Lafayette (29 page)

After the crossing, two more soldiers deserted, but were caught, and, as Lafayette reported to Washington, “one . . . has been hanged to-day, and the other (being an excellent soldier), will be forgiven, but dismissed from the corps.”
³¹
After the hanging, Lafayette’s chivalric instincts—and the evident cruelty of the soldiers’ plight—got the better of him. He issued a general order appealing to their honor as men and soldiers, their loyalty to country, and their loyalty to him personally. “I endeavoured to throw a kind of infamy upon desertion, and to improve every particular affection of theirs,”
³²
he explained to Washington. “[I] issued an order declaring that [I] was setting out for a difficult and dangerous expedition; that [I] hoped that the soldiers would not abandon [me], but that whoever wished to go away might do so instantly. . . . From that hour all desertions ceased, and not one man would leave; this feeling was so strong that an under officer, who was prevented by a diseased leg from following the detachment, hired, at his expense, a cart rather than separate from it.”
³³

Cheered by the response of his soldiers, he rode to Baltimore and obtained a personal credit of 2,000 livres from the city’s merchants (equivalent to $20,000 in today’s currency) to buy his men shoes, hats, and enough linen and other types of cloth to dress everyone. Invited to the inevitable ball in his honor, he appealed to the ladies to make shirts for his men from the linen he purchased. “The ladies will make up the shirts,” he reported to Washington, “and the overalls will be made by the detachment, so that our soldiers have a chance of being a little more comfortable.”
³⁴

A grateful Washington replied that he had been “extremely rejoiced to learn, that the spirit of discontent had so entirely subsided. . . . The measures
you had taken to obtain, on your own credit, a supply of clothing and necessaries for the detachment, must entitle you to all their gratitude and affection; and will, at the same time that it endears your name, if possible, still more to this country, be an everlasting monument of your ardent zeal and attachment to its cause, and the establishment of its independence. For my own part, my dear Marquis, although I stood in need of no new proofs of your exertions and sacrifices in the cause of America, I will confess to you, that I shall not be able to express the pleasing sensations I have experienced at your unparalleled and repeated instances of generosity and zeal for the service on every occasion. . . . With every sentiment of affection & esteem, I am . . .”
³⁵

Lafayette’s concern for his men and his enormous personal investment in their welfare cemented their unquestioning loyalty and allowed him to lead them on a series of forced marches to Virginia, where he hoped to surprise Arnold and Phillips—to hang the first for treason and shoot the second to avenge his father’s death. What Lafayette could not know as he left Baltimore was that he was initiating an historic campaign that would crown him, Washington, and Rochambeau with glory and create a new, independent nation.

“When the history of that country shall have become the history of antiquity,” wrote the eloquent nineteenth-century French historian Henri Doniol, “school children will be taught, as the generations now passing away are taught the memorable events of Greece or of Rome, to repeat the actions that took place in the campaign which began in the South against the English army. . . .

“Rarely have such privation and suffering, such Patriotic firmness and courageous determination, been united, in any soldiers with the same display of intelligent resolution, of native ability, of devotion upon the part of the leaders, to win for a feeble little army of liberation the glory of driving back an enemy, well equipped, vigorous, and formidable, with whom it contended for its native land.”
³⁶

On April 20, 1781, Lafayette decided he could not afford to wait for Wayne’s reinforcements and set off with his 1,000-man division on a forced march of more than 150 grueling miles from Baltimore to Richmond, Virginia. He arrived there in less than ten days, having devised an ingenious method to speed troops southward without exhausting them. He ordered half the men to ride in wagons, while the other half marched for an hour; marchers and riders then switched places for an hour, giving each group an hour’s rest for every hour on foot. He left the slower-moving heavy equipment and artillery behind, to follow as fast as possible. The technique, along with their new clothes and Lafayette’s constant encouragement, kept the men fresh and their spirits high, and got them to Richmond fit and ready for action.

