This Fierce People

Chapter One

“A Spirit of Independence”

The day after Major General Johann von Robais, Baron de Kalb, and his entourage of officers crossed from Virginia into North Carolina, he found time to write to his wife in Paris. “Here I am at last, considerably south,” he wrote, “suffering from intolerable heat, the worst of quarters, and the most voracious of insects of every hue and form.” It was mid-June 1780, and de Kalb’s men, well-trained veterans from Delaware and Maryland, had sweated their way through swamps and pine forests before making camp outside Goshen, a town that cannot today be located on a map. They would pass the night at other long-forgotten settlements as they headed toward Charles Town, hoping to reinforce the garrison there and, if they were too late for that, to defend the rest of the South as the British sought to bring the entire region under their control.

The war, by this time, had dragged on for years, without either the British or the Americans being able to defeat the other and bring it to a close. The first shots had been exchanged at Lexington and Concord more than seven years before. All the great events later generations would teach their children about—the Battle of Bunker Hill, Washington’s crossing the Delaware, the victory at Saratoga, the winter at Valley Forge, where de Kalb had suffered with the others—had come and gone, with still no end in sight. The last battle in the North, the inconclusive clash at Monmouth, took place in June 1778, exactly two years earlier. After that, not much had happened, and the cause of independence seemed to have stalled. The British still held New York and Philadelphia, and, in the South, when de Kalb had arrived, they were moving on the port at Charles Town. Starting a war, a cynic might say, was easy. Ending a war—actually winning one—was another matter. If this war was to be brought to a successful conclusion, it would be in the South, and General George Washington, back in New Jersey, hoped that de Kalb could be of more use there than in the North.

This trek to the Carolinas was hard-going even for young men born and raised in the mid-Atlantic colonies. For de Kalb, who was fifty-eight years old and had grown up in Bavaria and spent most of his life in northern Europe, summer in the American South presented daunting challenges. This old campaigner had known nights in rough barracks and drafty tents and on cold ground, but he had experienced nothing like the insects that hummed and buzzed and bit, morning, noon, and night. This was something that his wife, ensconced with their three small children in an elegant townhouse in Paris, could only imagine. “The most disagreeable [of these],” he told his wife, “is what is commonly called the tick, a kind of strong black flea, which makes its way under the skin, and by its bite produces the most painful irritation and inflammation, which lasts a number of days.” His body was “covered with these stings,” which southerners to this day know not as ticks but chiggers.

It would not get any easier for any of the men—especially those accustomed to the cooler weather of England and northern Europe—as they made their way deeper into the swampy lowlands along the southern coast. There, as the British commander at Savannah told Lord Charles Cornwallis, the heat was “beyond anything you can conceive.” Malaria, smallpox, typhus, dysentery, and what were called “malignant fevers,” “putrid fevers,” and “bilious fevers” would spread through their camps, killing officers and men. This made it “the height of madness and folly,” another British officer said, to do much fighting during the summer months. Diseases would sweep through the prison ships and the filthy encampments, and before long, the men were carrying the deadly microbes with them wherever they went. De Kalb had arrived in early summer, when the temperatures were rising, and with them, disease.

De Kalb would never make it back to his wife and children in France. Eight weeks later, when the British commanded by Cornwallis annihilated the main Continental army under General Horatio Gates at Camden, South Carolina, another 175 miles farther away, an enemy soldier struck de Kalb with a saber, opening an alarming gash in his head. Other redcoats then converged on him, and de Kalb was down, his body pierced three times with musket balls. All told, he would be wounded eleven times in the following seconds, and he would have been torn to pieces had not the Chevalier du Buysson, his young aide-de-camp, shielded his commander’s body with his own. Only when du Buysson told the British soldiers de Kalb’s name and rank did they relent. By the time de Kalb was hit, the firing elsewhere in this lopsided battle had more or less ceased, and Cornwallis himself rode over, paying his respects to his fallen adversary, as the unwritten rules of so-called civilized warfare required; these included treating defeated officers with gentlemanly courtesy.

“I am sorry, sir, to see you,” Cornwallis told de Kalb, “not sorry that you are vanquished, but sorry to see you so badly wounded.” Cornwallis ordered his men to carry de Kalb into Camden on a litter. There he was tended to by British surgeons, but, after three days, he died. The British general saw to it that de Kalb was buried with full military honors, with the other enemy officers attending the ceremonies.

