Part 26
It was Steuben who taught the Americans the value of bayonet fighting. The engagement at Stony Point proved the value of the bayonet as an arm. Previous to this time Steuben preached in vain on the usefulness of this weapon. The soldiers had no faith in it. But when Stony Point Fort was captured without firing a shot and when, the next day, Steuben with General Washington appeared on the scene, “Steuben was surrounded by all his young soldiers and they assured him unanimously that they would take care for the future not to lose their bayonets, nor roast beefsteaks with them, as they used to do.”
By his personal kindness and popularity Steuben was able to bring about marked reforms, and to convert the forces from untrained volunteers with no sense of order into a well-disciplined army which enabled Washington to win some of his chief battles. Speaking on a resolution before Congress to pay Steuben the sum of $2,700 due him, a member, Mr. Page, cited as proof of the efficiency which had been inculcated into the army by the distinguished German-American, an interesting incident in the following words:
“I was told that when the Marquis de Lafayette, with a detachment under his command, was in danger of being cut off on his return to the army, and the commander-in-chief was determined to support that valuable officer, the whole army was under arms and ready to march in less than fifteen minutes from the time the signal was given.” In the end Steuben was presented by Congress with a gold-hilted sword as a high expression of its sense of his military talents, services and character, and a large tract of land in New York State was given him on which to live in his old age.
At the battle of Yorktown Steuben was so fortunate as to receive the first overtures of Lord Cornwallis. “At the relieving hour next morning,” relates North, “the Marquis de Lafayette approached with his division; the baron refused to be relieved, assigning as a reason the etiquette in Europe; that the offer to capitulate had been made during his guard, and that it was a point of honor, of which he would not deprive his troops, to remain in the trenches till the capitulation was signed, or hostilities recommenced. The dispute was referred by Lafayette to the commander-in-chief; but Steuben remained until the British flag was struck.”
Illustration: GENERAL VON STEUBEN Drillmaster of the American Revolutionary Armies.
Steuben died in the night of November 25, 1794, on his farm, highly respected throughout the State and reverenced by the distinguished men of his time as well as by the German population, having served as president of the German Society of New York. When in 1824 Lafayette visited the United States the inhabitants of Oneida County collected money for erecting a monument over Steuben’s grave. They invited Lafayette to dedicate the monument, but he refused to accede to their request, excusing himself under some shallow pretext. (“Life of Steuben,” by Friedrich Kapp.)
That Steuben had no mercenary motives in coming to America, is proved by his letter to Congress. He wrote:
“The honor of serving a nation engaged in defending its rights and liberties was the only motive that brought me to this continent. I asked neither riches nor titles. I came here from the remotest end of Germany at my own expense and have given up honorable and lucrative rank. I have made no condition with your deputies in France, nor shall I make any with you. My own ambition is to serve you as a volunteer, to deserve the confidence of your general-in-chief, and to follow him in all his operations, as I have done during the seven campaigns with the King of Prussia.... I should willingly purchase at the expense of my blood the honor of having my name enrolled among those of the defenders of your liberty.”
Washington’s appreciation of Steuben is finally and irrevocably attested in the following letter dated Annapolis, December 23, 1783:
“My dear Baron! Although I have taken frequent opportunities, both in public and private, of acknowledging your zeal, attention and abilities in performing the duties of your office, yet I wish to make use of this last moment of my public life to signify in the strongest terms my entire approbation of your conduct, and to express my sense of the obligations the public is under to you for your faithful and meritorious service.
“I beg you will be convinced, my dear Sir, that I should rejoice if it could ever be in my power to serve you more essentially than by expressions of regard and affection. But in the meantime I am persuaded you will not be displeased with this farewell token of my sincere friendship and esteem for you.
“This is the last letter I shall ever write while I continue in the service of my country. The hour of my resignation is fixed at twelve this day, after which I shall become a private citizen on the banks of the Potomac, where I shall be glad to embrace you, and testify the great esteem and consideration, with which I am, my dear Baron, your most obedient and affectionate servant.
“GEORGE WASHINGTON.”
A superb monument of General von Steuben by Albert Jaegers now occupies one of the corners of the square opposite the White House in Washington.
