Major General Johann de Kalb showed extraordinary bravery at the Battle of Camden, South Carolina, on August 16, 1780, when he led his outnumbered Continental troops against the British line and received eleven wounds, dying in Camden three days later on August 19. Respect for him was immediate: British officers attended his funeral, American leaders praised him, Congress authorized a memorial statue in Annapolis, and a soldier who fought there later called him perhaps the bravest man that ever lived. Born in 1721 to a peasant family in Huttendorf, Germany, de Kalb served with distinction in the French Army, earned the French Order of Military Merit, retired as a Lieutenant-Colonel in 1764, and then lived with his wife and three children in comfort near Paris and Versailles. In 1767-68 he came to America on a secret mission for the French king to judge the colonies' chances of winning independence from Great Britain, aided by his fluency in English, French, and German and by his perceptive observations about the growing imperial rupture. Rewarded by King Louis XVI with the title of baron and promotion as a general officer for agreeing to accompany the Marquis de Lafayette to America in 1777, he sailed with Lafayette to South Carolina, went on to Philadelphia, and received his own commission as a Major General a few months after Lafayette. Fifty-nine years old when he died fighting for American independence, far from the family and comfortable life he loved, de Kalb made important contributions to the American victory. He was buried in Camden with full military honors in 1780, reinterred in 1825 at Bethesda Presbyterian Church beneath a monument designed by Robert Mills, and the cornerstone of that monument was laid by Lafayette in a Masonic ceremony.