chapter one

The Frontier Soldier

Lieutenant General Baron von Steuben could not believe his eyes. At great risk and personal expense, he had traveled four thousand miles across the Atlantic from Prussia to join the Continental Army. Arriving at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in February 1778, he surveyed the desperate condition of this pathetic army with a mixture of alarm and disgust. He felt deceived.

Under a gunmetal sky, he came on horseback from the town of York, eighty miles west, where Congress had fled after the British captured Philadelphia. After weeks of bitter cold, the weather had improved in late February, and the Schuylkill River had begun to melt. From a distance, Steuben could see one thousand cabins crowding the hills. Smoke curled out of a forest of chimneys. As he approached, Steuben could not discern in the waning light the crimson tracks left by barefoot soldiers. But he could not miss the stinking carcasses of horses lying in the snow.

General Washington met him on horseback outside the camp. The handsome, imposing Virginian and the plump Prussian with bulging lips and thick eyebrows rode side by side in awkward silence. Steuben, who was naturally ebullient, spoke French and German and very little English; Washington, who was characteristically reserved, spoke neither. It was an inauspicious beginning.

Steuben soon realized that Washington's army was a chimera. The Continental Army was melting away faster than the snow. He had expected to join a force of 40,000 men, but fewer than 14,000 remained and only half that were fit for duty. Nearly 7,000 were sick or not equipped to fight. Over the winter, nearly 2,500 men died from disease and around 15,000 deserted, sneaking across enemy lines into Philadelphia twenty miles southeast along the Schuylkill. "With regard to their military discipline," Steuben noted, "I may safely say that no such thing existed."

"The men had been left to perish by inches of cold and nakedness," Washington admitted. Without adequate food, the soldiers baked "fire cakes" made out of flour and water on a hot stone placed in the hearth. In some cases, starving men roasted their leather shoes to provide one more meal. One officer complained that "Congress have let it in the power of the States to starve the Army at pleasure." The camp needed 30,000 pounds of bread and an equivalent amount of meat daily. In addition, the men were promised a gill (four ounces) of whiskey a day. Rarely did the camp have anything approaching that amount. Angry soldiers chanted, "No bread, no soldiers!" The local farmers refused to accept the nearly worthless Continental dollars. They preferred to sell food to the British soldiers for pounds sterling. The situation was so desperate that Washington told his troops to steal whatever food they could find and "make an example" out of farmers who sold to the British.

The next day Steuben surveyed the troops with his large wolfhound, Azor, sniffing alongside. Half-naked men with skeletal bodies stared back in wonder at his well-fed figure in a smart Prussian blue tunic bedecked with medals. The men were awed by the general. "Never before, or since, have I had such an impression of the ancient fabled God of War," wrote one young private. Few soldiers owned more than one shirt, and many had none. More than 3,000 men were barefoot or partly naked. France had sent the army tens of thousands of boots that were too small for most Americans, and those that fit fell apart after marches across hundreds of miles. The scarcity of supplies forced many to cannibalize what little they had. The lucky few who had blankets cut them into tents; the ones with tents sewed the fabric into shirts. Most soldiers suffered from scabies or lice, which drove men to tear madly at their own flesh. As Steuben inspected the troops, men stood shivering with open sores covering their bodies. Medical care was almost nonexistent. Thousands lay in camp hospitals without doctors, food, or drugs.

Given all this, Steuben could not be surprised at the poor morale. Nearly all the enlisted soldiers were in their teens and twenties; most were poor and more likely to be motivated by the promise of a steady wage than revolutionary ideology. Soldiers had been promised forty shillings a month in hard coin, but wages were paid irregularly in rapidly depreciating paper money instead. By the winter of 1777, the Continental dollar had lost more than three-quarters of its value. With it, soldiers could barely afford a cheap bottle of rum. While soldiers starved, the senior officers feasted on mutton and veal and toasted their commander's health with General Washington's favorite Madeira. Still, even the officers found the conditions intolerable. As many as fifty officers resigned their commissions in a single week. Washington suffered deprivations of his own: He complained to Congress that his servants were not dressed properly.

Amid this landscape of misery and disorder, one man seemed unaccountably upbeat. John Marshall was a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant from the Culpeper regiment of rural Virginia. Steuben's roving eye could not have missed this handsome young man: Rail thin with a tangle of brown hair and intense dark eyes, and more than six feet tall, Marshall towered above his contemporaries. He had a rugged complexion; a round, friendly face; and an infectious grin. Long dangling arms and legs made him appear ungainly, yet he was exceptionally athletic. Harsh weather and small rations never dampened his humor and good spirits. When other officers groused about conditions, Marshall teased them until they had no choice but to laugh with him. He loved practical jokes, even at his own expense, and turned every mishap into an excuse for laughter. Once, when his bedding caught fire, Marshall made fun of his own clumsiness. He delighted in challenging other soldiers to games. He could jump farther than almost anyone, and he was a master at quoits, a popular game involving tossing a donut-shaped discus onto a stake. The men who served with Marshall loved him like a brother, and in all Marshall's prolific writing years later, he hardly ever complained about the conditions at Valley Forge.

Marshall impressed his superior officers with his even temper, fair-mindedness, and intelligence. Washington knew Marshall's father and appointed Marshall deputy judge advocate even though he had no legal experience or education. As a judge advocate, Marshall arbitrated disputes between soldiers and litigated violations of Washington's stern orders: Deserters and cowards were hanged, and even women living in the camp were flogged for minor infractions.

Marshall also paid attention to how Steuben quickly transformed the Continental Army into a highly disciplined force by combining rigorous training with paternal affection. Steuben wrote the first regulations for the army, borrowing the best practices of the French and Prussian armies. Unlike with his Prussian soldiers, it was not enough to tell these Americans to do something; he had to explain why. Steuben decided to serve as drillmaster himself. He addressed the troops in a mix of German and French, and his translator, who had no familiarity with military terms, turned the general's words into a mishmash of fragmentary English. He drilled them relentlessly with fast-paced, highly stylized routines adapted for the unconventional guerrilla warfare that Washington favored. Soldiers struggled to keep up. Even when Steuben lost his patience with them and swore at them in a jumble of German and baby English, they found him endearing.

Within a month, Steuben had transformed the ragtag shadow of an army into a disciplined fighting force. He reorganized the army into provisional regiments, reformed the quartermaster's office, improved sanitation and medical care, and demanded better food and uniforms. No one had done more to build the Continental Army, and Washington appointed the Prussian inspector general with the rank of major general. At the same time, Steuben, like Marshall, appealed to the soldiers' sense of fun. He served the officers flaming whiskey drinks and organized costume parties that lampooned their conditions.

Marshall worked closely with Steuben, and the two forged a great friendship. Marshall thought that Steuben and Washington, as different as they were, complemented each other. Steuben formed intense emotional relationships with his soldiers and insisted that his officers bond with their men as well. And Steuben's affection was reciprocated by officers and enlisted men alike.

Steuben's unconditional love could not have been less like Washington's reserve. To his men, Washington was a remote father figure who demanded respect and discipline. He had a rigid sense of hierarchy and propriety. Officers were punished just for eating with enlisted men. Still, Marshall thought that Washington was "the greatest Man on earth." He later wrote, "When I speak or think of that superior Man my full heart overflows with gratitude." And Marshall credited Washington with saving the Continental Army from defeat.

Washington and Steuben gave Marshall an early lesson in two styles of...