The Drillmaster of Valley Forge (27 page)

The arrival of Luzerne, presumably with further word of French help on the way to America, was just one of several developments that lightened the mood in the army and in Congress that summer. As Steuben himself knew, the army was still far from operating at peak efficiency, but when it came to tactical proficiency the Continentals had not regressed since Monmouth. “If we understand by Order & Discipline only what regards the Manœvres prescribed in the Regulations,” Steuben conceded, “I will venture to say that the Army in general is well Disciplined, that there are some Regiments which have more precision than the English Infantry.”
¹⁹
This was no small praise from a man who was his own worst critic.

And it showed in combat. Washington had no intention of risking a “general action”—an all-out battle with the British—but he could engage in smaller actions. That May, Clinton had threatened American-held West Point, a vital stronghold, key to the Hudson Valley and upstate New York. British troops took possession of Stony Point, an outpost on the west bank of the Hudson that controlled Kings Ferry. Clinton hoped to draw the Americans out of the security of West Point; Washington obliged him, but not quite in the way Clinton had anticipated.

On July 15, 1779, Anthony Wayne led a corps of thirteen hundred Continental light infantry toward the modest earthen fortification at Stony Point, which was situated on a forbidding bluff overlooking the river. Late that night, part of Wayne's force launched a diversionary attack on the landward approach to the fort, drawing British fire in that direction, while the two remaining American columns silently scaled the rocky heights on the northern and eastern faces of the Point.
They achieved almost complete surprise over the fort's defenders, leaping into the upper works with fixed bayonets and overpowering the garrison without firing a shot. The entire British force was either killed or taken prisoner. American losses were trivial. And the first American to enter the upper works was none other than Lieutenant Colonel Fleury.

Only a month later, Washington struck again, and from a different direction. In the early morning hours of August 19, 1779, Maj. Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee led a tiny mixed force of infantry and cavalry in a raid on the British fort at Paulus Hook, immediately across from New York City, in present-day Jersey City, New Jersey. Lee was unable to gain possession of the fort, but he managed to escape with nearly 160 British and Hessian prisoners—and all practically within cannon-shot of Clinton's main army.

Stony Point and Paulus Hook did wonders for American morale. No one was prouder than Steuben, who was so overjoyed about Stony Point that he personally arranged for a triumphal entry when Wayne's aide-de-camp brought the news to Philadelphia. “I came into the City,” the aide reported, “with colours flying, trumpets sounding, and hearts elated, drew crowds to the doors and windows, and made not a little parade…. These were the Baron Steuben's instructions, and I pursued them literally, although I could not help thinking that it had a little the appearance of a puppet show.”
²⁰

Certainly the consensus among Washington's generals and the delegates in Congress was that Steuben's reforms had given the Continentals the discipline and proficiency with the bayonet that allowed them to take Stony Point and raid Paulus Hook. Even the Baron was cautiously optimistic. As he wrote to Benjamin Franklin early that autumn,

 

T
HE
B
ARON DID NOT DELUDE HIMSELF.
The Continental Army was still incapable of outmastering the British in sustained operations without substantial French help, and without further improvements, the Americans would be shamefully dependent on the French—if, that is, the French ever came to their aid.

A year and a half had passed since Valley Forge, and nearly a year since the painful object lesson of Overkill, but many of the problems of military discipline had still not been addressed. Guard duty remained neglected, soldiers were free to wander about camp—or out of camp entirely—without constraint, “the natural consequence of the Regiments being without Officers.” Independence might be the heart of the Cause, but independence had no place in the ranks. When the Baron wrote to Ben Franklin in September 1779, he added in a cautionary tone: “We have still many Weaknesses which bespeak our Infancy. We want, above all, the true meaning of the Words
Liberty, Independence,
&c. that the Child may not make use of them against his father, or the Soldier against his Officer.”
²²

Steuben was not just bewailing individual acts of insubordination within the army. The problem went much deeper than that: not only the discipline of the soldier, but also of the
nation
and the
people
. The states were unwilling to fill their assigned recruitment quotas, and Congress was unwilling or unable to compel them to do so. Until this changed, the army would be undermanned and undersupplied, and the British would hold every advantage over them. If the Americans wanted to win the war, they would have to commit everything they had. Steuben had said as much to John Hancock and Sam Adams back in 1777. It was no less true now.

As the months rolled on and 1779 drew to an anticlimactic close, the condition of the army didn't get any better. It did, in fact, get much worse.

Actually,
everything
got worse, and the weather itself was in large part to blame. The winter of 1779–80 was the worst since the war began. Storms pelted the army with snow and sleet in late November, as the troops converged on Morristown, New Jersey, to settle in for the winter. The serious snowfall began shortly after Christmas, before huts could be built to accommodate the men. A three-day blizzard in early January dumped upward of six feet of snow on the ramshackle tent city at Jockey Hollow, burying soldiers as they slept. The army was paralyzed; roads were shut down by the drifting snow, making travel to and from the camp impossible. Fierce winds tore through the men's tattered clothing and ripped tents apart as if they were made of paper. At Valley Forge, the weather had been unpleasant; at Morristown it was lethal.

