SECOND AND THIRD GROUPS
The Comte de Saint-Germain, the French minister of war, sent a second group of technical experts to America under the command of Louis le Bègue de Presle Duportail.9 He formally “loaned” four military engineers to the Continental Army. This was more than a year before France officially declared war against England. Unlike the previous volunteers, these men received contracts that called for promotions to a grade only one step higher than their French commissions, and Saint-Germain had carefully picked them for their skills. Duportail was commissioned a colonel on July 8, 1777, and given command over all engineers in the army shortly thereafter. Duportail’s obvious expertise and cooperative attitude led to his promotion to brigadier general on November 17, a status equivalent to that of General Knox.
Major General Marie Jean Paul Joseph du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834) led a third contingent from France in 1777. He and the Bavarian-born Major General Johann, Baron de Kalb (1721–1780), were talented protégés of Charles-Jacques-Victor-Albert, Comte de Broglie, one of France’s top military officers. Although nineteen-year-old Lafayette had limited military experience, he had powerful political connections in the French court. Consequently, Deane offered him and de Kalb, an experienced officer in the French Army, major general’s commissions.
By the time this third group reached Philadelphia, the failure of some of the first volunteers and the controversy surrounding du Coudray led to a cold reception by Congress and the army. But Lafayette’s enthusiasm, his and his companions’ offer to serve as unpaid volunteers, and their demonstrated competence eventually earned commissions for most of these Frenchmen. Because the Americans had little practical experience and no training that could match the British engineers’ at Woolwich or those in France, where the science of military engineering was being perfected, these foreign volunteers made their most immediate impact in military engineering.
FIRST CHIEF ENGINEERS
The first chief engineers of the Continental Army were self-taught Americans. Colonel Richard Gridley had had a principal role in the siege of Louisbourg in 1745 and was responsible for laying out the siege works around Boston in 1775, but his advanced age limited his active service thereafter. Colonel Rufus Putnam (1738–1824) eventually received the post on August 5, 1776, partly in recognition of his efforts to help lay out the defenses on Manhattan Island and Long Island that summer. Congress commissioned Andrew Thaddeus Kosciusko (or Kosciuszko; 1746–1817) a colonel of engineers on October 18, 1776. He was a young Polish captain who had been trained in France and was qualified by European standards. Colonel Putnam chose to return to infantry duty in 1777. Congress, now more cautious, halted the commissioning of untested volunteers. Washington had only Colonel Jeduthan Baldwin (1732–1788), Kosciusko, and a number of detailed infantry and artillery officers to choose from until Duportail’s group arrived at Philadelphia.
Duportail became chief of engineers on July 22, 1777, and continued in that post until October 10, 1783. He was Washington’s chief engineer at the siege of Yorktown, where he worked closely and effectively with his artillery counterpart, Henry Knox, and his former colleagues in the French expeditionary force. Washington was so impressed with him that he wrote, “I shall ever retain a grateful sense of the aids I have derived from your knowledge and advice to me.”
1
EARLY YEARS
Antoine-Jean-Louis Le Bègue (sometimes misspelled Lebèque) de Presle Duportail, better known as Louis, was born at Pithiviers en Gâtinais (now in the department of Loiret), a small town near Orléans, France, on May 14, 1743. He was the son of Sédillot, a merchant’s daughter, and Jacques Guillaume Le Bègue de Presle Chevalier du Portail.1 His father was an attorney specially charged with the Orléans forest. The Duportail family was recognized as nobility from the seventeenth century, when one of Louis’s ancestors was appointed advisor secretary to the king (Conseiller-secrétaire du roi).
Louis was the ninth of ten children, several of whom died very young. A notarized document drawn up on May 17, 1782, after the death of his father on December 20, 1781, indicates that he had three surviving brothers and one sister. His next older brother, Jacques Louis, Le Bègue d’Oyseville, was chosen as godfather for his baptism. The eldest, Achille-Guillaume Le Bègue de Presle, became a physician and chair of the faculty of medicine in Paris and maintained regular correspondence with Benjamin Franklin and his family. (Several of his letters are at Yale University.) His younger brother, Pierre, Le Bègue de Villiers, was a learned priest in the Society of the Sorbonne and vicar general of Comminges. Louis’s only known sister was Marie-Elisabeth Le Bègue de Presle. She married Julien, François Boys, a Paris attorney. The document also reveals that Louis inherited revenues, titles, and property totaling 61,000 livres (a private soldier in the French army earned about 1 livre per week in 1780), which permitted him later to buy a very large parcel of land on the banks of the Scioto River in Ohio. However, the Montgomery County archives (where the property was located) has no record of what happened to the land.
Louis must have undertaken rigorous classical studies at a religious school, as he was able to read and write Latin. In letters to Benjamin Franklin on January 16 and 19, 1777, he proposed to communicate in Latin to maintain a certain secrecy in their correspondence and because he didn’t understand English at the time.
Louis began studies as an engineer at the Military School of Mézières in 1761 at the age of eighteen. The school was founded in 1690 by the king’s engineers, who succeeded Vauban. It was established at Mézières to benefit from a battlefield in
