Washington [229]
As he introduced professionalism into this motley army, the mercurial Prussian performed wonders. Washington started out by assigning one hundred men to him to be trained for his headquarters guard; he accomplished it so expertly that Washington soon sent him more. Steuben taught the men new skills, including how to wield bayonets. “The American soldier, never having used this arm, had no faith in it,” recalled Steuben, “and never used it but to roast his beefsteak.”45 All day long he drilled men on the broad, open parade ground at the center of the encampment, teaching them to march and wheel in formation, to switch from line to column and back to line. All the while he tossed off a storm of profanities in French, English, and German and galloped about in “whirlwinds of passion.”46 Steuben was foul-mouthed and colorful, and the men were charmed by their strangely flamboyant new drillmaster.
With editorial assistance from John Laurens and Alexander Hamilton, Steuben began to compile his famous “blue book,” an instruction manual for drills and marches that gave new precision to the infantry. This booklet was so well done that it remained in use until the Civil War. Thrilled with his ersatz baron, Washington hailed him as a “gentleman of high military rank, profound knowledge, and great experience in his profession.”47 In another letter, he allowed his personal affection to peep through. “I regard and esteem the baron as an assiduous, intelligent, and experienced officer.”48 Washington always felt special gratitude to Steuben for helping to rescue the army that winter. When he later drafted a brief evaluation of him, he described him thus: “Sensible, sober, and brave; well acquainted with tactics and with the arrangement and discipline of an army. High in his ideas of subordination, impetuous in his temper, ambitious, and a foreigner.”49
That winter the projected shortage of soldiers led Washington to introduce another significant change in policy. In January 1778 Brigadier General James Mitchell Varnum of Rhode Island asked the unthinkable of the Virginia planter: the right to augment his state’s forces by recruiting black troops. “It is imagined that a battalion of Negroes can be easily raised there,” he assured Washington.50 Washington knew this was an incendiary idea for many southerners. Nevertheless, desperate to recruit more manpower, he gave his stamp of approval, telling Rhode Island’s governor “that you will give the officers employed in this business all the assistance in your power.”51 The state promised to free any slaves willing to join an all-black battalion that soon numbered 130 men. Massachusetts followed Rhode Island’s lead in enlisting black soldiers, and in Connecticut, slave masters were exempt from military service if they sent slaves in their stead. That August a census listed 755 blacks as part of the Continental Army, or nearly 5 percent of the total force. Later in the war Baron Ludwig von Closen, attached to the French Army, said of Washington’s men, “A quarter of them were Negroes, merry, confident, and sturdy.” This estimate sounds grossly exaggerated. Closer to the mark was the Frenchman’s unstinting praise for these self-confident black soldiers, saying they made up three-quarters of a Rhode Island regiment, “and that regiment is the most neatly dressed, the best under arms, and the most precise in its maneuvers.”52
Even as the American Revolution broadened George Washington, he had to reconcile his changed outlook with his private decisions as a slave owner. It seems more than coincidental that, in the aftermath of