The Baron's Silence
Paris, September 1777. Benjamin Franklin sits down to write a letter of introduction for a penniless German soldier, reads the man's service record aloud, writes four words, and does not write the fifth. Lieutenant General. The word Quartermaster stays on the page it came from.
Baron Friedrich von Steuben is standing four feet away. He says nothing. It costs him nothing at all, and he will think about that for the rest of his life.
Ruined in Germany by an accusation nobody will put in writing, carrying a barony his father bought from a forger, Steuben lands in America with a description of himself he did not write and cannot correct without losing everything. At Valley Forge he takes eleven thousand starving men and gives them an army. In Virginia he loses the arsenal of a state to a battalion that did nothing but light campfires on a ridge he could not ride out to see. And in a hot meeting house in Staunton, a planter finally asks him aloud the question four years of war have not: by whose word do we know what you are?
What Steuben discovers there is worse than exposure. Nobody was ever going to ask.
Drawn from the documented record - the forged genealogy, the inflated letter, the defeat at Point of Fork, the inquiry that never reported, the will that adopted two grown men because no law in America allowed it - THE BARON'S SILENCE is the story of the man who drilled the Continental Army, and of the stranger fact underneath it: he was never found out. He died in a wooden house in upstate New York with the matter entirely unexamined.
For readers of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels.
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