The German Element in the War of American Independence E-Book

George Washington Greene

• Herausgeber: Charles River Editors
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 220

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Pyrrhus Press specializes in bringing books long out of date back to life, allowing today’s readers access to yesterday’s treasures.

Das E-Book The German Element in the War of American Independence wird angeboten von Charles River Editors und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
revolutionary war; washington; founding fathers; saratoga; hamilton; valley forge; franklin

Leseprobe

The German Element in the War of American Independence

George Washington Greene

About Pyrrhus Press

Pyrrhus Press specializes in bringing books long out of date back to life, allowing today’s readers access to yesterday’s treasures.

George Washington Greene’s history of German participation in the Revolutionary War is a concise but comprehensive look at the role played by various Prussians that helped the colonists, like Baron von Steuben, the drill instructor at Valley Forge.

BARON VON STEUBEN

The name which, passing through the variations of Stoebe, Steube, and Stoeben, finally took its place in modern history under the form of Von Steuben, first appears in the thirteenth century in the list of noblemen who held feudal manors and estates as vassals of Mansfield and Magdeburg. Like the other nobles of the part of Germany to which they belonged, they became Protestants from the beginning of the Reformation, and like the rest of the minor nobility grew poor by the changes introduced into the system of warfare, while the territorial princes grew rich by the confiscation of church property. During the Thirty Years War, the branch from which the general descended was separated from, the parent stock, and won distinction through its successive generations by the pen and the sword. One among them, his grandfather, an eminent theologian, was known by an “able commentary on the New Testament and the Apocalypse.” Another his father’s elder brother, was distinguished as a mathematician, a writer upon military science, and the inventor of a new system of fortification. His father, Wilhelm Augustine, was .educated at Halle with his two elder brothers, entered the military service of Prussia at the age of sixteen, was married at thirty-one, when a captain of engineers, and, after having served with distinction in the great wars of the century and filled positions of confidence, and trust under Frederick the Great, died in honorable poverty at the age of eighty-four, on the 26th of April, 1783. Of his ten children, only three, two sons and a daughter, lived to grow up and of these the subject of our history, Frederick William Augustus Henry Ferdinand, was the eldest. At the time of his birth, November 15, 1730, his father was stationed at the fortress of Magdeburg on the Elbe, and while he was yet a child he followed him, as the duties of service called him, to Cronstadt and the Crimea. When the father returned to Prussia, the son was barely ten years old. Thus all the associations of his infancy and child hood were military: guns, drums, trumpets, fortifications, drills, and parades. Before he was fully turned of fourteen another chapter was added to his rude experience he served under his father as a volunteer in the campaign of 1744, and shared the perils and hardships of the long and bloody siege of Prague end of a second campaign that your friend will be either in Hades or at the head of a regiment.

And soon the war came, the great Seven Years War not indeed a war of principles and ideas, a political war merely, yet in military science the connecting link between the great wars of Eugene and Maryborough and the development of strategy by Napoleon. Steuben’s part in this war was neither a prominent nor a brilliant one. The first campaign found him a first lieutenant; the last left him a major and in temporary command of a regiment. He was wounded at the battle of Prague in May, 1757, and shared the triumph of Rossbach in November, 1757. The next year gave him a wider field. The brilliant, dashing, dare-devil hero of this war was the General von Mayr, an uneducated, self-made soldier, the illegitimate son of a nobleman, one of those men whom war raises to rank and fortune, and peace sends to the jail or the gallows. Forced into the army by necessity he had resolutely made his way to a command, fighting with equal desperation under different banners, and entering at last the Prussian service in season to take an important part in the Seven Years War. Frederick, who wanted just such a man to oppose to the leaders of the enemy’s Croats and Pandours, put him at the head of a free corps, where his daunt less courage and enterprising genius had full play. Steuben became his adjutant-general and followed him through his brilliant campaign of 1758. At the beginning of 1759, death, which had so often passed the bold adventurer by in the field, came to him in his tent and then Steuben returned to his regiment, with a knowledge of the management of light infantry and a habit of cool and prompt decision in the tumult of battle which he could hardly have learned so soon or so well in any other school.