He was born simply Johann Kalb on June 29, 1721, in Huttendorf, just northwest of Nuremburg, the son, official records say, of a “peasant.” This was a time of constant warfare in Europe, and, for an ambitious and capable young man, a career as a professional soldier offered opportunities for advancement. Before he was twenty, he had joined the French army, serving in the Chasseurs de Fischer, a corps of partisans—what we would call guerrillas, partisans, or irregulars—under the command of Marshal de Saxe, one of the great military theorists to emerge from the War of the Austrian Succession. At twenty-two, Kalb was made a lieutenant in the Loewendal Regiment, a sophisticated, highly cultured, multilingual unit led by officers from all over Europe, also under Saxe’s command. By learning “how to lead troops, and gaining experience in all aspects of the art of military planning and combat,” John Beakes Jr., de Kalb’s recent biographer, writes, he was making himself into a “very effective officer.” Serving under early European masters of mobility in warfare—of the feint, of the hit-and-run, of the surprise attack, in units often far removed from the main army that operated with unusual independence—he was learning the kind of fighting especially suited to the American landscape. By 1747, when Kalb was twenty-six, he had fought in sixteen major battles and was promoted from lieutenant to captain with the designation aid-major. After that, he began to call himself de Kalb, as he would be known thereafter; the Baron would come later.

By the end of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748, de Kalb had grown into a tall, imposing figure, calm under fire, well regarded by the men who served under him, and admirably humane at a time when his peers could be cruel. He remained with the French army in peacetime, where he became something of a reformer. He proposed—without success—the formation of a special regiment of “marine infantry,” trained to undertake surprise attacks on the English coast and its colonies. Any such regiment should include good numbers of Irishmen. “All the world is aware,” he wrote, “of the hatred cherished by the Irish against the English.”

But de Kalb also attended to matters involving individuals. When a court-martial issued a death sentence for a deserter who then returned to the army, de Kalb successfully argued that capital punishment was applicable only when the deserter was arrested on foreign soil. His efforts to reform some of the harsher protocols of camp life were not always successful, but he tried. Prostitutes were not to enter the barracks, and when they were discovered to have done so, soldiers they were there to entertain could be made to whip the women as punishment. Men who objected to this treatment were hanged for insubordination. Details are sketchy, but Beakes says de Kalb sought “more humane” responses to this too-common occurrence, “and it was his practice throughout his career to try to soften some of the more drastic punishments that prevailed in eighteenth-century armies. He was a firm disciplinarian, but he seems to have tempered this with a genuine concern for his troops.” How he dealt with the prostitutes awaits further research.

With the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, which Americans called the French and Indian War, de Kalb was fighting again, as struggles between France and Great Britain spilled over into the New World—where, in Pennsylvania, the twenty-one-year-old Virginia militia officer George Washington, sent with a small force to protect construction of a British fort on what the French claimed was their territory, ambushed a force of Canadians and killed its commander. Again de Kalb was with the Loewendal Regiment and in 1756 was promoted to major. The following year he fought in the Battle of Rossbach, an ancien régime engagement unlike what he and other veterans of European wars would see in the New World.

At Rossbach, Frederick the Great’s twenty thousand Prussians defeated forty thousand troops fighting for France and Austria. In the southern theater in the American Revolution, by contrast, it was not unusual for what was considered a major battle to be fought between troops totaling no more than two thousand or three thousand on both sides. Compare that to Leipzig, where, in 1813, half a million men would fight. But Fortune had smiled on America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1840. It had placed its “inhabitants . . . in the midst of a wilderness, where they have, so to speak, no neighbors.” Even half a century after the War for Independence—which ended in Tocqueville’s time—a “few thousand soldiers are sufficient for their wants, but this is peculiar to America, not to democracy.”

In 1760, de Kalb purchased a commission in the First Battalion of the regiment Anhalt, where he was appointed quartermaster general of the Army of the Upper Rhine. This further deepened his considerable military education. There seemed almost no aspect of the art and science of war in which he was not experienced, both in theory and practice. For his performance in the Battle of Wilhelmsthal in 1762, he received the French Order of Military Merit. The war ended the following year. De Kalb was forty-two now—no longer a young man—and had spent almost two decades in the French army, fighting in at least twenty major engagements in two wars. During visits to Paris, he met and in 1764 married Anna Elisabeth Emilie Robais, the sixteen-year-old heiress to a cloth-manufacturing fortune. On his pension—and his wife’s money—this German peasant who had affixed a “de” to his name retired to what could have been a life of ease. De Kalb could not claim to possess one of the “first-rate fortunes,” he admitted, but he need never again fret about money.

Retirement did not suit de Kalb, however, and in October 1767, he was on board the Hercules, sailing to the American colonies on a secret mission for France. Bent on revenge for its losses in the Seven Years’ War, the court of Louis XV followed the mounting unrest on the shores of the Atlantic and was eager to determine the extent to which troubles there might be exploited to its advantage. The French wanted to know, de Kalb was told, whether the rebels there “are in need of good engineers and artillery officers,” the “quantities of munitions of war and provisions they are able to procure,” what were “their resources in troops, fortified places, and forts.” France wanted to know, too, the rebels’ “plan of revolt,” if they had one, “and the leaders who are expected to direct and control it,” and “the strength of their purpose to withdraw from the English government.”

