The Drillmaster of Valley Forge (37 page)

Steuben, who joined the New York chapter of the Cincinnati in 1786 and served for several years as its president, shrugged off the ridiculous accusations. “
À ça, Monsieur le Cincinnatus
,” he wrote in jest to Henry Knox, the real guiding hand behind the Society, in November 1783, “Your pernicious designs are thus revealed. You wish to introduce dukes and peers into our Republic. No, my Lord, no, my Grace, that will not do…. Blow Ye the Trumpet in Zion!”
¹⁵

Laugh as he might at the carpings of the “Bostonians and gentlemen of the
Holy Land
” and their “modest and Presbyterian airs,” the truth was that the Baron's position damaged his standing with Congress. Massachusetts delegate Rufus King jabbed at him:

Once Steuben perceived this prejudice, once he determined that Congress would not deal with him fairly, he dropped any pretense at tact when discussing politics, no matter whom he offended. “As long
as I live in this D___ Republic, I will at least have the Liberty of laughing When Ever I feel a disposition for it—wich God knows is very seldom.”
¹⁷

In the autumn of 1786, high taxes and forced foreclosures sparked an insurrection among the farmers of the western Massachusetts hill country. The episode came to be known as Shays' Rebellion, after its leader, a former Continental officer named Daniel Shays. Most of the Baron's former comrades in the Continental command spoke out vociferously against the rebels. To people like Henry Knox and Alexander Hamilton, the nearly bloodless uprising highlighted the need for stronger central government.

Steuben lamented the rebellion as a harbinger of bad things to come, the “collapse” of the “edifice we struggled for seven years to build.” But as the uprising spread, his sympathies took a surprising shift. Like Thomas Jefferson—a man who in so many ways was Steuben's political opposite—the Baron sided with the rebels. The farmers, many of them Continental veterans, were being forcibly impoverished by a state government dominated by merchants and speculators, men who had profited handsomely from the war. To Steuben, the farmers' plight illustrated what he saw as the central problem with the American republic: those in power had exploited the common man in the War for Independence, and continued to do so after the war was over.
¹⁸

In private, to Billy North, Steuben poured out his contempt for the Massachusetts authorities in letters dripping with vicious, theatrical sarcasm. “This mob,” he wrote to North in October 1786, referring to Shays's rebels, “consisted of men of the Vilest principles, Desperate in their fortune etc.—therefor a disgrace to human nature.” The leaders of Massachusetts, on the other hand, were “Gentlemen of property & Consideration. This alone gives us a sufficient superiority over these Retches.”
¹⁹

The Baron could not restrain himself from making his views public. He published a scathing article in the
New York Daily Advertiser
lampooning the army's efforts to quell the rebellion. He wrote the
article under the pseudonym “Bellisarius,” but everyone of importance who read the article knew it was the Baron. Many of them were not amused.
²⁰

Steuben's response to Shays' Rebellion highlights the Baron's conflicted relationship with American government. A republic worked well when its leaders were virtuous, he felt, when they held the common good above all other considerations and interests. But the leading men in American politics after 1783 no longer had the kind of virtue that had made the leaders of 1776 great. “It seems to me that we have neither the virtue nor the wisdom [necessary] to be a democratic republic,” he wrote shortly after the end of the war. Government was now in the hands of those who sought only their personal gain, measured in dollars, and cared nothing for the plight of the men who had fought and died for them and for independence.
²¹
Such a nation could not long survive. When George III's son, Prince William Henry, expressed an interest in visiting the United States in 1786, Steuben wryly remarked, “It doesn't surprise me. Eagles are always about when the scent of carrion is in the air.”
²²

The conduct of Congress so sickened the Baron that he contemplated—briefly—supporting the creation of an American constitutional monarchy. He wrote to Prince Henry of Prussia to sound him out: Would the prince care to accept the crown of an American kingdom if it were offered to him? Henry expressed mild and cautious interest, but the Constitutional Convention assembled in Philadelphia before anything could come of the venture.
²³

 

C
ONGRESS DID NOT DO RIGHT BY
S
TEUBEN
; the delegates never fully honored the vague promises that had been made to him at York in 1778. But that in itself did not condemn Steuben to poverty. He did that to himself. He would never really moderate his profligate spending habits in his declining years, spending what money he received from Congress as soon as it reached his hands. Worse, he even
spent money
before
it reached his hands. “He is and will be all eternity,” North once groused to Walker, “eating the calf in the cow's belly.”
²⁴

Shortly after the end of the war, the Baron leased a large house in what was then the countryside of Upper Manhattan. He christened it “The Louvre,” and though it was run down, he was determined that it should rival Belmont in stately elegance. There he planned to entertain his friends among the notables of New York society. He lavished nearly all of the money he squeezed from Congress in 1784 on renovations, new furniture, and books; he splurged on unsupportable luxuries, including three new carriages. The spending reduced him to penury in no time at all. He could not afford to entertain his friends, and for much of 1786 he stayed in the house alone with only Azor—who had remained faithfully by his side through the war years—to keep him company. Unable to keep the house up, he relinquished his lease at the end of 1786. For much of his life thereafter, he failed to maintain a permanent residence anywhere, drifting from one boardinghouse to another or living with Ben Walker and his new bride, Polly, in their Manhattan home.

