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Baron Friedrich von Steuben

Friedrich von Steuben was born on September 17, 1730, and died November 28, 1794, a Prussian soldier who had served with distinction in the Seven Years’ War and had become an aide-de-camp to Frederick the Great. But he had never advanced beyond the rank of captain. Discharged from the army after the war, he had made a precarious living as chief minister at the court of Hohenzollern-Hechingen, one of the many small principalities into which Germany was divided at the time.

The finances of Hohenzollern-Hechingen more or less collapsed in 1777, and Steuben wandered around Europe, seeking appointments. One old friend tried to rescue him by introducing him to a rich widow. With a trail of IOUs behind him, the baron came to Paris, where Franklin’s agile imagination concocted his career and the idea of offering his services as a volunteer. Congress had sternly warned that it wanted no more foreigners arriving in America with contracts for brigadier and major generalships in their trunks.

The canny Silas Deane added another touch. After Steuben had sailed, Deane wrote to Robert Morris that in the hurry of his departure, the baron had left behind the proofs of his long service in the King of Prussia’s armies, but there was no need to be concerned: Deane and Franklin had examined them, and they were entirely convincing. Beaumarchais added a final fillip to the story with a letter to Morris, asking him to advance the baron money and assuring him that he had “discussed the merits of this officer with the greatest generals that we have.”

General Washington’s actual reception of Baron von Steuben was so low-keyed as to be barely perceptible. Four days after Steuben arrived at Valley Forge, the commander in chief mentioned him in the middle of a long letter to Henry Laurens about several pressing matters. Almost offhandedly, Washington wrote: “Baron Steuben has arrived at camp. He appears to be much of a gentleman, and as far as I have had an opportunity of judging, a man of military knowledge and acquainted with the world.”

Washington soon appointed Baron von Steuben the army’s “acting” inspector general. Steuben accepted the offer with alacrity. He understood Washington wanted to see what he could accomplish before giving him full backing. The baron had already gone to work. He had toured Valley Forge, talking to officers and enlisted men. To his reputation as a military expert, Steuben added the charm of his rough-and-ready personality. There was little of the famous Prussian harshness and formality to him. Letters from friends in Europe attest to the warmth of his relationships. With the help of the interpreter Duponceau and occasional assistance from the aides John Laurens and Alexander Hamilton, who were fluent in French, the baron’s second language, Steuben persuaded everyone to be candid. What he discovered was appalling. He was confronting a wrecked army. A less courageous (or less bankrupt) man would have quit on the spot.

Steuben decided the key to reviving the army was a manual that would enable the troops, with sufficient practice and instruction, to march and maneuver with precision and confidence first on a drill field and then on a battlefield. No such manual existed. Steuben decided he would write one. The baron still knew only a few English words. He had to write the chapters of his manual in French, which Duponceau translated into rudimentary English. Late in the night, after a laborious day at headquarters, Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens added military terminology that was beyond Duponceau’s knowledge. As soon as chapter one was finished, Steuben had it distributed to the entire army, in itself no small task. There was no printing press at Valley Forge to speed the process. Copies had to be made in longhand.

Visit West Point or Annapolis or the Air Force Academy today and you will see cadets standing and walking in this basic posture, exactly as Friedrich von Steuben taught it at Valley Forge. Here are the exact words from Steuben’s manual: “He is to stand straight and firm upon his legs, with his head turned to the right so far as to bring his left eye over the waistcoat buttons; the heels two inches apart; the toes turned out; the belly drawn in a little, but without constraint; the breast a little projected; the shoulders square to the front and kept back; and the hands hanging down the sides, close to the thighs.”

Steuben would set the example by personally drilling a model company. He would show these self-satisfied lieutenants and captains and majors that it was not beneath the dignity of a lieutenant general from the King of Prussia’s army to issue such commands, and the results would, he hoped, convince them that there was something to be said for this portly foreigner’s bizarre ideas.