Along with the splendid tribute to the American spirit of patriotism and unselfish devotion of Steuben, it seems fit and timely to add here the “creed” which was adopted by the officers of the American army at Verplanck’s Point, in 1782:
We believe that there is a great First Cause, by whose almighty fiat we were formed; and that our business here is to obey the orders of our superiors. We believe that every soldier who does his duty will be happy here, and that every such one who dies in battle, will be happy hereafter. We believe that General Washington is the only fit man in the world to head the American army. We believe that Nathaniel Green was born a general. We believe that the evacuation of Ticonderoga was one of those strokes which stamp the man who dares to strike them, with everlasting fame. =We believe that Baron Steuben has made us soldiers, and that he is capable of forming the whole world into a solid column, and displaying it from the center.= We believe in his blue book. We believe in General Knox and his artillery. And we believe in our bayonets. Amen.
The gratitude of the American people, many years after Steuben’s death, was solemnly attested by Congress in dedicating a monument to his memory at Pottsdam, with the inscription:
To the German Emperor and the German People: This replica of the monument to the Memory of General Friedrich Wilhelm August von Steuben.
Born in Magdeburg, 1730; died in the State of New York, 1794. Is dedicated by the Congress of the United States as a Token of Uninterrupted Friendship.
Erected in Washington in Grateful Appreciation of his Services in the War of Independence of the American People.
=Sulphur King, Herman Frasch.=--Inventor of the method of pumping up sulphur from its deposits, known as the water process, patented in 1891, which made available the large sulphur deposits in southern Louisiana and other places, which had puzzled engineers for years. Frasch came originally from Germany in the steerage, obtained work sweeping out a retail drug store, became a clerk and finally was graduated from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy. He joined the Standard Oil Company, and in prospecting for oil came upon abandoned sulphur workings. The deposits were covered with quicksands which had caused the death of several men, they exhaled noxious gases and the attempts to mine them were called a failure. Frasch bought them for a song on his own account, and began sinking his own perforated pipes through which he forced steam and hot water from a battery of boilers which he had rigged up. Frasch became a millionaire and revolutionized sulphur mining in Sicily.
=Sutter, the Romance of the California Pioneer.=--The romance of American colonization contains no chapter more absorbing than that of the winning of the West. A poetic veil has been cast about the California gold excitement and the rugged pioneers of the gulch, by Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller and Mark Twain; but few historians have thought it worth their pain to uncover the romance of the original pioneer of California on whose land was found the first gold that formed the lodestone of attraction for the millions that swept westward on the tide of empire.
Against the historic background of the settlement of the Pacific Coast stands out in luminous outlines the figure of Capt. John August Sutter. Where another German, John Jacob Astor, had failed--that of founding an American colony on the Pacific--he succeeded, even before California, taken from Mexico as a result of the war of 1846, became a State of the Union in 1850. His career is an inspiration to his fellow racials wherever German veins tingle to the thrill of American achievement.
Born 1803 at Kandern, in the Grand Duchy of Baden, Sutter received an excellent education, graduated from the cadet school at Thun and, after serving as an officer in the Swiss army and acquiring Swiss citizenship, he came to the United States in 1834. He first wandered to St. Louis, then the outfitting point for the Santa Fe trail and center of the fur trade. Here Sutter joined an expedition to Santa Fe and returned to St. Louis with a substantial profit. His next trip was undertaken with an American fur expedition and, crossing the Rocky Mountains, he reached Vancouver, the headquarters of the Hudson Bay Fur Company on the Pacific, in September, 1838. After a visit to the Sandwich Islands and to Sitka, Alaska, he arrived in Monterey, California, in 1839, and determined to put into execution a long-cherished plan of founding a colony on the Sacramento River. Selecting a spot 120 miles northeast of San Francisco, which had been highly recommended to him by trappers, he formed the settlement, New Switzerland, upon a strip of land which he had acquired on favorable terms from the Spanish governor, Alvarado. Here, of strong walls and bastions, he built Fort Sutter and armed it with twelve cannon. He then offered inducements to settlers to join him, broke several hundred acres of land, built a tannery, a mill and a distillery, fenced in a large area of grazing land between the Sacramento and Feather rivers, employed Indians as herders and laborers and placed them under Mexican, American and German overseers. About 1840 his livestock consisted of 20,000 head of horses, cattle and sheep.
Fort Sutter soon attracted a desirable class of settlers, many of them mechanics, who found ready employment here, as well as hunters and trappers, who came to exchange furs for supplies of food, of clothes and of powder and lead. Having complied with the terms of his agreement, he was given title to the Alvarado grant and was appointed by the governor the official representative of the Mexican government for the northern part of California.
In the Mexican civil war between Santa Anna and the constitutional president, Bustamento, he cast his lot with Santa Anna’s governor, Manuel Micheltorena, and in 1845 received from the latter for his services the Sobranta grant. There was almost a daily increase of his land and pastures. His fort became too small. In 1844 he laid out the town of Sutterville on the Sacramento River, which latterly took the name of Sacramento. In 1848 he established vineyards on his property, the first north of Sonoma. His wheat crop is estimated at 40,000 bushels for various years, while his large commercial and industrial enterprises promised him a steady increase of a fortune, even then estimated at millions. His fortune seems to have reached its apex in 1846.
