Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben (1730 to 1794) was a former Prussian staff captain who reached Valley Forge in February 1778 and became inspector general of the Continental Army. He drilled the army through a model company, wrote its first official manual, the Blue Book of 1779, and commanded a division at Yorktown in 1781.
On 23 February 1778 a 47 year old foreigner rode into the winter camp of the Continental Army at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. He could neither speak nor write English. His letter of recommendation, signed by Benjamin Franklin, described him as "lately a Lieutenant General in the King of Prussia's Service". Most of that was not true.
Yet within about three months the self styled Baron de Steuben had given the army a common drill, and in June it stood up to British regulars in open battle.
Who he really was
Steuben was born on 17 September 1730 in the fortress town of Magdeburg. He joined the Prussian army in 1747, fought through the Seven Years' War and ended it on the staff of Frederick the Great, a genuine distinction. But he was discharged, on 29 April 1763, with the rank of captain1, and never served in a European army again. In 1771 the Prince of Hohenzollern-Hechingen made him a baron.
By 1777 he was in Paris looking for work. The French ministers Saint-Germain and Vergennes recommended him to the American envoys, and Franklin's letter to Washington of 4 September 1777 promoted him to lieutenant general. The editors of the Franklin Papers are blunt: he had been the king's aide de camp and staff officer, but his rank in the Prussian service had been that of captain2. His biographer Paul Lockhart shows that Steuben embellished his own story, turning the German Freiherr into the grander French Baron de Steuben3.
Valley Forge, winter and spring 1778
Congress sent Steuben on to Valley Forge, where he arrived at the low point of the winter. The army of the Ten Crucial Days and of Germantown did not lack courage, but it lacked a system. Each state used different drills and maneuvers4, patterned on various European methods. George Washington appointed the newcomer temporary inspector general, with the task of creating one standard method for the whole army.
Steuben began with a model company: Washington's own guard of about 50 Virginians, reinforced with 100 picked men from the other states1. The American Battlefield Trust counts the 100 added men, while the National Park Service puts the whole company at about 1204. Unusually for a European officer of rank, he worked with the soldiers directly. When the company had mastered a lesson it demonstrated it to the camp, and brigade inspectors copied the next lesson into the orderly books of every brigade and regiment.
He wrote the drills at night, staying only several days ahead of the army. He composed them in French, and his secretary Pierre-Étienne Du Ponceau translated them, with help from two of Washington's aides, John Laurens and Alexander Hamilton.
How he taught: the record and the legends
The documented core is plain: personal example, short lessons, constant repetition. On 6 May 1778 the army celebrated the French alliance with a grand review and showed off its new skills; that same day Steuben was handed his commission from Congress as inspector general4 with the rank of major general. Some details that sound invented are recorded: he had sailed from France with his Italian greyhound, Azor.
Colourful stories grew around that core. The best known, repeated by the American Battlefield Trust, has Steuben running out of curses in German and French and calling on Du Ponceau to swear at the soldiers1 for him in English. It comes from later recollections and is best read as an anecdote.
Monmouth: the first test
The test came within weeks. In June 1778 the British left Philadelphia and marched across New Jersey, and Washington followed. On 28 June the armies met at Monmouth Court House. The advance force under Charles Lee fell back in confusion, Washington rallied it and formed a new line, and Steuben was given the work of re-forming retreating troops and bringing them back into the fight.
Through a long afternoon of brutal heat, Continental regiments stood in line against British regulars. The National Park Service sums it up: the battle was essentially a draw, but the Continental Army fought the British to a standstill.
The Blue Book
In the winter of 1778 to 1779 Steuben went to Philadelphia to turn his lessons into a book, with Lieutenant Colonel François de Fleury, Du Ponceau and Captain Benjamin Walker helping draft and translate it. Congress approved it on 29 March 17795, and it was printed that year as Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States.
Soldiers called it the Blue Book. Beyond drill it covered recruits, firings, the march of an army, camps, guard duty, inspections and the treatment of the sick. A captain's first object, it said, should be "to gain the love of his men5, by treating them with every possible kindness and humanity". It remained the army's basic manual until the era of the War of 1812.
The South and Yorktown
In 1780 Steuben went south with Nathanael Greene and spent the following months in Virginia gathering recruits and supplies. In June 1781 a British raid under John Graves Simcoe drove him from Point of Fork on the James River. On 19 June he joined the Marquis de Lafayette, who was shadowing Cornwallis.
At the siege of Yorktown that autumn the Continentals formed three divisions under Lafayette, Steuben and Benjamin Lincoln6. As one of the few veterans of siege warfare in the American wing, Steuben had, in the words of the National Park Service historian Charles Hatch, a leading role in planning and constructing the siege works that closed around Cornwallis until his surrender on 19 October 1781.
After the war and his legacy
On 23 December 1783, the day he resigned his commission, Washington wrote to Steuben from Annapolis: "This is the last Letter I shall ever write7 while I continue in the service of my Country." It thanked him for his "faithful & meritorious Services".
Peace was harder on Steuben than war. Pennsylvania and New York made him a citizen, and New York gave him 16,000 acres in the Mohawk Valley, but he sank into debt until Congress granted him a pension of $2,500 a year in 17908. He died on 28 November 1794 on his New York land, with his former aide Benjamin Walker at his side. He never married; his will made Walker and another former aide, William North, his adopted sons and heirs.
In 1777, before he sailed, accusations reached the court of Baden3 that he had taken improper liberties with boys. The charge was never tried, but Lockhart shows how it ended his hopes of a post in Germany. Some modern writers describe Steuben as gay, pointing to those rumours and to his bonds with Walker and North; the surviving documents do not settle the question.
His name lives on in counties and towns, a statue in Lafayette Square facing the White House, and the Steuben parades held each September in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago.
Why he still matters
The Continental Army did not lack bravery before Steuben. It lacked a shared language of drill, inspection and camp routine, and he supplied one that farmers and tradesmen could learn in weeks. Like Casimir Pulaski, he crossed the Atlantic for a cause not his by birth, and the army he trained fought the later battles of the American Revolution as one force. Washington thanked him in his last letter as commander in chief.