Washington [228]
During this Valley Forge winter Washington conquered his initial misgivings about Lafayette and embraced him as his most intimate protégé. In late November, in Gloucester, New Jersey, Lafayette spearheaded a party of four hundred men in a surprise raid on a Hessian detachment, leading to twenty enemy deaths versus only one American casualty. Washington admired the Frenchman’s swashbuckling courage. No longer just another foreign nobleman to be tolerated, Lafayette was rewarded with command of a division. He knew he had attained a unique place in Washington’s heart. “I see him more intimately than any other man,” he boasted to his father-in-law. “. . . His warm friendship for me . . . put[s] me in a position to share everything he has to do, all the problems he has to solve, and all the obstacles he has to overcome.”39
Washington found irresistible this young Frenchman who saw him in such Olympian terms, but Lafayette was also canny and hardworking and constantly honed his military skills: “I read, I study, I examine, I listen, I reflect . . . I do not talk too much—to avoid saying foolish things—nor risk acting in a foolhardy way.”40 Lafayette opened an emotional spout deep inside the formal Washington. Although he seldom showed such favoritism, Washington made no effort to mask his fondness for Lafayette. He did not fear the young French nobleman as a future rival and was convinced of his ardent idealism. When Lafayette and his wife had a son, they decided to name him Georges Louis Gilbert Washington du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette—for short, George Washington Lafayette. Lafayette vowed that the next child would be christened Virginia, prompting Franklin to quip that Lafayette had twelve more states to go.41
THE CONTINENTAL ARMY’S RISE from the ashes of Valley Forge owed much to a newcomer, Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf Gerhard Augustin, Baron von Steuben, a soldier who liked to decorate himself with sonorous names. While Steuben could legitimately claim wartime experience, having served as a Prussian captain during the Seven Years’ War and on the military staff of Frederick the Great, the baron title was bogus. When, in the summer of 1777, Franklin and Deane in Paris sent him to America, they embellished his credentials to make him more acceptable to Washington; on the spot, the unemployed captain was puffed up to the rank of a lieutenant general. He agreed to waive a salary temporarily and serve only for expenses. In late February 1778 the self-styled baron with the fleshy nose, jowly face, and uncertain command of English (he resorted to French to make himself understood) showed up at Valley Forge, where his bemedaled figure made a huge impression. “He seemed to me a perfect personification of Mars,” said one private. “The trappings of his horse, the enormous holsters of his pistols, his large size, and strikingly martial aspect, all seemed to favor the idea.”42
As he strode about the camp, trailed by his greyhound, Steuben was taken aback by the misery everywhere: “The men were literally naked . . . The officers who had coats had them in every color and make. I saw officers . . . mounting guard in a sort of dressing gown made of an old blanket or woollen bedcover.”43 Well versed in military practice, Steuben writhed at the unsanitary conditions; horse carcasses rotted near men preparing food, and sick men mingled with the healthy. He instituted many necessary reforms, such as having latrines dug at least three hundred feet away from huts, then promptly filled and abandoned after four days of use.
Steuben’s advent came at an auspicious time. After the widespread fatalities at Valley Forge and the tremendous attrition among officers, Washington was nervous as he contemplated a resumption of fighting in the spring. Two hundred to three hundred officers had resigned since the summer. Washington needed a tough drillmaster like Steuben to instill discipline and ready his army for combat. Unlike the British, whose units moved in brisk, marching steps, the