Immigration into California was steadily increasing; the old antipathy of the Spaniards and Indians against Mexico was stimulated into new life; Major Fremont, the Pathfinder, visited Fort Sutter, and encouraged by him, Sutter in the spring of 1846 declared his independence and on July 11 of that year hoisted the Stars and Stripes over his fort.
Once before the flag had been raised by a German on the Pacific Coast, at Astoria by Astor in 1811. It was not suffered to remain there permanently, but this time it was destined not to be hauled down again. The war between Mexico and the United States broke out. Commodore Stockton appeared with an American squadron, soldiers of the Union began their invasion (see “Quitman,” elsewhere), and California became a territory of the United States. Sutter was now destined to experience that life is uncertain and fortune is fickle.
In January, 1848, Sutter was about to build a mill on the American River, a tributary of the Sacramento, and, in digging the foundation, J. W. Marshall, an agent of Sutter’s, discovered gold. Despite the efforts of Sutter to keep the discovery secret for a while until his mill was completed and his fields were put in order, the news circulated with the speed of the wind. The magic word had been spoken, and thence on no man thought of anything but gold. The irresistible rush was on; a tide of humanity swept on to wash gold and dig up the mountain sides farther up. Wages rose beyond all reason, so that it was impossible to continue farming and industry, since there were no hands to do the work. Titles were worthless. Thousands of adventurers squatted on Sutter’s land. Countless law suits had to be instituted, and Sutter’s property was soon covered with mortgages. In the end the supreme court confirmed his title to the Alvarado grant while declaring null and void that of the much larger grant from Micheltorena. Other misfortunes came apace and presently Sutter saw his great fortune swept away. The State of California granted him an annuity of $3,000 for seven years in lieu of taxes paid by him on American federal-owned property which was immune from tax.
In the year 1865 Sutter turned his back upon California and went to Pennsylvania, where he died poor at Litiz. But he was not forgotten. His name was given to rivers, towns and counties and the room of the legislative assembly was decorated with his portrait. He had been elected major general of the State militia and in 1849 he was made a member of the convention to adopt a constitution. In this capacity he was active in securing the passage of measures declaring for the abolition of slavery.
Sutter was naturally generous, hospitable and broad-minded, with a strong adjunct of courage, shrewdness and enterprise in great conceptions. A memorial speech delivered by Edward J. Kewen on the occasion of a banquet of the Society of California Pioneers, September 9, 1854, concludes with the following tribute:
In the cycle of the coming years historians will write of the founding and settlement of this western State, and when they shall dwell upon the virtues, the hardships, the sufferings and courage, the fearlessness which has brought all this about; when they describe the mighty impulse which this commonwealth has exercised upon the progress of free government and the development of the principles of liberty, and when they shall adorn the annals with the name of the founders of its fame, no name will illuminate their records with more brilliant light than that of the immortal Sutter--the noble example of the California pioneers.
“=Swordmaker of the Confederacy.=”--Louis Haiman, born in Colmar, Prussia, who came to the United States at a tender age with his family and was brought to Columbus, Georgia, then a small village. At the outbreak of the Civil War Haiman was following the trade of a tinner. “His work,” according to the Atlanta “Constitution,” was successful, “and in 1861 he opened a sword factory to supply the Confederacy a weapon that the South at the time had poor facilities for making. Such was Haiman’s success that in a year’s time his factory covered a block in the town of Columbus and was the most extensive business in the place. The first sword made by Haiman was presented to Col. Peyton H. Colquitt, and was one of the handsomest in all the Southern army. It was inlaid with gold, and was constantly used by Colonel Colquitt up to the time of his death. After that Haiman made swords for the officers of the Confederate army, and his first order came from Captain Wagner, in charge of the arsenal at Montgomery, Ala. Later on, to supply the needs of the troops in Southern Georgia and Alabama, he added a manufactory of firearms and accoutrements to his establishment. When the Federal army occupied Georgia Haiman’s property was confiscated and turned into a federal arsenal. General Wilson, commander of the army of occupation, proposed to restore to Haiman his property if he would take the oath of allegiance to the Federal authority, but Haiman’s unswerving loyalty to the cause of the South would not for a moment allow him to brook such a suggestion, and with the departure of the troops his factory was razed to the ground. His swords came to be famous in the ranks of the Confederacy, and their temper and durability have often called to mind the supreme test of swords related in ‘Ivanhoe’ between the leaders of Christendom and heathendom, Richard Coeur de Lion and Saladin. After the war, with the resources left him, he entered business at Columbus, that of manufacturing plows.”
