Lafayette (13 page)

The Conway Cabal, as it came to be called, gained momentum after Gates’s army encircled the entire 5,700-man British army in the north. British commander general John Burgoyne, one of the victorious commanders at Bunker Hill, had no choice but to surrender under the humiliating “Convention of Saratoga.” His troops laid down their arms, pledged never to fight in America again, then marched back toward Boston
past
Bunker Hill to an internment camp near Cambridge—to languish there until an exchange of prisoners would permit their return to England.

Although Gates sent immediate word of his victory to his wife in Virginia, he pointedly neglected to inform Washington, who sent him a sharp letter of rebuke that forced Gates to apologize.

The victory at Saratoga electrified the world—Europeans as well as Americans. Patriot morale soared. Believing victory near, if not at hand, Congress put aside interstate disputes to approve the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. In Europe, political leaders routinely spoke of “the new nation,” while monarchs shuddered at the epochal character of Saratoga: an army of farmers and woodsmen with no military training had humiliated a
well-disciplined, accomplished professional army; a peasant rebellion had crushed the military might of a divinely ordained, absolute monarch.

Almost every European newspaper embellished the British-Hessian humiliation, with many even inventing other imaginary American victories and British disasters. Lafayette’s ceaseless flow of letters to his family and friends at court elevated the conflict to an Arthurian romance. With Frenchmen following his every move, his legend took on a life of its own: the
Gazette d’Amsterdam
reported that Lafayette had all but single-handedly sent a 2,000-man British regiment at Brandywine retreating in confusion.
¹¹
Voltaire and others wrote of him; street minstrels sang ballads of the brave young knight forsaking fortune, friends, and family to fight for liberty; young French noblemen sought to fight beside him and queued outside Franklin’s residence to plead for the right to fight for American liberty. Even English parents could not resist reading tales of the Legend of Lafayette to their children. And, after much posturing, Lafayette’s reluctant father-in-law, the duc d’Ayen, at last put aside his anger at the young man to express pride in his accomplishments. “The very persons who had blamed him most for his bold enterprise now applauded him,” wrote Lafayette’s friend, the comte de Ségur. “The court showed itself almost proud of him and all the young men envied him. Thus, public opinion, turning more and more toward war, made it inevitable and dragged a government too weak to resist in the same direction.”
¹²

Lafayette laughed at the furor he had provoked. “By quitting France in such a scandalous fashion,” he wrote, “I actually served the [American] revolution.”

After Saratoga, it was clear that no British army would ever conquer the American interior, where, far from coastal ships and sources of supply, it would face desperate men defending their families, homes, and lands. But it was just as clear that American Patriots—even with clandestine French aid—would be unable to expel the British from major coastal cities and clear American waters of British warships without a massive, well-trained land force and a powerful fleet, which only the French could provide.

The widespread public acclaim for Lafayette and the American struggle, however, emboldened Vergennes to push King Louis XVI closer to war, using as a lure the immeasurable wealth awaiting the nation that dominated trade with the new nation. War was simply an investment to assure that wealth. England, too, however, now realized the economic folly of a rupture with America, and Lord North sent an offer of reconciliation to Franklin and Deane in Paris, while Parliament appointed commissioners to try to negotiate peace with Congress.

In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the Saratoga victory sent Lafayette leaping from his sickbed, although his “hurted foot,” as he put it to Henry Laurens, was still unhealed and oozing—indeed, too painful for him to wear his
boot. He believed Saratoga to be a prelude to an American strike against New York and the final, climactic battle of the war. He not only wanted to participate, he believed he was ready to command. He wrote to Washington, pleading, “with all the confidence of a son, of a friend” for command of a division. “Consider, if you please, that Europe and particularly France is looking upon me—that I want to do some thing by myself, and justify that love of glory which I let be known to the world in making those sacrifices which have appeared so surprising, some say foolish. Do not you think that this want is right?”
¹³

After four days had passed without a response, Lafayette purchased a horse and rode off—his aide Gimat trailing “in my shadow”—to rejoin Washington at headquarters at Whitemarsh, almost in the jaws of the enemy at Germantown. He wrote to his wife to calm her fears. Like many soldiers at war, alone with men, he was falling deeper in love with the image he conjured of a wife he had abandoned before he ever got to know her. For the first time in his letters to her, he used the familiar, loving
tu
, instead of the formal
vous:

Do not worry about me; all the hard blows are over; all we face are some small skirmishes at most; I am as safe in this camp as I would be in the middle of Paris. If I could measure happiness by the joy of serving here, by the friendship of the army and its men, by the loving friendship and mutual confidence of the most respected and most admirable men, by the affection of Americans—all these could sustain my happiness, I would need nothing else. But my heart is far from easy. How you would pity me if you knew how much my heart suffers without you and loves you. . . . Have I two children? have I another infant to share my tender love with my dearest Henriette? Kiss my dear little girl a thousand times for me; embrace them both tenderly. . . . I trust they will know one day how well I love them. . . . Will you, too, always love me, my sweetheart? I dare to hope so . . . Adieu, adieu! How sweet it would be to kiss you now, to tell you myself: I love you more than I have ever loved—and will as long as I live.
¹⁴

When Lafayette reached Whitemarsh, Howe’s forces had seized Patriot forts along the Delaware, and the British navy could sail upriver to Philadelphia and beyond with impunity. British forces under Cornwallis prepared to create a huge, British-controlled zone from New York, along the Atlantic coast past the mouths of Delaware and Chesapeake Bays. Washington ordered General Nathanael Greene to determine the strength of the Cornwallis force and the likelihood of disrupting his scheme. Washington knew his untrained, outmanned army could not defeat Cornwallis in conventional battlefield confrontation, but he was working out a new strategy of unconventional warfare that American Indians had used successfully against him and Braddock in the west. Instead of direct engagement, he would harass the British, with snipers moving about to ambush foraging parties, with quick, hit-and-run strikes that would cost the enemy 20, 30, or 40 troops in each skirmish, with few, if any, American losses. They would wage a war of attrition that would cede the ground to the British after each engagement but ultimately cost them the war. Washington recognized that it would take patience and many years, but he knew he would win, because the British had never fought such a war and were as unprepared and untrained for it as Americans were for conventional warfare.