He was soon appointed adjutant to General von Hulsen, fought under him in the unsuccessful battle of Kay, in July, was wounded in the murderous battle of Kunersdorf, where Frederick commanded in person, and having, somewhat like Hilas at Marengo, won a victory and prepared his bulletins, was defeated with terrible slaughter on the same day and by the same enemy. Then for two years, from August, 1759, to September, 1761, we lose sight of him. But that he passed them in good service is evident from his reappearance as aid to General Knoblauch wen Platen made his brilliant march into Poland against the Prussian rear. And here for a moment the names of father and son appear together, for the elder Steuben, as major of engineers, built the bridge over the Wartha, which the younger Steuben crossed too swiftly perhaps to clasp his father’s hand or do more than exchange a hurried glance of recognition as the headlong torrent of war swept him onward. Some skillful marching came next, with overwhelming odds to make head against, and the scene closes for a time with a blockade and a capitulation a blockade in an open town desperately defended till ammunition and provisions failed and half the town was on fire, and an honorable capitulation with flying colors and beating drums and all the honors of war.

In this surrender Steuben was the negotiator and by its terms he followed his general and brother officers to St. Petersburg as prisoner of war. But the imprisonment was a pleasant one, for the Grand Duke Peter, a warm admirer of Frederick, took him into special favor and it proved, in, the end, a surer path to promotion than active participation in a victory, for he did his king such good service with the grand duke that on his return to Prussia he was made captain, and raised from the staff of a subordinate general to that of the great commander himself. And here his military education received its highest finish for besides what he learnt in the daily performance of his duty under the king’s own eye, he was admitted to the lessons upon the higher principles of the art of war which Frederick him self gave to a limited number of young officers, whom he had selected, not for birth or fortune, but for talent and zeal. And thus it was as aid to the king that he took part in the siege of Schweidnitz, and saw the curtain fall upon the checkered scenes of this long and bloody war. The king, well pleased with his services, bestowed upon him a lay benefice with an income of four hundred thalers.

Peace came, and with it an unsparing reduction of the army. “Lieutenant Blucher may go to the devil” was the expressive phrase with which the future marshal was sent back to private life and among the reasons assigned for Steuben’s withdrawal from the army is dissatisfaction with the new position assigned him in it. However this may be, we find him, soon after the peace of Hubertsburg, traveling for amusement, staying a short time at Halle and Dessau, then going to Hamburg, where he made an acquaintance that was to exercise a decisive influence upon his future career at a decisive moment, the acquaintance of the Count St. Germain and last to the baths of Wildbad in Suabia, where he was presented to the Prince of Hohenzollern Hechingen, and, through the influence of the Princess of Wurtemberg and Prince Henry of Prussia, received the appointment of grand marshal of his court. An honorable appointment, indeed, but dull work, one would think, for a soldier in the flower of his age. From infancy, with one brief exception, Steuben had known no life but that of fortress and camp had been accustomed to be up before day and measure his time by drum-beat and trumpet. He had been constantly moving to and fro with his life in his hand, subject to the chances of a hairs-breadth more or a hair s-breadth less, in the line of a musket-bullet or cannon-ball. He had often seen men whom he had messed with in the morning lying around him at night wounded, or dying, or dead. And now he was to lay him down calmly under a gilded canopy, sleep softly on down, and let the summer and winter sun outstrip him in their rising. His companions were to be men who spoke in whispers, and bowed long and low his duties, the ushering in and out the presence chamber those of higher rank, and seeing that those of lower rank were duly attended, each in his degree stifling intrigues, allaying discontents, composing discords watching over the details of a great household for a court is nothing more and giving them an air of dignity by personal gravity and official decorum.

