Lafayette (10 page)

“This beautiful city is worthy of its inhabitants,” Lafayette wrote ecstatically, “and everything bespoke comfort and even luxury. Without even knowing me, Governor Rutledge . . . eagerly received me with the utmost kindness and attention. They showed me the new works that Moultrie had defended so well.”
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Moved by Moultrie’s heroism, Lafayette gave his brother Mason the funds to dress, arm, and equip one hundred men. By the end of his stay in Charleston, the city’s welcome left him so enamored of Americans and their ways that when he wrote to Adrienne the words “we republicans” flowed in the ink from his quill as easily as his signature:

A simplicity of manners, a desire to please, the love of country and of liberty . . . are to be found everywhere. The richest man and the poorest are upon the same social level, and, although there are some great fortunes in this country, I defy one to discover the least difference in the bearing of
one man to another. The city is one of the most attractive, the best built, and inhabited by the most agreeable people, that I have ever seen. The American women are very beautiful, unaffected in manner, and charmingly and neatly dressed. . . . What delights me most is that all citizens are brothers. There are no poor people in America, not even what may be called peasants. Every man has his own property, and each has the same rights with the greatest land-owner in the country. . . . As for me, I have been welcomed in the most agreeable manner by everybody here. I have just this moment returned from a grand dinner that lasted five hours, given by a gentleman of this city in my honor. . . . We drank many healths and I spoke very bad English, which language, by the way, I am beginning now to use a little.
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As an afterthought, he remembered to ask, “Do you still love me? My heart always answers, yes: I trust it does not deceive me. . . . Embrace my Henriette most tenderly; should I add, embrace our children? Those poor children have a wanderer father, but he is, at heart, a good, honest man, a good father who loves his children very much, and a good husband as well, for he loves his wife with all his heart. . . . Adieu, then, my dearest love; I must leave off for want of time and paper; and if I do not repeat ten thousand times that I love you, it is not from want of affection, but from having the vanity to hope that I have already convinced you of it. The night is far advanced, the heat intense, and I am devoured by gnats covering me with big bites; but the best of countries, as you can see, has their inconveniences. Adieu, my love, adieu.”
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Adrienne did not receive his first letters to her until August 1. By then, she seemed uncertain about her own feelings for the husband who had sired her two children and abandoned her without an adieu, let alone a tender embrace. “My mother did everything to demonstrate from his letters how tenderly he felt towards me,” Adrienne recalled.
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Lafayette outfitted his company with a train of splendid carriages and horses, and, on June 25, he rode out of town with Kalb and five other officers on the road to glory in Philadelphia. They did not get far. “Four days later our carriages were reduced to splinters,” one of the officers wrote in his diary. “Several of the horses were old and unsteady and were either worn out or lame. We had to buy others along the road. . . . We had to leave part of our luggage behind, and part of it was stolen. We traveled a great part of the way on foot, often sleeping in the woods, almost dead with hunger, exhausted by the heat, several of us suffering from fever and dysentery.”
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In contrast to his discouraged companions, Lafayette remained in high spirits and good humor. “I have experienced no ill effects,” he wrote to his wife. “The farther I advance north, the better pleased I am with the country
and its people. They refuse me no kindness or attention, even though most hardly know who I am.”
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Their journey took them seven hundred miles through the “abominable heat” of both the Carolinas, then northward through Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware. The trek left some of the officers so disheartened they discussed quitting and returning to France, but Lafayette remained enraptured. He had spent his childhood battling brambles and thorns with his wooden sword in the woods at Chavaniac and knew which berries, plants, and mushrooms in the wild were edible. Compared to the horrors he had suffered at sea, the woods, fields, and streams of America offered a wonderland of new sights, sounds, and tastes. “Vast forests and immense rivers combined to give the country an appearance of youth and majesty,” he wrote. “I studied the language and the customs of the inhabitants . . . observed new productions of nature and new methods of cultivation.”
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After more than three weeks, Lafayette’s suffering little troop reached Annapolis, with Lafayette exhilarated and gaining strength with each step. One of the officers, Chevalier Du Buysson, wrote that “Lafayette’s enthusiasm was inspiring.”
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But Lafayette carefully disguised his joy in letters to his wife: “O! if you only knew how much I sigh to see you, how much I suffer at being separated from you, and all that my heart has been called on to endure. . . . I scarcely dare think of the time of your confinement, and yet I think of it every moment of the day. I cannot dwell upon it without the most dreadful anxiety. I am, indeed, unfortunate, at being so distant from you; even if you did not love me, you ought to pity me.”
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Adrienne was in no mood to pity her husband; she was in the agonies of giving birth to their second child, daughter Anastasie. After five months, she had yet to receive any word of her husband, and more weeks would elapse before his letters would arrive.

