Lafayette (12 page)

The blistering fire and inexorable British advance sent the American soldiers fleeing in panic. Lafayette tried to halt their retreat. He reared his horse into the air, wheeled to the right, to the left, galloping back and forth to block the fleeing troops. Finally, he jumped off and grabbed at men’s shoulders and arms, ordering them to turn about, stand and fight—a major general in full uniform; a madman refusing to face defeat. At six feet one
inch, he was taller than they, a knight in battle, commanding his men to hold against the enemy—much as the legendary maréchal de France Gilbert de La Fayette III had held against the same British enemy with Joan of Arc at Orléans. Startled by a major general’s presence among them in battle, the Americans halted their retreat, rallied around him, and took the enemy’s charge. Stirling formed his brigade on a slight rise behind Lafayette and gave the French knight and his men covering fire, but the sheer number of British troops finally overwhelmed them. With his troops falling dead or wounded about him, Lafayette ordered them to fall back beside Sullivan’s and Stirling’s men, and, together, they stood their ground until the British were within twenty yards and forced them to flee to the safety of the woods behind. It was then that Gimat looked down and saw blood seeping from Lafayette’s boot. In the noise and excitement of rallying the troops, a musket ball had passed through the calf of his left leg and transformed the glory of his Arthurian quest into the painful reality of soldiering. About him lay the dead and dying men and boys, many younger than he, their tatters soaked in blood, sweat, and dirt. Some begged for help, others called to God; some cried out for their mothers, and others just muttered incomprehensibly and sobbed.

Gimat and La Colombe lifted the wounded Lafayette onto his horse, and they joined the sad, general retreat eastward toward Chester. Aware of the disaster, General Nathanael Greene moved from Chadd’s Ford to cover the retreat, opening his lines to let the waves of bewildered militiamen— mostly farm boys and woodsmen—escape the murderous Redcoat fire. In the confusion, Lafayette tried to rejoin Washington, but loss of blood left him so weak that he had to stop to have his wound bandaged and only barely escaped capture.

“Fugitives, cannon, and baggage crowded in complete disorder on the road to Chester,” Lafayette recalled. “Meanwhile, Chadd’s Ford was captured, the cannons seized, and the road to Chester became the common retreat of the whole army. In the midst of that dreadful confusion, and during the darkness of the night, it was impossible to recover.”
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At Chester, twelve miles from the battlefield, Lafayette approached the entrance to a bridge and, despite searing pain in his leg, turned his horse and blocked the disorderly retreat of troops, ordering them to halt and reform their lines before allowing them to cross. “Some degree of order was re-established,” he reported, when Washington and the other generals arrived to relieve him. Washington ordered a surgeon to dress Lafayette’s wound, and Stirling’s French-speaking aide, Captain James Monroe of Virginia, helped him to nearby Birmingham Church, where he lay on a makeshift litter, while Monroe commiserated with him and attended his needs. About seven months younger than Lafayette, Monroe had suffered a wound the previous
year at Trenton. With Gimat and La Colombe, Monroe spent the night befriending the wounded Frenchman, displaying his French and talking of his venerated mentor, Mr. Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence. The following day, as Washington prepared to march his army back to Germantown, his surgeon loaded Lafayette onto a boat for transport upstream along the Delaware to Philadelphia to be tended properly. “Treat him as if he were my son,” Lafayette heard the commander in chief tell the surgeon.
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Word of lafayette’s wound—and even rumors of his death—echoed through the gilded halls of Versailles and great Parisian mansions. In the Hôtel de Noailles, Lafayette’s doting mother-in-law, the duchesse d’Ayen, almost collapsed, but, according to Adrienne de Lafayette, “She found a way to conceal the rumors of his death from me by taking me far from Paris.”
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Weeks later, a letter finally arrived that allowed the Noailles family to resume their normal routines:

“I must begin by telling you that I am perfectly well,” Lafayette wrote in uncharacteristically subdued fashion to Adrienne, “because I must end by telling you that we fought a difficult battle last night, and that we were not the strongest. Our Americans, after having stood their ground for some time, ended at length by being routed; while I was trying to rally the troops, the gentlemen of England did me the honor of shooting me, which hurt my leg a little, but it is nothing, my sweetheart; the ball touched neither a bone nor a nerve, and I will have to stay in bed for only a little while, which has left me in a bad mood. I hope, sweetheart, that you won’t be anxious; you should not be: I shall be hors de combat for some time, and you can be sure that I will take good care of myself. This defeat, I fear, will have harsh consequences for America.”
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It was midnight before Washington began his report to John Hancock, the president of Congress. The Americans had lost about 1,000 men— almost 10 percent of the Continental army; the British only 576. Washington mentioned Lafayette’s participation and injury. Had he not arrived when he did and rallied the fleeing American soldiers, the British might have surrounded, captured, or annihilated Sullivan’s right flank and possibly the entire
Patriot force. “Notwithstanding the misfortune of the day,” the commander in chief reported, “I am happy to find the troops in good spirits, and I hope another time we shall compensate for the losses now sustained.”
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Lafayette left Brandywine battlefield a hero. He was a hero to the men on the line—a soldier’s general, who had quit his horse to fight beside them. And he was an unlikely hero to Sullivan, from New Hampshire, where savage raids and depredations during the French and Indian war had left deep hatred for Indians and their Gallic allies.

