Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben (17 September 1730 – 28 November 1794) was a Major-General and Inspector-General of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. Born in Prussia, Von Steuben served in Frederick the Great's army, using Prussian drilling tactics to train the Continentals during the winter of 1777-1778 at Valley Forge.
Biography[]
Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben was born on 17 September 1730 in Magdeburg, Duchy of Magdeburg, Prussia, the son of a royal engineer in the Prussian Army. Von Steuben served with his father during the War of the Austrian Succession at a young age, and he was wounded while serving as a Lieutenant in the Prussian Army during the Seven Years' War. In June 1761, he became Deputy Quartermaster at the General Headquarters under Frederick the Great and became an aide-de-camp, but he was unemployed at the end of the war. In 1771, he accompanied Josef Friedrich Wilhelm, Prince of Hohenzollern-Hechingen to France to borrow money, but in 1774 he returned to Germany, deeply in debt. On 1 December 1777, Von Steuben decided to volunteer his services to the Continental Congress in the United States during the American Revolutionary War. On 23 February 1778, he arrived at Valley Forge, where the Congress had relocated after the capture of Philadelphia by Great Britain in 1777, pretending to be a Baron and veteran general. Even after the Continental Army's commander-in-chief George Washington found out that he was a fraud, he decided to appoint Steuben as temporary Inspector-General, and Von Steuben trained the Continental Army in Prussian tactics while they were encamped at Valley Force. As he only spoke German and French, he had bilingual officers curse at the American troops and instruct them on how to fight. On 5 May 1778, he was made an Inspector-General and Major-General in the Continental Army, and his "Blue Book" on military tactics would officially be in use by the US Army until 1814 and influenced the US military until the Mexican-American War in 1846, when Napoleon's army structure would be used instead.
Von Steuben traveled with Major-General Nathanael Greene in the southern theater of the war after 1780, and he was quartered in Virginia at the time of the Marquis de Lafayette's campaign against Charles Cornwallis' army in 1781. He led 1,000 Continentals at the Battle of Blandford against Cornwallis on 25 April 1781, and he took sick leave until the start of the Siege of Yorktown. Von Steuben would lead one of the three Continental divisions at that battle, and he aided Washington in demobilizing the army, in addition to founding the Revolutionary War veterans' Society of the Cincinnati. Von Steuben settled in Upstate New York near Rome in Oneida County, where he died in 1794 at the age of 64.