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".
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“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
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