=Tolstoy on American Liberty.=--Although Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, New York City, never surrendered the decoration bestowed upon him by the Kaiser, and though he had delivered sundry sound scoldings to England for her professed fears of German aggression, in the days before the war, his name stands out conspicuously among a considerable number of heads of colleges for the suppression of free speech and liberty of conscience in regard to the war. A number of the professors, several of international fame, were compelled to resign under the pressure exercised from above, and Columbia became known for its spirit of intolerance. Among those who felt this was Count Ilya Tolstoy, son of the famous Russian author and philosopher, himself a man of distinction in those fields.
In February, 1917, even before we entered the war, Tolstoy’s engagement to deliver a lecture at a meeting of the International Club in the assembly room of Philosophy Hall, Columbia University, was summarily cancelled, although he had delivered the same lecture without molestation at Princeton a few days before. In an interview the distinguished savant said:
“The action of Columbia University was no insult to me. It was an insult to the vaunted institution of free speech in this country. I shall go back to Russia and tell them the story. I shall tell them how New York prevented me from giving the lecture I gave before thousands in Moscow. They will be astonished. My countrymen have made your heralded freedom of speech a shibboleth of liberty--in our land.... It matters little. I am surprised, but not hurt. Only I have learned that Russia has much more freedom from personal prejudice, in many ways, than this country has.”--New York “American,” February 12, 1917.
=Commercial Treaty with Germany and How it Was Observed.=--One of the most humane and liberal treaties in the history of nations was that entered into between the United States and Prussia in 1799. It was renewed in 1828 and became the treaty governing the relations between Germany and ourselves in 1871 on the establishment of the German Empire.
This treaty was in force in 1917 when we entered the war. Some high eulogiums have been passed upon this treaty, which was signed by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Quincy Adams, and, in 1828, by Henry Clay, on the part of the United States, and by the authorized representative of Frederick the Great, on the other. In his comments on this treaty, Theodore Lyman, Jr., a writer with a strong Tory tendency and chary of praise as regards Prussia, makes the following observations in his “The Diplomacy of the United States” (1828):
This treaty, which has been called a beautiful abstraction, is remarkable for the provisions which it contains: Blockades of every description were abolished--the flag covered the property--contrabands were exempted from confiscation, though they might be employed for the use of the captor on payment of their full value. This, we believe, is the only treaty ever made by America in which contrabands were not subject to confiscation, nor are we aware that any other modern treaty contains this remarkable provision. We are probably indebted to Dr. Franklin for the articles.
It received an even higher endorsement in a message to Congress, dated March 15, 1826, by President John Quincy Adams, who said:
They (the three American commissioners) met and resided for that purpose about one year in Paris and the only result of their negotiations at that time was the first treaty between the United States and Prussia--memorable in the diplomatic history of the world and precious as a monument of the principles, in relation to commerce and maritime warfare with which our country entered upon her career as a member of the great family of independent nations.... At that time in the infancy of their political existence, under the influence of those principles of liberty and of right so congenial to the cause in which they had just fought and triumphed, =they were able to obtain the sanction of but one great and philosophical though absolute sovereign in Europe (Frederick the Great) to their liberal and enlightened principles. They could obtain no more.=
The two principal provisions of the treaty of 1799-1828 follow:
Article XII:
And it is declared, that neither the pretense that war dissolves all treaties, nor any other whatever, shall be considered as annulling or suspending this and the next preceding article; but, on the contrary, that the state of war is precisely that for which they are provided, and during which they are to be as sacredly observed as the most acknowledged articles in the law of nature and nations.
Article XXIII provides as follows:
If war should arise between the two contracting parties, the merchants of either country then residing in the other shall be allowed to remain nine months to collect their debts and settle their affairs, and may depart freely, carrying off all their effects without molestation or hindrance; and all women and children, scholars of every faculty, cultivators of the earth, artisans, manufacturers, and fishermen, unarmed and inhabiting unfortified towns, villages, or places, and in general all others whose occupations are for the common subsistence and benefit of mankind, shall be allowed to continue their respective employments and shall not be molested in their persons, nor shall their houses or goods be burnt or otherwise destroyed, nor their fields wasted by the armed force of the enemy, into whose power by the event of war they may happen to fall; but if anything is necessary to be taken from them for the use of such armed force, the same shall be paid for at a reasonable price.