After thirty-two days, Lafayette and his bedraggled party reached Philadelphia on July 27, 1777, “in a more pitiable condition even than when we first came into Charleston,” according to Du Buysson. After “brushing ourselves up a little,” they went to the Pennsylvania State House, where Congress was sitting. When they presented Deane’s letters of recommendation and commissions to the doorkeeper, he barred the way. Congressman James Lovell of Massachusetts, the chairman on foreign applications, heard the ruckus and went out to meet them, but after reading their commissions, brusquely dismissed them. “It seems that French officers have a great fancy to enter our service without being invited,” he snarled. “It is true we were in need of officers last year, but now we have experienced men and plenty of them.”
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Lafayette was crestfallen; Kalb, humiliated; the rest of the party, stunned to despair. “We didn’t know what to think,” said Chevalier Du Buysson.
“We tried to think of the possible reasons for such an insulting rebuff.”
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As it turned out, Lafayette and his friends could not have arrived at a worse time. Congress was in a foul mood: the Revolution seemed lost. General John Burgoyne’s army had swept down from Canada to the foot of Lake Champlain and captured Fort Ticonderoga—hitherto thought impregnable. Two days later, they captured two more Patriot strongholds, at Mount Defiance and Mount Independence, where they seized substantial stores of Patriot arms and ammunition. Meanwhile, a force of loyalists and Indians was moving eastward from Lake Ontario to join Burgoyne, while General Henry Clinton was leading troops northward along the Hudson River. Still worse, Admiral Sir William Howe and a four-hundred-ship armada had set sail from New York toward the Patriot capital at Philadelphia, with 20,000 troops on board.

As if the war did not provide enough gloom, French adventurers were still tramping into town, badgering members of Congress for the high ranks and salaries that Silas Deane had promised them in Paris. Their arrogance, incompetence, and deceit had earned them nothing but scorn and hatred. Washington called them men of “unbounded pride and ambition;”
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Major General Nathanael Greene called them “so many spies in our camp.”
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Just before Lafayette arrived, Philippe Trouson du Coudray “presented himself before Congress with lordly airs, implying that he had been a brigadier general in France, a counselor to the French ministry, to princes and dukes . . . demanding the rank of major general and commander in chief of the American artillery . . . and,” Du Buysson noted, “demanding payment of 300,000 livres [$3 million current value] for his services.”
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Three of Washington’s generals—Nathanael Greene, Henry Knox, and John Sullivan—threatened to resign until an investigation unmasked Du Coudray as the commoner son of a wine merchant and a former artillery brigade chief, not a brigadier general of noble birth. Du Coudray drowned accidentally in the Schuylkill River near Philadelphia a month later, and the committee moved to recall Silas Deane for granting commissions to unqualified applicants.

When, therefore, Lafayette showed up, Congress was in no mood to consider any more of Deane’s commissions. Undeterred—and unwilling to return to France humiliated—Lafayette sent his own petition to Congress, addressing it to President John Hancock and inscribing the unmistakable triangle of dots—
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—that symbolized Hancock’s own Masonic brotherhood. “After the sacrifices I have made in this cause,” Lafayette wrote, “I have the right to exact two favours: one is, to serve at my own expense—the other is, to serve at first as a volunteer.” Like Hancock and other signers of the Declaration of Independence, Lafayette pledged his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor to American independence.

With British troops about to storm Philadelphia, Congress was all but bankrupt and in desperate need of money and military aid. As president of Congress, Hancock was in charge of military procurement, and he believed that Lafayette’s name, wealth, and ties to the French court might serve the American cause. He sent New York congressman William Duer to interview the young Frenchman and confirm his Masonic affiliation. Duer was a well educated, English-born financier and merchant who spoke fluent French. “He . . . was more polite and adroit, and . . . made some sort of apology to Lafayette,” Chevalier Du Buysson wrote in his diary. “He had orders to sound him out. He spoke to him in private.”
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In a second interview, Duer and Lafayette worked out the terms of his commission: he would receive no pay or other compensation; his rank was strictly honorary, and he would receive no command or even the promise of one; moreover, the date of his commission would be July 31 to preclude his gaining even nominal seniority over any officers of the same rank. Lafayette agreed, and, on July 31, 1777, Congress passed a resolution:

“Whereas the Marquis de La Fayette, out of his great zeal to the cause of liberty, in which the United States are engaged, has left his family and connections, and at his own expence come over to offer his services to the United States without pension or particular allowance, and is anxious to risque his life in our cause—Resolved, That his service be accepted, and that in consideration of his zeal, illustrious family and connections he have the rank and commission of Major General in the Army of the United States.”
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Two hours later, Lafayette, still only nineteen, received the resolution and the sash of an American major general.

In granting Lafayette’s commission, however, Congress rejected out of hand the applications by Kalb and the other de Broglie plotters, saying they lacked command of English and had misunderstood Deane. All pleaded with Lafayette to intercede on their behalf, saying they had no money to get home. Reasoning that no self-respecting major general could do without personal aides, he hired at his own expense the two youngest officers—Jean-Joseph Sourbader de Gimat and Chevalier Morel de La Colombe, both twenty-two years old. He promised the others he would petition Congress on their behalf.

On August 4, Patriot lookouts spotted Howe’s fleet off the Delaware capes in southern New Jersey, south of Philadelphia. Washington rode to the capital the following day to confer with Congress. At a dinner for him and his aides that evening, the Continental army’s newest major general caught his first glimpse of the leader he described as “this great man.” From earliest childhood, fictional Arthurian heroes had peopled Lafayette’s imagination; now, for the first time, one of them strode into his life. Washington stood as all heroes stood—“exactly what one would wish,” according to Thomas Jefferson, “his deportment easy, erect, noble; the best horseman of his age, and the most graceful figure that could be seen on horseback.”
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One of Washington’s servants was more emotional: “So tall, so straight! and . . . with such an air! Ah, sire, he was like no one else!”
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