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.
Under the foregoing, German citizens, merchants, corporations,
companies, etc., would have the right for the period of nine months
after the declaration of war to collect their debts, settle their
affairs, and, if possible, to depart safely, carrying all their
effects with them without any hindrance whatsoever. This would mean,
for instance, that the owners of the German vessels interned in our
harbors would be privileged to have full control over their property.
Under date of February 8, 1917, the State Department issued the
following statement:
It having been reported to him that there is anxiety in
some quarters on the part of persons residing in this
country who are the subjects of foreign states lest their
bank deposits or other property should be seized in the
event of war between the United States and a foreign
nation, the President authorizes the statement that all
such fears are entirely unfounded.
The Government of the United States will under no
circumstances take advantage of a state of war to take
possession of property to which under international
understandings and the recognized law of the land give it
no just claim or title. It will scrupulously respect all
private rights, alike of its own citizens and the subjects
of foreign states.
This was made public two months before we found ourselves in a state
of war with Germany. Soon after, A. Mitchell Palmer was appointed
Custodian of Alien Property and began to seize about one thousand
million dollars’ worth of German property and securities--not the
property of the Imperial German Government, with which we were at
war, but the property of German private persons.