Brandywine also gave Washington a new appreciation for his young charge, who, he realized, was like himself in so many ways. Washington had been orphaned as a child—at eleven, not two, but nonetheless fatherless during impressionable boyhood years. Like Lafayette, Washington was one of his nation’s wealthiest men, with nearly eight thousand acres, huge wheat and tobacco crops, lumber mills, fisheries, a cloth manufactury, and about one hundred slaves. He was an aggressive land speculator with sixty thousand acres in the western Virginia and Ohio wilderness, awaiting what he believed would be the inevitable tide of westward migration. Largely self-taught after his father’s death, he had studied self-help manuals, geographies, histories and biographies of great soldiers, and, like Lafayette, had refused pay for his service in the Revolutionary War. He began soldiering in 1754, as a lieutenant colonel with General Edward Braddock, commander in chief of British forces in North America, in a campaign to seize Fort Duquesne, in the Ohio country. About eight miles from the fort, a French and Indian ambush mortally wounded Braddock, and, as Lafayette would do at Brandywine, Washington assumed command and turned a rout into an orderly retreat, leading survivors across one hundred miles of wilderness to safety. Rewarded with command of the Virginia militia, he defended Virginia’s frontier for three years and relished danger as much as Lafayette. He said he found “something charming in the sound . . . [when he] heard the bullets whistle.”
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A week after Brandywine, Congress fled Philadelphia to a new, temporary capital in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, about eighty-five miles to the west. Lafayette continued up the Delaware River to Bristol, where South Carolina congressman Henry Laurens interrupted his journey to Lancaster to take the wounded Frenchman to the Moravian Community, which had converted the Single Brethren’s House into a hospital. Laurens’s son, Lieutenant Colonel John Laurens, was about Lafayette’s age and, like Alexander Hamilton, one of Washington’s trusted young aides. The long ride produced a warm friendship between the elder Laurens and the Frenchman, who sent Laurens a letter of deep, albeit convoluted, thanks:

Dear Sir

Troublesome it will be to you for ever to have been so Kind with me. . . . My leg is about in the same state and without your kindness would be in
a very bad one. For my heart he is full of all the sentiments of gratitude and affection which I have the honor to be with Dear Sir Your most obedient servant

The Mquis de Lafayette
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On September 26, Howe’s army marched into Philadelphia and sent a 9,000-man force north to Germantown. With the British poised to sweep across Pennsylvania, Congress distanced itself still farther by moving to York, about 110 miles west of Philadelphia. Rather than await a British attack, Washington made a bold move on the night of October 3, sending two separate columns along what seemed to be parallel roads to Germantown for a two-pronged attack on the British. One of the roads, however, followed a long, serpentine course, and the column on the straighter, shorter road penetrated the streets of Germantown before its twin column arrived. Faced with an impenetrable wall of British fire and no support from the second column, the Patriots retreated just as a dense fog enveloped the area, and they ran into their own second column, which mistook them for enemy soldiers. Caught between Patriot fire and British fire, the trapped column lost 700 men, with 400 more taken prisoner. The British lost 534 soldiers.

In Bethlehem, the wounded poured into the Moravian hospital, where Lafayette lay bedridden, suffering intense pain from his wound and “even more intensely from the boredom of inactivity. The good Moravian brothers,” he wrote, “bewailed my passion for war, but, while listening to their sermons, I was making plans to set Europe and Asia aflame.”
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Determined to avenge the losses at Brandywine and Germantown, Lafayette began a bold campaign to influence French policy—a risky decision for an officer who had disobeyed the king’s orders and remained officially out of favor at court. He fired a barrage of letters to French leaders urging a military and commercial alliance with America and all-out war with Britain. He wrote to Foreign Minister Vergennes and Prime Minister Maurepas urging immediate strikes against British forces in the Caribbean, Canada, India, and the China Sea. Maurepas dismissed the proposals, scoffing that if Lafayette had his way, he would “sell all the furniture at Versailles to underwrite the American cause.”
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Far from alienating the court, however, Lafayette’s descriptions of the American military situation and reports of his intimate ties to Washington, Hancock, Laurens, and other American leaders convinced Vergennes that the marquis had achieved considerable standing in America and could play a key role in cementing military, diplomatic, and commercial ties between the two nations—perhaps even assuming the role Vergennes had intended for de Broglie as French
stathoudérat
of a puppet American state. In any case, the collapse of the de Broglie plot left Vergennes with little choice: Lafayette was the only high-level French officer with direct ties to top American military and political authorities.

On October 1, Lafayette finally wrote to reassure his wife, telling her to be “perfectly at ease about my wound . . . the surgeons are astonished at how quickly it is healing . . . all the faculty in America are at my service. . . . I have a friend, who asked them to ensure my being well attended; that friend is General Washington. . . . His friendship has made me a happy man in this country. When he sent his best surgeon to me, he told him to take charge of me as if I were his son, because he loved me with the same affection. When he learned I wanted to rejoin the army too soon, he wrote the warmest of letters urging me to concentrate on getting well first.”
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Lafayette urged Adrienne to adopt the role of the “wife of an American general officer. . . . The enemies of America may tell you, ‘They were beaten’ or ‘Philadelphia is taken, the American capital, the boulevard of liberty.’ Leave politely, and say, ‘You are imbeciles.’”
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The disasters at Brandywine and Germantown plunged Congress into despair, and some angry members lashed out at Washington, demanding his replacement. A few ambitious generals agreed. Brigadier General Thomas Conway, a boastful Irish mercenary who had served thirty years in the French army before coming to America, wrote to Congress disparaging Lord Stirling’s conduct at Brandywine. He sent a similar letter to Major General Horatio Gates, the equally ambitious English-born commander of the Northern Continental Army in Albany, New York, and no friend of Washington. Conway disparaged Washington and urged Gates to find a way to take Washington’s place as commander in chief. Washington detested Conway, who had anointed himself comte Thomas de Conway. “It is a maxim with him to leave no service of his untold,” Washington said of Conway.
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