Early Life
Kalb was born in Hüttendorf, a village of 600 people now outside Erlangen, in the present-day Germany state of Bavaria, the son of Johann Leonhard Kalb and Margarethe Seitz. He learned French, English, and the social skills to earn a substantial military commission in the Loewendal German Regiment of the French Army (where he served as Jean de Kalb). He served with distinguished honor throughout the War of Austrian Succession in Flanders. During the Seven Years' War, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and made assistant quartermaster general in the Army of the Upper Rhine, a division created by the disbanding of the Loewendal Regiment. He won the Order of Military Merit in 1763, and was elevated to the nobility with the title of baron.
In 1764, he resigned from the army and married Anna Elizabeth Emilie van Robais, an heiress to a fortune from cloth manufacturing.
In 1768, he traveled to America on a covert mission to determine the level of discontent amongst colonists by de Choiseul, on behalf of France. During the trip, he gained a respect for the colonists and their "spirit of independence".
Read more about this topic: Johann De Kalb
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“I feel the desire to be with you all the time. Oh, an occasional absence of a week or two is a good thing to give one the happiness of meeting again, but this living apart is in all ways bad. We have had our share of separate life during the four years of war. There is nothing in the small ambition of Congressional life, or in the gratified vanity which it sometimes affords, to compensate for separation from you. We must manage to live together hereafter. I can’t stand this, and will not.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)