You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Hello and thank you for joining the American Revolution.

This week episode 271 advancing on Detroit.

In the fall of 1780, most forces on both sides of the struggle

were settling into winter quarters.

The Americans were preparing for another winter in Morristown, New Jersey. The French were still in Newport, Rhode Island, not having gone anywhere since their arrival in America. The loyalists who I discussed last time in their

raids on New York had returned back to Canada for the winter. The British Southern Army under

Cornwallis had pulled out of North Carolina to take a defensive posture in South Carolina.

One man, however, opted to take on an additional action that fall.

Colonel Augustin Moten de la Baum was determined to take Detroit.

And while there were a handful of French officers who received commissions as generals in the Continental

Army, there were also dozens of other French officers who traveled to America to accept lesser commissions.

Augustine Moulton de la Baum was one of these men.

Laubam was born in France to a family that could trace its ancestry back to nobility. But somewhere along the way, one of his ancestors had been unfortunate enough not to be born first.

So the family title passed to an older brother. So Molten did not have any title of nobility. In his

youth he was simply known as Augustin Molten. His father worked as a tanner, a respectable profession, but absolutely not nobility. Even so, his family background would allow him to get a commission as an officer in the French Army.

As such, Moten sought a military career beginning in 1757 when the seven years war began. One of Moulton's first introductions to war was the Battle of Minden, a major

land battle where the British and Prussians defeated the French. It was the same battle

where Lafayette's father was killed and where British General Sackville, later known as Lord Germain, ended his military career by a failure to follow orders.

Sackville's failure allowed much of the French army, including the 21-year-old lieutenant Moten, to escape capture or death.

Moten later joined the John Darmory, which was a military company responsible for law

enforcement among civilians.

When the French Army seized a town, the gendarmory would maintain law and order until a civilian

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