One of the outstanding characters and geniuses to which I wish to call your attention, was a foreigner of the breaking out of the Revolution, but whose zeal for liberty and a righteous cause, was attracted to the colonists struggling for independence, who enlisted his service and his all--I refer to General Baron von Steuben.
When a very young boy Steuben displayed a great love for the alluring art of war. So great was his love that his military education was personally supervised by Fredrick the Great, an honor and recommendation, in the military sense, that could not be equaled. He spent twenty years of hard labor and toil in the saddle until he was acclaimed as one of the foremost generals in all Europe.
Steuben, a man of very stable, military character, was the reformer of the American Army. The army at the time of his arrival in America being at its most delapidated stage. He could not have come at a more opportune time to aid Washington, who was then suffery greatly with his troops at Valley Forge, nor could he have displayed a more noble character in the hardships and sacrifices he underwent during those long and bitter years of strife. Something entirely new and different from the luxurious conditions to which he was accustomed in Germany.
Recognizing his power and ability as an army officer and reformer, Washington immediately appointed Steuben as Inspector General, a position which he filled with honor, distinction and efficiency until the end of the most important struggle. A disciplinarian was what the American Army needed most above all things. It needed a man to transform a wretched poverty stricken mass of farmers into a smooth working military machine. It needed a man who possessed military genius and winning personality to place it in a position to meet a most efficient army of one of the great powers of Europe. It needed a man who was willing and able to undergo trying conditions that, were by all indications not unforeseen. General Steuben possessed these characteristics and administered them to the best of his ability, all that could be done or given by any man regardless of his inheritance or acquirements.
The reformer, as he might well be called, did not hesitate in performing the difficult task that was assigned him, nor did he asky any help. He proceeded, in his indefinable way, the building of a new army. He wrote a manual of arms, the first ever to be used in the American Army and by the strict enforcement of this manual, succeeded in establishing an efficient military regime. While he strengthened the actual fighting power of the army, he also remodeled the internal power or departments of the army, placing responsibility on the superior officers and introducing systems of economy and efficiency into its policies.
On the battle field his actions are not to be forgotten. Time after time he turned defeat into decisive victory by displaying his most valuable military tactics. He was the hero of the day at Stoney Point, at West Point, in Virginia and he was the man who claimed the honor of receiving Cornwallis's offer to surrender.
After the war was over and America had succeeded in winning its independence, he returned to New York to live as a private citizen, renouncing his status as a Prussian subject, desiring to remain in his adopeted country. However, as in some instances, his military services were soon forgotten by the country he had so nobly served and he was practically without means, when in 1790, seven years after the close of the war, Congress voted him a pension on which he was able to live the rest of his days in comfort. He retired to his farm, a gift of the state of New York, where he died in the winter of 1794.
Thus lived and died the trusted friend and advisor of Washington. The disciplinarian and reformer of the Colonial army; the Engineer and Strategist; the builder of West Point; the hero and soldier of many a battlefield; the defender of Liberty and a righteous cause; the man, the hero and the soldier--Baron von Steuben.