The baron was not satisfied with transforming the drill and marching procedures of the Continental Army. He wanted to see a psychological, even a spiritual change in the relationships between the officers and men. He wrote succinct summaries of the duties of each officer in a regiment, from the colonel to the lieutenants. Perhaps the most important were the instructions to the captain. To this day the opening lines remain the cornerstone of the U.S. Army’s philosophy of leadership: “A captain cannot be too careful of the company the state has committed to his care. . . . His first object should be, to gain the love of his men, by treating them with all possible kindness and humanity. . . . He should know every man of his company by name and character. He should often visit those who are sick, speak tenderly to them, see that the public provision, whether of medicine or diet, is duly administered and procure them besides such comforts and conveniences as are in his power. The attachment that arises from this kind of attention to the sick and wounded, is almost inconceivable. . . .”

Steuben realized, of course, that the army would not achieve these practical and spiritual transformations instantaneously. Even his model company did not always perform up to his expectations. When that happened, the troops got a glimpse of another side of the ex–lieutenant general: his volcanic temper. He showered his pupils with oaths in French and German, adding to this choice collection the only English curse he had acquired: “Goddamn!” During one of these blowups, caused when the model company misunderstood some complicated command, perhaps “To the rear, march!,” and one half collided with the other half, the baron’s temper rose to apoplectic heights. Duponceau was frantic at his inability to communicate Steuben’s orders. The men stumbled around, trying to sort themselves back into orderly ranks.

Out of the spectators on the edge of the parade ground stepped a New York captain named Benjamin Walker, who asked in perfect French if he could help the great lieutenant general communicate with his pupils. “If I had seen an angel from heaven,” Steuben later said, “I could not have been more rejoiced.” Captain Walker instantly became his aide-de-camp, and in a few minutes the company was performing the maneuver perfectly.

The baron’s long years as a bachelor also made him the right man in the right place when it came to making Valley Forge more hospitable. He hated to dine alone, and whenever possible he had guests to dinner. One of his first parties mocked the army’s lack of decent clothing with a soldierly bravado that delighted the guests. No one was admitted to the feast unless he showed up in a torn pair of breeches.

As Duponceau recalled in his memoir, the guests all “clubbed” their rations, and Steuben’s German manservant saw to the cooking. “We dined sumptuously on tough beefsteak and potatoes, with hickory nuts for dessert,” the young Frenchman wrote. Instead of wine, they procured some cheap whiskey from one of the camp’s sutlers and made “salamanders”—a potion that required the drinkers to set the liquid on fire and gulp it down, flames and all. “Such a set of ragged, and, at the same time, merry fellows, were never brought together,” Duponceau concluded.

After Valley Forge Baron von Steuben remained an important officer in the Continental Army until the end of the war. He grew weary of his role as drillmaster and yearned for a fighting command. Washington found him more useful as a spokesman for the army’s needs before Congress. In 1780, when Washington’s great lieutenant Nathanael Greene took command of the shattered Southern Department, Washington sent Steuben with him to help reorganize the battered Southern army. At Yorktown, Washington put him in charge of one of the American divisions, utilizing his experience in siege warfare. The states of Pennsylvania and New York made Steuben an American citizen and New York gave him 16,000 acres of land in the Mohawk Valley, near Utica. Nevertheless, his casual attitude toward money got him into financial difficulties until the federal Congress granted him a $2,500 annual pension. He died in 1794 in the log cabin he had built on his New York acres, his devoted aide Benjamin Walker at his side.

Baron von Steuben lay in his northern New York grave more or less forgotten by everyone but scholars of the American Revolution until 1919. Then German-Americans, deeply disturbed by the propaganda generated by World War I, set about reviving him as a symbol of their patriotism. Chapters of the Steuben Society were founded in cities and towns with large German-American populations. During the 1930s they were vociferously anti-Nazi. In 1958, the 275th anniversary of the first German immigration to America, New York Steubenites began marching up Fifth Avenue, like the Irish-Americans on St. Patrick’s Day. The idea spread to Philadelphia and Chicago. All three parades now take place within a week of Steuben’s birthday, September 17.

Thomas Fleming. Drawn from , published by Smithsonian Books. The Magnificent Fraud. . February/March 2006; Volume 57, Issue 1.

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