: “I received a particularly stupid letter from M. des Epiniers…. He asks my advice as to whether he should come back as my aide or take care of his uncle's business. You may be sure I recommended the latter.”
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Nathanael Greene, by Charles Willson Peale, from life, 1783. One of Steuben's foremost friends among the Continental Army generals, Greene hoped to have Steuben at his side during his campaigns in the Carolinas. The British invasions of Virginia, however, kept Steuben busy elsewhere.
(Independence National Historical Park)

Capt. (later Major) William North. Billy North joined Steuben's staff in 1779. Along with his best friend, Ben Walker, North looked after the Baron in his declining years, and tried in vain to keep Steuben from spending extravagantly.
(Emmet Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

Anne-César, Chevalier de la Luzerne, by Charles Willson Peale, from life, 1781–1782. Gérard's successor as French ambassador to the United States. Steuben tried hard to impress Luzerne, hoping that it would lead to recognition in France. Luzerne was impressed, but was unable to move Vergennes to generosity after the war.
(Independence National Historical Park)

There was also a secret Steuben, a man not even Walker or North would ever know. This Steuben was scared, full of self-doubt, a man who so feared mediocrity that he fibbed to cover his inadequacies—even to those friends who accepted him unconditionally. From his closest companions in Europe, notably Chancellor Frank, he hid the truth about his new life in America. He spun elaborate yarns about his glorious adventures in the Revolutionary cause: how he had led the army to victory at Monmouth and Yorktown, how Congress and the States had heaped laurels upon him. He even told Frank, while sparring with Congress in the spring of 1779, that Congress had appointed him to a seat on the Board of War!
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