France needed a spy, and de Kalb, with his reputation for courage, sound judgment, and discretion, plus the knowledge a quartermaster general of the Army of the Upper Rhine would possess, was the man for the job. De Kalb landed in Philadelphia in January 1768, and, during his six months in the colonies, he visited Boston and New York, cultivating sources and filing reports, written in code to the Duc de Choiseul, the French foreign minister, who was his handler back home. Six years before the British closed the port of Boston—before de Kalb had even sailed to Philadelphia—he sympathized with the Americans’ complaints. England, he wrote, “ought to be content with the profits it derives from selling them worthless goods at high prices, and purchasing necessities for a song.” If the colonists made good on their threats to boycott anything manufactured in the mother country, the British economy would suffer, and “if the court should undertake to cure this evil by imposing additional taxes [as it would], sedition will follow, and the break be beyond healing.”

These sympathies intensified as de Kalb got to know the colonists and saw the effects of British policies on their lives, all the while eluding English spies who were, in turn, tracking his comings and goings. “All people here,” he wrote from New York, “are imbued with such a spirit of independence and even license, that if the provinces can be united under a common representation, an independent state will certainly come forth in time.” In Boston, he discovered that the inhabitants “are almost exclusively Englishmen or of English stock.” This native of Germany who had spent most of his life in the French army saw in the colonists’ heritage a telling paradox: Because they are Englishmen, he wrote, “the liberties so long enjoyed by them have only swelled the pride and presumption peculiar to that people.” It was precisely the enjoyment of those liberties and their pride and presumption that made the colonists desire independence and would make them willing to make considerable sacrifices to achieve it.

Before arriving back in Paris in June 1768, de Kalb translated articles from American newspapers from English to French and sent them on to his handler to supplement his personal observations. His reception was not what he had expected. Choiseul had lost interest in the American colonies, and in de Kalb’s reports. The foreign minister’s attention, for now, was on the conquest of Corsica, and he had no time for his returning spy. De Kalb sought an audience with Choiseul but was repeatedly rebuffed. They finally met the following year at a social event. “You returned too soon from America, and your labors are therefore of no use to me,” de Kalb was told. “You need not send me any more reports about that country.”

Choiseul might have lost interest in de Kalb’s findings, but for the next decade—and with increasing intensity after that—the French continued to seek ways to help what they routinely referred to as the American “insurgents.” By 1776, at least a year before the Battle of Saratoga and France’s recognition of American independence, French interests were covertly shipping arms, ammunition, and other supplies to the rebels, and the following year, a meeting was arranged between de Kalb and an immensely rich young nobleman eager to risk everything for the American cause. This was Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, or, as he is better known, the Marquis de Lafayette.

Lafayette was nineteen years old when he was introduced to de Kalb, who was described to him as a man “whose experience and counsels might be valuable” to him. The young marquis “is a prodigy for his age,” de Kalb wrote, “full of courage, spirit, judgement, good manners, feelings of generosity and zeal for the cause of liberty.” De Kalb had developed a “zeal for the cause of liberty,” too, although his was also informed by his desire to be of professional service in a war where his abilities would be recognized and rewarded.

The Americans needed more than the idealism of young aristocrats like Lafayette, de Kalb believed. If they had any hope of success against the British, they could not rely on green recruits. What would be required by the colonists, “now in the position of mere children,” de Kalb said, “is some foreign troops.” They needed battled-tested leaders, of course, and he was eager to make his thirty-two years of experience available. Other European officers were interested in the cause as well—“gentlemen of rank and fortune,” as Silas Deane, the Continental Congress’s secret envoy in Paris, described them—and they, too, wished to participate. Whispered negotiations ensued, and de Kalb was back and forth between Paris and Versailles, eventually obtaining a two-year furlough from the French army and, thanks to Deane, a commission in George Washington’s new army. It was during this winter of intrigue that, for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious, de Kalb was first referred to, in official correspondence, as “Monsieur Le Baron.” (Other titles were also questionable. Without proper authorization, Deane signed agreements with both de Kalb and Lafayette, making them major generals in the Continental army—a matter that would have to be sorted out later, when both were actually on American soil.)

Not everyone was enthusiastic about Lafayette’s “zeal for the cause of liberty,” however. His family was against the scheme. So was the court of Louis XVI. Agents were sent to arrest the young nobleman to prevent his departure but, on the Victoire, a ship Lafayette purchased out of his own fortune, he, de Kalb, and several other ambitious French officers slipped away in March 1777. For three weeks, they laid anchor in a Spanish port, while Lafayette, his family, and the court came to terms with the marquis’s plans. Learning of their opposition to the scheme, de Kalb “advised him to sell the ship,” because “this folly will cost him dearly. But if it be said that he has done a foolish thing, it may be answered that he acted from the most honorable motives and that he can hold up his head before all high-minded men.” The adventure was off to a rocky start—Lafayette was seasick when they set out—but they reached open seas in mid-April. Even then, with British men-of-war prowling the Atlantic, they were not out of danger.

It was a “long and painful voyage,” de Kalb told his wife, “not entirely without anxiety every time we saw some ships, all the more so since we had decided to defend ourselves, though we were poorly equipped for the purpose.” This did not prove necessary, and on June 13, 1777, the Victoire reached South Carolina.