Still limping badly, Lafayette eagerly volunteered to join Greene, who had taken a strong liking to the young Frenchman—especially after seeing Lafayette’s courage at Brandywine. Though separated by fifteen years, they enjoyed each other immensely. Greene was a prosperous Rhode Island farmer,
merchant, and manufacturer and a brilliant autodidact, who had taught himself Latin, higher mathematics, and military history and strategy, and learned French from his wife. His mastery of military logistics had made him Washington’s most able and trusted associate. Greene and Lafayette eagerly fed on each other’s intellectual provender and became close friends on the ride to Jersey. “He is one of the sweetest-tempered young gentlemen,” Greene wrote to his wife; “he has left a young wife and a fine fortune . . . to come and engage in the cause of liberty—this is a noble enthusiasm.”
¹⁵

Greene and Lafayette crossed the Delaware into New Jersey, landing north of the Cornwallis force at Gloucester, opposite Philadelphia. In the first battlefield command of his life, Lafayette led four hundred riflemen toward Gloucester to reconnoiter, carefully posting pickets in the woods on either side of his trail, to prevent the enemy from circling behind and cutting off his retreat. To his aides’ distress, Lafayette himself crept within firing range of British sentries at Gloucester to reconnoiter. After estimating the size of the Cornwallis force, he returned to his troops and led an assault on a forward post of about four hundred Hessians. Caught unprepared, the Hessians fled, with the Patriots chasing and firing at them furiously. Lafayette and his men pursued for about a mile, killing, wounding, or capturing at least sixty, before Cornwallis sent grenadiers to cover the Hessian retreat with rifle fire. Lafayette withdrew his men under cover of nightfall and rejoined Greene’s camp with but one dead and five wounded. His men hailed his courage and leadership, and Greene sent an enthusiastic report to Washington: “The Marquis, with about four hundred militia and the rifle corps, attacked the enemy’s picket last evening, killed about twenty and wounded as many more, and took about twenty prisoners. The Marquis is charmed with the spirited behavior of the militia and rifle corps. . . . The Marquis is determined to be in the way of danger.”
¹⁶

Lafayette was ecstatic with the success of his first command and wrote straightaway to Washington as he would have to his own warrior father. “I wish,” he ended his letter, “that this little success of ours may please you, though a very trifling one . . . it will be a great pleasure for me to find myself again with you.” And he signed it “With the most tender affection and highest respect.”
¹⁷

Lafayette’s triumph so delighted Washington that he reversed his previous stand against foreign commanders in the American army and urged Congress to grant Lafayette a command. “There are now some vacant divisions in the army, to one of which he may be appointed, if it should be the pleasure of Congress,” he wrote to Henry Laurens, who had succeeded John Hancock as president of Congress. “I am convinced he possesses a large share of that military ardor, which generally characterizes the nobility of his country.”
¹⁸

On December 1, Congress resolved “that General Washington be informed, it is highly agreeable . . . that the Marquis de La Fayette be appointed to the command of a division in the Continental Army.”
¹⁹
Three days later, Washington offered Lafayette command of any division he chose, and he chose the Virginians from the commander in chief’s own state. On the same day, he received word from France of the birth of his second child, Anastasie.

A military leader at last, Lafayette poured his pride into a letter to his father-in-law, the duc d’Ayen. Only slightly tinged with humility, the letter painted a portrait that his father-in-law could hang proudly in the gallery of great Noailles and Lafayette warriors. Designed, on the one hand, to heal the wounds he had inflicted on his family by running away to America, it was also a curriculum vitae that Lafayette knew his father-in-law would cite to obtain a court appointment for Lafayette in the ministry or military after the war. He wrote:

It is impossible to be more agreeably situated than I. The members [of Congress] I know overwhelm me with kindness and attention. The new president, Mr. Laurens, is one of the most respected men in America and is my particular friend. As to the army, I have made friends with everyone, with proof of such friendships forthcoming almost every day. . . . The task I am performing here . . . will improve my knowledge exceedingly. The major-general [in the American army] is the equivalent of the lieutenant-general and the field-marshal [in the French army] in the most important functions, and, as such, I can apply both my talents and experience. . . . I read, I study, I examine, I listen, I reflect, and I try to develop a reasonable, common-sense opinion. I do not talk too much—to avoid saying foolish things—nor risk acting in a foolhardy way. I do nothing to abuse the confidence with which the Americans have entrusted me.
²⁰

There was no better way for Lafayette to appeal to an old field marshal and confidant of the king than with tales of battle (and his wound, of course) at Brandywine, Chester, Germantown, Gloucester, and Saratoga. Lafayette concluded that America’s advantage over Britain lay in “the superiority of General Washington. . . . Our general is a man formed, in truth, for this revolution, which could not have been accomplished without him. I see him more intimately than any other man, and I see that he is worthy of the adoration of his country. His warm friendship for me, and his complete confidence in me in all things military and political, large and small, put me in a position to share everything he has to do, all the problems he has to solve and all the obstacles he has to overcome. Every day, I learn to admire more his magnificent character and soul. . . . I spent the entire summer at
General Washington’s quarters, where I felt as if I were a friend of twenty years’ standing.”