Johann de Kalb
American general (1721-1780)
Johann von Robais, Baron de Kalb (June 19, 1721 – August 19, 1780), born Johann Kalb, was a German-born army officer who served in the French and Continental armies. During the American Revolutionary War, he served as a major general in the Continental Army and was mortally wounded at the 1780 Battle of Camden, dying several days later.
Early life and education
De Kalb was born in Hüttendorf, a German village near Erlangen, Principality of Bayreuth, the son of Johann Leonhard Kalb and Margarethe Seitz. From a peasant family, he worked as a waiter until he left home at the age of sixteen. He learned French, English, and the social skills to earn a substantial military commission in the Loewendal German Regiment of the French Army in 1743.
Career
De Kalb served with distinction in the War of the 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 was awarded the Order of Military Merit in 1763 and elevated to the nobility with the title of baron.
In 1764, de Kalb resigned from the army and married Anna Elizabeth Emilie van Robais (*1748, +1785), the French heiress to a fortune from cloth manufacturing. He bought the Milon-la-Chapelle chateau near Versailles, where he took up a quiet life of farming.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q75363. VIAF identifies the subject as 67342909. The Library of Congress control number is nr92015421. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1721, 1780, 1743 and 1763.
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This entry incorporates text from “Johann de Kalb” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.