Steuben’s character was passing into a new phase, revealing, as such transitions always do, qualities hitherto unknown to their possessor or those who knew him best. He had had little time for the dreams of youth. Life for him had been full of stern realities. His only ambition, the thirst of military glory, had been imperfectly gratified. He had not won a regiment in two years, as he had promised his friend Henry that he would, but neither had he gone to Hades and to have been an aid and a chosen pupil of Frederick was something to dwell upon with satis faction, even though it left him with but four hundred thalers over his captain’s pay. How small the prospects of advancement in peace time were, his father’s example showed him a veteran of forty-seven years service, without a blot on his escutcheon, and still only a major of engineers. And meditating upon these things he could lay down his sword without regret and bid farewell to all the habits and associations of all his life.

But why, in place of that keen, stout sword, with its plain leather scabbard and plain brass guard familiar to a soldier’s hand, take up the flimsy blade fit only to rest idly on a courtier’s thigh or be crossed with some other flimsy blade in a courtier’s quarrel? Rest, rest, rest Steuben was weary and wanted rest. Far down in the depths of his nature, but overlaid hitherto and hidden by the necessities of his position, lay a love of ease, a longing for social life and the pleasures of refined intercourse. But that ease, to satisfy the old soldier’s ideas of form and hierarchic subordination, must be accompanied by dignity that repose, to satisfy the old soldier’s habits of daily occupation, must wear a semblance of activity. And where were these to be found in such happy combination as in the cyclic frivolities of a petty German court, wherein the daily trifles of life were performed with all the pompous ceremonial of a great empire?

And thus, too, we find the measure of Steuben’s political sentiments at this pausing point in his career. Frederick had burnt his “Antimachiavel” years before, and reigned like a voluntary disciple of the eighteenth chapter of the “Prince.” To the common eye thrones were never firmer. The “Contrat Social” had but just come forth from the fervid brain of Jean Jacques. The “Lettres Persanes” and “Esprit des Loix” were doing their work surely but in apparent silence. Few shared the Cardinal Fleury’s dread of an approach ing end of the world.1 But Frederick, who protected the French Raynal and frowned on his own Germans when they ventured to treat profoundly some of the subjects of the superficial abbe’s declamations, was not the man to encourage the study of Rousseau or Montesquieu in his camp, and the camp had been Steuben’s world. Personally independent and possessing an almost exaggerated sense of dignity, he was still accustomed to call a king his master and look upon the distinctions of rank in civil life as he looked upon them in military life. The rights of the people, the duties of rulers, the true sources of authority, were questions that he had not yet found leisure to discuss and when the leisure came, there was nothing in his surroundings to invite the discussion. As grand marshal of the court of a German prince he found little in his new surroundings to enlarge the conceptions of the rights of humanity which he had formed in the army of a German king.

In the busy idleness of the petty court Steuben passed nearly ten years acceptable to the prince for his intelligent zeal and strict performance of his duty, acceptable to courtiers for the dignified amenity of his manners and the justice of his dealings. He had leisure for reading, of which he had once been fond, and for society, in which he was well fitted to shine. The prince loved traveling, and Steuben traveled with him whenever he went to other courts of Germany, and, welcomest duty of all, to Paris, where his rank opened for him the doors of the most celebrated saloons and procured him the acquaintance of the men he most desired to know. So contented was he with this mode of life that he purchased a small country-seat by the name of Weilheim and thus, but for that “vice of courts” which has ever reigned in them supreme, he might have floated pleasantly on the easy tide to the French Revolution, and drawn his sword once more with comrades of the Seven Years War under the banners of the Duke of Brunswick.

But Steuben was a Protestant, the descendant of Protestants from Luther’s day downwards the court was Roman Catholic, and with priests about it who found it hard that a heretic should stand so high and live so intimately with their sovereign. How they intrigued against him, and how cunningly they strove to sow dissensions between the prince and his grand marshal, we can readily conceive, although the story has not come down to us in all its details. But Steuben, well knowing that whatever the immediate result of the actual contest might be, there could be no return to the tranquility which had formed the chief charm of his position, discreetly bowed to the blast and resigned carrying with him into private life the esteem of the prince and the friendship of many eminent men whose friendship he had won under the prince’s auspices.

