Steuben and John W. Mulligan, Jr.

• A principle source Friedrich Kapp's 1859 biography of Steuben was John W. Mulligan, Jr., of whom Kapp wrote: I gratefully acknowledge the important services rendered to me by John W. Mulligan, Esq., with whom I have had the advantage of becoming intimately acquainted during the progress of this work. This venerable gentleman, now 86 years of age, who became acquainted with Steuben when the latter lived in New York at Walker's, afterwards with Charles Adams lived in his family, and continued to act as his secretary until his death, related to me with quite remarkable vigor and frankness a number of characteristic traits and stories of Steuben's life. I would that every biographer may find so reliable an authority, and so amiable and instructive a narrator as Mr. Mulligan.

  Kapp described Steuben's meeting Mulligan in the biography, writing: In 1791 Steuben made the acquaintance of John W. Mulligan, a young and promising man, whose father had been an active Whig in New York during the revolution. Mr. Mulligan, after having finished his studies in Columbia College, became Steuben's secretary, and served him with a fidelity and love which won him the friendship and confidence of his protector. Steuben concentrated all the tenderness of his heart on his friend, as he had no family relations, and there are few examples to be found in which the feeling of kindness and good fellowship was so sincerely reciprocated as between Steuben and his friend.

  Mulligan was with Steuben when he died in late November 1794. The younger man read to his idol and they retired to bed. Mulligan slept in Steuben's old bedroom in the older house and Steuben slept in the room in a new cottage not yet connected to the old. There were also two servants to serve the gentlemen. When a servant told Mulligan that Steuben was ill, Mulligan tried to give aid and comfort and sent for Walker and North. The latter came before Steuben died. Mulligan still cried out, in a letter, for the consolation of Walker. O, Colonel Walker, our friend, my all; I can write no more. Come if you can, I am lonely. Oh, good God, what solitude is in my bosom. Oh, if you were here to mingle your tears with mine, there would be some consolation for the distressed.

  Kapp also includes in his appendix, among many others, a letter from Steuben to Mulligan: Philadelphia, January 11, 1793 

  • Your letter of the 7th was handed me yesterday by Mr. Hamilton. In vain, my dear child, should I undertake to explain to you the sensation which the letter created in my heart. Neither have I the courage to attempt to arrest the tears you have so great reason to shed. For a heart so feeling as yours this was the severest of trials, and nothing but time can bring consolation under circumstances so afflicting.

   

  • Strength of mind in enfeebled by griefs of this nature; but, my friend, one ought not to suffer it to be entirely extinguished, for it is the duty of a sensible man to cherish the heavenly fire with which we are endowed by Providence.

    Despite moral philosophy I weep with you, and glory in the human weakness of mingling my tears with those of a friend I so tenderly love.

    My dear Charles ought, ere this, to have received my answer to the touching letter he wrote.

    I repeat my entreaties, to hasten your journey to Philadelphia as soon as your strength permits. My heart and my arms are open to receive you. In the midst of the attention and fetes which they have the goodness to give me, I enjoy not a moment's tranquility until I hold you in my arms. Grant me this favor without delay, but divide your journey, that you may not be fatigued at the expense of your health.
     

  I am not certain what crisis this letter refers to, but at the moment suppose it is Steuben's reaction to letters from Mulligan and Charles Adams describing their anguish at an order from Adams' parents, the Vice President and his wife, that they no longer live together.

  In his book, Kapp addresses the question of why Steuben never took a wife. He writes: Steuben was never married. It seems, however, that he met with a disappointment in early life. While preparing to remove to his farm, the accidental fall of a portrait of a most beautiful young woman, from his cabinet, which was picked up by his companion and shown to him, with the request to be told from whom it was taken, produced a most obvious emotion of strong tenderness, and the pathetic explanation "O, she was a matchless woman." He never afterwards alluded to the subject. Mulligan is the most likely source for this story and I view it as Mulligan's gesture to assure the respectability of Steuben in the eyes of history. It seems that Mulligan had had a minor career in New York City politics and doubtless had his own reputation to protect. (I do recognize that some historians contend that there was no stigma attached to homosexual relations in 1859 - four years after the publication of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, but we are speaking here of the reputations of a general and a lawyer, not a poet.)
       

by Bob Arnebeck

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