Von Steuben helps city prepare for war

When Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben visited Pittsburgh in August 1786, a new war seemed likely to break out between the United States and Great Britain.

The Treaty of Paris had ended the Revolutionary War three years earlier. While the British had agreed to abandon their forts in the Ohio Country as part of that 1783 deal, the Redcoats had not done so. In response the U.S. Congress had “come to a determination of raising troops for the purpose of taking the western forts withheld by the British,” The Pittsburgh Gazette reported in its Aug. 26 edition.

Von Steuben, born in 1730, was a Prussian officer who joined the Continental Army in 1778 as a volunteer. During the American war for independence, he had served both as inspector general and as chief training officer, best known for drilling soldiers at Valley Forge.

During his time in frontier Pittsburgh, von Steuben was an honored guest at a parade of local military units on what is now Allegheny Commons on the North Side. The cavalry, artillery and light infantry units that von Steuben reviewed were composed of militiamen who drilled “agreeably to the system established in the continental army,” the Gazette reported. The parttime soldiers’ training and appearance “bespoke a return of the truly military spirit that characterized the militia of Pennsylvania throughout the [Revolutionary] war.”

Von Steuben, approaching his 56th birthday, told the assembled troops he planned to come back from retirement to “immediately employ himself in forming a system of legionary arrangement for the United States.”

The Prussian drillmaster was often called the “Military Father” of George Washington’s Continental Army, and he told the troops he would like “to stand in a similar relation with the militia of America,” the newspaper reported.

While the British continued to occupy forts on U.S. territory at Detroit, Niagara, Ontario, Presque Isle and other locations for another decade, the dispute with London ended not with war but with diplomacy.

The Jay Treaty, named for the chief American negotiator, John Jay, was signed in the British capital in 1794. It took effect in 1796, after being ratified by the U.S. Senate. This time the British lived up to their promises to withdraw from the frontier forts. The agreement also resolved other long-standing disputes. American ship owners and British merchants were able to collect long-overdue debts. The Jay Treaty also established a portion of the northeast border between the United States and Canada at the St. Croix River.