It was not quite the way he had envisioned his retirement, and understandably it sometimes brought him to despair and bitterness.
“Vive la liberté!”
he wrote to North as his dream of transforming the Louvre into a gentlemanly gathering place faded before his eyes. “In this country the laborers are barons and the barons are beggars.”
²⁵
But overall he kept his spirits up. “Whatever be one's circumstances, the best is to put on a cheerful face,” he had once told Henry Laurens, and he stood by that code now. Even though he felt ashamed of his indigence, so much so that he refused dinner invitations that he could not reciprocate, he gleefully immersed himself in the social life of New York City. He was naturalized as a citizen there, on the Fourth of July 1786, and stayed within the city most of the time.
²⁶
Besides his position in the local chapter of the Cincinnati, he served as president of the German Society of New York from 1786 until his
death, and was an active member of the German Reformed congregation.

Plus he had Walker and North. Ben and Billy had families of their own now, but they continued to look after the Baron long after they were no longer being paid to do so. North, who remained in the army as inspector until 1788, fussed incessantly over Steuben and monitored his expenses. He and Walker tried, repeatedly, to put the Baron on a budget, and they admonished him for his extravagance. Regardless of their stern advice, the Baron looked instead to gain easy money as he latched onto one get-rich-quick scheme after another, most of them centering on the financial fad of the moment: land speculation. He pursued several such ventures, all equally fantastical—one of them a plan to create a Spanish “military colony” on the Mississippi, where Continental Army veterans could live free on rich farmland in return for military service. Like all of the Baron's postwar business ventures, this arrangement with “Don Quixote Countrie” never panned out.

North feared that sometimes he pushed the affable old man too hard. “God knows I would as soon wound myself as wound him,” he wrote to Walker, “but his sore must be probed.” Indeed, the ministrations of his surrogate sons did grate on the Baron sometimes, and he chided North for his miserliness, “the only vice that increeses with Age.” “‘With these Castles in Air, the Old fool goes still on in his extravagant expenses,' So says Billy,” the Baron lashed back at North in 1788. “Silence, Mr. Billy, I hear you…you are not always in the Right…. I live & must live poorer than I ever did.” Yet overall he took great comfort in the fact that his “kids” cared so deeply for him. “It is true that he often scolds me,” Steuben wrote to North, describing his friend in the third person. “But it is because he wants me to be better than I really am…. He wishes that I were one of the seven sages of Greece, but my passions often make a fool of me.”
²⁷

The Baron was not entirely without assets. He was cash-poor but land-rich. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York had all given him
substantial tracts of wilderness land in gratitude for his services, and even Virginia—before Steuben made himself persona non grata there—offered him a large, as-yet-unsurveyed plot of land in the Ohio Valley. Steuben sold his New Jersey and Pennsylvania estates, but he stubbornly held on to the sixteen thousand acres promised him by the state of New York and his old ally Governor George Clinton. He chose for himself a remote, completely undeveloped parcel deep in the wilds of the Mohawk Valley, just north of what was then called Fort Schuyler.
*

Here, on the estate that he called “Steuben,” the Baron intended to live as a country squire. He would build a manor house on the property, invite land-hungry New Englanders to clear the land and set up farmsteads, while he lived off of his share of the harvest from the fecund soil. Proximity to the Mohawk River would facilitate easy export of surplus crops.

Steuben did indeed have a cabin built on the property, though never the grand mansion he had envisioned. A few tenants came to work the land—one of them was Jonathan Arnold Steuben, the Connecticut soldier who had changed his traitor's name at the Baron's suggestion—but few of them stayed for very long. But as Walker and North frequently reminded him, the endeavor took far more effort than it was worth. The costs of developing the land put Steuben deep in debt long before the estate yielded even marginal profits.

 

T
HE
B
ARON RETURNED TO PUBLIC LIFE
only once more, when the new constitutional government of the United States took form in New York City in the spring of 1789. His prestige had not entirely faded, and he enjoyed a prominent place near George Washington on the balcony of Federal Hall as the new president took his oath of office on April 30. Soon President Washington called on Steuben for his advice, the two men falling easily into their old roles again—Washington as the commander in chief, the Baron as his military adviser—
as they discussed the structure and mission of the postwar army and its employment on the western frontier. Steuben was delighted by the gesture. “I have dined with the great man,” he told North that May, flattered that his old general still held his opinion in high regard when Congress had consistently ignored him. “I have had a talk with him tête-à-tête for four hours, a horseback ride from nine in the morning until two o'clock.”
²⁸

With Washington at the helm of the new government and Alexander Hamilton as secretary of the treasury, the Baron hoped he would get the recompense he had earned, that he deserved. But their presence in government made little difference. Despite Hamilton's strivings on his behalf, Congress would go no further than to authorize a $2,500 annual pension for him.

Nor did Washington's reconnection with the Baron signal that a new career might be in the offing. Steuben did not expect one, but the president actually gave it some thought. In the winter of 1792, Washington was looking for a new general to lead U.S. forces against the Shawnee-Miami-Delaware confederation in the Ohio country. The confederation had already annihilated the expeditionary force of Steuben's old army friend Arthur St. Clair in a bloody debacle on the banks of the Wabash River. It would stand as the worst defeat ever of United States troops by Native Americans, and Washington was not about to let the matter rest. As he mulled over the possible candidates for the commander's position, he jotted down a few thoughts on the character and abilities of each.

On the Baron, Washington wrote: “Sensible, sober and brave, well acquainted with tactics and with the arrangement and discipline of an army.” Not effusive, but accurate. His shortcomings? “High in his ideas of subordination—impetuous in his temper—ambitious”…and then the curse: “a foreigner.”
²⁹

Washington's assessment, if it had ever become known to the Baron, would have cut him to the quick. Steuben was well aware of his temper and his ambition, and his insistence on obedience to orders.
But
a foreigner
? Even when he wrote little essays and memoranda for no one's eyes but his own, analyzing the problems of American government and the “military constitution,” Steuben always referred to Americans as
we
, not
they
.