The army was as close to complete dissolution as it had ever been or would ever be. Enlistment terms for many soldiers were about to expire; starvation would have compelled many more men to leave were it not for the snow-blocked roads that prevented them from deserting en masse—a dark blessing for the army, as Nathanael Greene would observe.

Many officers left as soon as they could, but Steuben stayed on. Washington, ever the optimist, wanted a frank assessment of the army's strength so he could plan operations for the spring—therefore the inspections continued, snow or no snow. The general-in-chief had no idea just how bad things were until Steuben showed him the stark arithmetic on paper.

The Baron had not pulled any punches in the spring inspections, but the observations he made in December 1779 were absolutely scathing by comparison. The underlying problems had not changed since the army came to Jockey Hollow. It was the magnitude of those problems—absenteeism, low morale, inadequate clothing, lax discipline—that had ballooned.

No regiment was up to strength—not even close. One company of Moses Hazen's Canadian Regiment consisted of nothing more than a
drummer and two privates, and two other companies had no officers whatsoever. Edward Hand's brigade, “the worst composed in the Army,” contained two Pennsylvania regiments that Steuben pronounced “almost ruined for want of care.” Some of the many absent men in the brigade had been missing for two years. The New Yorkers “exhibit the greatest picture of misery that ever was seen”; the average New York Continental did not have clothing “sufficient to cover his nakedness in this severe season,” while their officers looked so shabby they were “ashamed to appear even in Camp.”
²³

The army inspections at Morristown, December 1779. This is a typical report from the inspections done by Steuben himself. Evaluating the condition of Sherman's 8th Connecticut Regiment, the Baron writes: “Four companies of this Regiment are left without Officers too many being on furlow. This Regiment has near Thirty Men dispersed in the Country in improper Commands. Some near two years absent and many of those returned Sick absent have been absent two even three Years. [signed] Steuben, inspector General.”
(National Archives)

Washington was already overburdened with paperwork, so it took him some time to sift through the mountain of reports that Steuben and his sub-inspectors had piled on his desk. When he did get to them he was shocked. “I am extremely disappointed to find,” he wrote Steuben, “that most of the corps in the army are in worse shape than I had flattered myself.” Some units had even “gone backward.”
²⁴

Many of the problems, Steuben knew from experience, could be remedied with hard work and the return of better weather. But the real evils, the things that truly threatened the army's continued existence, were beyond the powers of the high command to fix: numbers, recruitment, and organization. Organization had been the chief concern at the time of the spring inspections. There was too much disparity between unit sizes, as there had been at Valley Forge. Then, as now, Steuben advocated reducing the number of regiments and collapsing them into fewer but larger units of a standard size—preferably around five hundred rank and file per regiment. It would not be a popular solution, especially among the officers who would lose their posts. But it would be brutally effective, for both administrative and tactical purposes.
²⁵

That was in the spring. Since then, the individual states had become increasingly negligent in meeting their assigned manpower quotas. The national economy, if it could be called that, was headed toward complete collapse, as Continental currency depreciated in value faster than anyone could have imagined. In January 1779, one gold dollar was worth eight Continental dollars; by December, it took forty-two Con
tinental dollars to equal one in specie. One Connecticut soldier remarked that the currency issued by Congress was “fit for nothing But Bum Fodder.”
²⁶
The army deteriorated as the economy did, and by the time the first snows fell at Morristown, the army was already dying.

Organization, therefore, took a backseat to numbers. Washington and Steuben were of one mind on this issue. Performing a sort of institutional triage, they temporarily pushed reform to the side in order to focus on bringing the army up to strength.

Unfortunately, the prevailing sentiment in Congress had come around to Steuben's previous proposal: the consolidation of the army into fewer but larger units. In the Board of War this had come to be known as the “incorporation plan,” and it was sponsored by New York delegate and Board of War member Robert R. Livingston. It was an attractive solution for a Congress lacking money and to command authority, where so many delegates distrusted the simple notion of a standing army. The plan required no outlay of cash, and did not compel them to press the states for more men. And it had the blessing of the inspector general himself. If French aid was so close at hand, why would it be necessary to keep anything more than a skeleton army in the field?

This was a dangerous way of thinking. It assumed that the British would remain passive, and that the French would be true to their word—and the survival of the country could not be gambled on either of these dubious conditions. The army had to be restocked with men, and for that, Congress would have to act.

Congress was not quite the same animal in 1780 as it had been two years before. Relatively few of the delegates who had greeted Steuben at York still actively represented their states in Philadelphia, and the acrimonious dispute over Washington's leadership had by now subsided. The main thing keeping Congress from supporting the army was not ideological division or personal spite, but “the grand cause of all our misfortunes, the bad state of our finances.”
²⁷
It would be difficult to cajole Congress into spending more on the army when the delegates perceived everything in terms of dollars and cents.

The army needed its own voice to be heard in Philadelphia. Washington decided that Steuben would be that voice. No soldier but the Baron had so much experience in dealing with Congress and still held Washington's trust; no other officer commanded such professional respect in Independence Hall. And certainly no one else knew the facts and figures of Continental military strength as Steuben did.