Once more a free man, he seems to have experienced some return of military ambition. For a moment there was a prospect of war, and could he have obtained without much effort the rank he felt himself entitled to, he would have entered the service of the emperor. But his heart was so little in the change that he neglected even to present himself to Joseph, as his friend the Prince de Ligne and General Ried had urged him to do, and the negotiations which he had indolently begun were suffered to fall through. In 1769 the Margrave of Baden had conferred upon him the cross of the order of “la Fidelite” and now, on resigning his grand marshalship, he first turned his steps towards Carlsruhe, the seat of the mar grave’s court. Even quieter than that of Hechingen was the life that he led here. Absolute master of his time and of a competent income, he could go whither he would, still sure of meet ing or making friends wherever he went. A visit to the country-seat of the Baron von Waldener, in Alsace, brought him once more into contact with the Count St. Germain and in the winter of 1776, while Washington was struggling through the Jerseys and striking his daring blow at the German mercenaries in Trenton, Steuben was making at Montpellier the acquaintance of the Earl Warwick and Earl Spencer. So intimate did they become that he resolved to extend his circle of travel and make them a visit in England.

Paris lay in his way, and as the Count St. Germain had recently been made minister of war, he could not resist the temptation of passing a few days there and congratulating him on his advancement. It was early in May, 1777. Franklin had already taken up his residence at Passy and was drawing young and old around him. Silas Deane had been in France almost a year. Arthur Lee was there too, busy, active, jealous, suspicious. Beaumarchais was gliding to and fro, as adroit, keen-eyed, and subtle as his own Figaro. Paris was unconsciously vibrating to the touch of the lightning-tamer, and preparing to hail him as the breaker of misused scepters.

But it was not of this that Steuben was thinking as lie reentered Paris on the 2nd of May, but of the new war minister with whom he had talked of Prussian tactics at Hamburg and in Alsatia, and of the gay saloons he had been so much at home in when he visited them with the Prince of Hechingen. He would just glance at them now, just go out to Versailles and tell the count how glad he was to see him in the right place, and then cross over into England and see what kind of a life English noblemen led in their own castles. And as soon as he had made himself comfortable at his hotel, he wrote to tell the count of his arrival and that he should wait upon him at an early day.

“Do not come to Versailles,” was the answer.

“In three days I will see you at the arsenal and will send an officer to conduct you thither. We have important questions to discuss together.” And still pondering on this sphinx-like reply, he saw the three days pass by and the officer come and found himself once more in the presence of his friend.

Then for the first time, perhaps, certainly for the first time with any approach to personal interest, he heard the story of the revolted colonies, of their perils and their resources, of the sympathy which France and Spain felt for them, and of the danger that with all their courage and resolution, with all the secret aid of their European friends, they might still fail for want of a man like him to organize and discipline their citizen soldiers. Here was glory, here was fortune, here was a field (and St. Germain laid his hand upon the map of America as he spoke), such as no European war could afford, for applying the les sons of his great- master and demonstrating the superiority of the system which they both believed in so firmly.

Steuben was taken by surprise. In all his guesses at the meaning of St. Germain’s letter, he had never thought of this. At first the difficulties and objections rose before him in formidable array. St. Germain answered him at length, trying to meet them all. “What would you ad vise me, not as a minister but as a friend?” “Sir, as a minister I have no advice to give you on these subjects but as your friend I would never advise you to do anything which I would not do myself were I not employed in the king’s service.”

Thus ended the first interview, and Steuben went thoughtfully down the old stairway which Sully and France’s best king but one had often trod together, when the America that he had been asked to go and fight for was a wilderness. Next day they met again. Twenty-four hours reflection had removed some doubts, awakened some hopes. It was but a distant sound of the trumpet, but the old spirit the spirit formed in infancy, cherished through boyhood, and accepted in manhood as the chief spring of action was stirred again. It may be, too, that a still deeper cord had been touched, and that he felt it would be a generous as well as a glorious thing to fight on the side of a republic contending for her liberty. But liberty was a word not yet familiar to his lips. Glory had its meaning and ranks its value. Could he be sure of winning them?

