When was friedrich von steuben born

He showed them how to march at 75 steps a minute, then It was March 19, , almost three years into the Revolutionary War. The Continental Army had just endured a punishing winter at Valley Forge.

And a stranger—former Prussian army officer Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben—was on the scene to restore morale, introduce discipline and whip the tattered soldiers into fighting shape. To one awestruck year-old private, the tall, portly baron in the long blue cloak was as intimidating as the Roman god of war. Von Steuben had never been a general, despite the claim of the supporters who recommended him.

A decade past his service as a captain in the Prussian army, von Steuben, 47, filled his letters home with tall tales about his glorious reception in America. In less than two months in spring , von Steuben rallied the battered, ill-clothed, near-starving army. Ferreiro considers von Steuben the most important of all the volunteers from overseas who flocked to America to join the Revolution.

Born into a military family in —at first, his last name was the non-noble Steuben—he was 14 when he watched his father direct Prussian engineers in the siege of Prague. Enlisting around age 16, von Steuben rose to the rank of lieutenant and learned the discipline that made the Prussian army the best in Europe.

But a vindictive rival schemed against him, and he was dismissed from the army during a peacetime downsizing. Forced to reinvent himself, von Steuben spent 11 years as court chamberlain in Hohenzollern-Hechingen, a tiny German principality. In , the prince of nearby Baden named him to the chivalric Order of Fidelity.

Von Steuben, his salary slashed, started looking for a new military job. In , he tried to join the army in Baden, but the opportunity fell through in the worst way possible. So he turned to his next-best prospect: America. In September , the disgraced baron sailed from France to volunteer for the Continental Army, bankrolled by a loan from his friend, French playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais.

He trained them vigorously, then used them as a model example for the rest of the camp. His system of progressive training ensured that the men of the Army were ready for battle.

His training regimen became the basis for Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States , the guide that would serve the United States Army through the War of Von Steuben's military career would conclude in when he received his honorable discharge from the Army.

By the mids, he had restyled himself as a baron, but was in fact desperate for money and a better position. At this low point in his life, Steuben met Benjamin Franklin in Paris who recognized him as an experienced soldier who could bring order to the Continental Army. Steuben promptly formed a model company of soldiers and trained them to march, use the bayonet, and execute orders quickly on the battlefield.

In turn, this company trained all the able-bodied soldiers at Valley Forge. Steuben also worked with Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette to create a training manual for the Continental Army. Known as the Blue Book, the manual guided the American army all the way through the War of After the battle, Washington sent Steuben to assist Nathanael Greene in the South and later the Baron a battalion to command at Yorktown.

In , George Washington wrote his final letter as the American commander to General Steuben, thanking him for his "faithful and meritorious Services.