With many warnings to be cautious, to keep away from Versailles and not allow himself to be too freely seen in Paris, St. Germain gave him a letter to Beaumarchais; Beaumarchais introduced him to Deane; Deane took him to Franklin. Thus they stood face to face, the philosopher-diplomatist with his Quaker-cut drab, and the soldier-courtier with the glittering star of the order of “Fiddlitd” on his breast; the eye that had been trained to look closely into the phenomena of nature, and read the workings of the heart in the play of the features, looking straight into the eye that had been trained to look into the cannon’s mouth and detect the signs of success or disaster in the wild tumult of battle. “This is no enthusiast,” Franklin must have said to himself as he scanned the sun-embrowned face, the strong features, the well-rounded forehead, the bushy eyebrows uplifted as if the clear orbs they shaded were ever on the watch, the large nose not wholly Roman but very near it, the full lower lip suggestive of good cheer fully appreciated, and the projecting chin, all borne with the upright precision of a man who had worn a uniform from his childhood. “No young Marquis de Lafayette this fresh from the schools, with romantic dreams of liberty and human virtue. Here is a sword to sell, perhaps something more but what are swords good for but to cut men to pieces and it is rather hard that I, who have passed over fifty of my seventy-one years in trying to teach men how to take care of themselves and convince them that they are never so happy as when they live like brothers I, who have often said that I never knew a bad peace or a good war, should in my old age become a sharpener of swords and swords men.” “A strange way this, of persuading men to come and shed their blood for you,” thought Steuben as he listened incredulously to the suggestion of some grant of a couple of thousand acres of land as a compensation for his services and with something very like indignation when Franklin told him with “a manner to which he was then little accustomed” (not the court manner, that is, but one that he became well accustomed to in the sequel) “that he had no authority to enter into engagements and could not advance him anything for the expense of his voyage.”

His blood was roused. This was not the way to speak to a man whom the great king had honored with his confidence, and in the heat of his anger away he went to Beaumarchais, to say that he should go immediately back to Germany and did not want to hear anything more about America. Next day he went to Versailles. St. Germain seemed hurt at his decision, but what ever his knowledge of other men may have been, he knew Steuben thoroughly and instead of breaking with him he invited him to pass a few days at his house. This at least Steuben could not refuse. After dinner the Spanish Ambassador, Count Aranda, came in not, perhaps, altogether by accident. “Here is a man,” said St. Germain as he presented Steuben to him, “who will risk nothing, consequently he will gain nothing.” he said, “until I return to Germany.” But the idea had taken possession of his mind, and his friends must have felt almost sure of him when they saw him turn his steps toward instead of going to England. It has taken us but three pages to tell this story, but it took three months to act it in, and July was near its end when Steuben reached Rastadt. A letter from Beaumarchais was there before him, telling him that a ship and money were ready for him and that Count St. Germain expected his immediate return. A letter from the count himself urged him to hasten back to Versailles. Here, as with Deane, Beaumarchais was evidently acting as the agent of the ministry, and acting in a manner worthy of the author of the “Mariage de Figaro” and the “Memoire a Consulter.” How could a straightforward, hot-blooded, honor loving Steuben hope to break through the toils which such a hand had spread?

Just at that time the Prince Louis William of Baden was at Rastadt, and Steuben, who placed great confidence in his judgment, told him the story and showed him the letters. Prince Louis, himself a lieutenant-general in the service of Holland, could see no room for hesitation, and thus between two princes, three counts, and the adroitest of negotiators, the aid-de-camp of the most absolute of kings surrendered himself to the service of the most democratic of republics.

There were still difficult details to arrange. First, Frederick’s consent to transfer to Steuben’s nephew, the Baron von Canitz, his canonry of Havelberg which now brought him an income of four thousand six hundred livres. Then the fixing upon a definite character to present himself in, and securing, as far as possible, the means of making his application to Congress successful.