“Richmond was filled with munitions warehouses,” Lafayette explained. “Its pillage would have proved fatal. [We] marched there so rapidly that, when General Phillips neared Richmond and learned that [we] had arrived the night before, he would not believe it.”
¹

Lafayette did not arrive too soon. A combined force of 2,500 British regulars under Phillips and Arnold had moved up the James River and captured Petersburg, twenty-five miles south of Richmond, from Steuben’s ineffectual band of 1,000 Virginia militiamen. Steuben had requested—and Governor Thomas Jefferson had promised—additional men, supplies, and horses, but they never arrived. “We can only be answerable for the orders we give,” Jefferson explained feebly, “and not for the execution. If they are disobeyed from obstinacy of spirit or want of coercion in the laws, it is not our fault.”
²

In fact, Jefferson and Virginia were unprepared for war. Despite Patrick Henry’s fiery liberty-or-death orations, few Virginians—including Henry— were willing to fight, let alone die, in a revolution over taxes that affected but a handful of wealthy property owners, and neither Henry nor Jefferson ever went into battle, despite their lofty language extolling liberty and independence. Desperate for more troops and supplies, Lafayette went to his first face-to-face meeting with the great Jefferson, a six-foot-tall, freckle-faced redhead like himself. Nearly fifteen years older, he was easily the most cultured American Lafayette had ever met—much as the young Monroe had described at Brandywine. Jefferson was fluent in Latin and Greek—and he spoke French, cruelly adulterated, however, by a curious Scottish accent absorbed from a Scottish tutor during his youth, before he attended the College of William and Mary.

Lafayette and Jefferson grasped each other’s hand eagerly, warmly, held it long, and searched each other’s face, recognizing the historic significance if not the impact of their meeting: two brilliant, towering figures on the world’s stage; one, the world’s most illustrious warrior, a knight who rode with kings but fought for liberty; the other, one of the world’s most illustrious political philosophers, author of a document that created a new nation and form of governance; both knowing that, directly and indirectly, together and individually, they were reshaping the world, its governments and nations, and the human condition for centuries to come. They took to each other immediately and plunged into wide-ranging discussions: hunting and farming (both were born country boys); music; literature; the Greek and Roman republics; the French philosophes; Locke’s
Rights of Man
, and Jefferson’s appropriation of its thesis in the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson cited Locke, Sir Isaac Newton, and Sir Francis Bacon as his “trinity of immortals.”
³

When Lafayette asked the governor for troops and supplies, however, he discovered, to his chagrin, that Jeffersonian democracy endowed individuals with the right not to take up arms to defend liberty. As the embarrassed governor admitted, “I shall candidly acknowledge that it is not in my power to do anything. . . . Mild laws, a people not used to war and prompt obedience, a want of provisions of war and means of procuring them render our efforts often ineffectual.”
⁴
Lafayette understood for the first time the limitations— and dangers—of republican government, unfettered by constitutional guidelines.

Believing Richmond defenseless, the British crossed the James River to attack on the morning of April 30—only to run into an all-enveloping rain of fire and musket balls from the heights above. Lafayette had spread his troops across a wide swath on the embankment before the city and ordered
a staccato of rapid fire that Phillips interpreted as a defensive force far greater than it actually was. As he had done at Barren Hill, Lafayette kept his men scampering from one position to another between shots, so that every two shots each soldier fired seemed to come from two soldiers.

“The leaving of my artillery appears a strange whim,” Lafayette recalled, “but had I waited for it, Richmond would have been lost. General Phillips told one of his officers how astonished he was at our celerity . . . as he was going to give the signal to attack, he reconnoitred our position . . . [and] flew into a violent passion, and swore vengeance against me and the corps I had brought with me.”
⁵

With Lafayette’s “army” commanding the heights of Richmond, the British believed the city was impregnable, and they retreated across the James to Petersburg to await reinforcements from Cornwallis in North Carolina. The following day, Lafayette proclaimed victory to his cheering troops and sent them on parade in full uniform to celebrate the first Patriot triumph of the Virginia campaign: Lafayette had saved Richmond and its precious stores of Patriot arms. Two days later, his artillery and supplies arrived, but without Wayne and his 800 Pennsylvanians or any word of their whereabouts. Lafayette spent the next few days developing a grand strategy for the southern campaign—and organizing a network of spies to infiltrate British forces and determine their strategy. He purposely recruited slaves, whom the British had courted with promises of freedom for stealing their masters’ horses and delivering them to British cavalrymen.

“The military scene in Virginia was soon to become more interesting,” Lafayette wrote. “General Greene had marched [southeasterly] . . . to attack [British] posts in South Carolina while Lord Cornwallis was in North Carolina. Cornwallis . . . burnt his wagons, tents, and other heavy equipment to enable him to move more quickly; he then advanced rapidly [northward] toward Petersburg and made Virginia the principal seat of war.”

On May 8, Lafayette crossed the James and marched to Petersburg to lay partial siege to the city and harass the British. To exact revenge from the officer who had fired the cannon shot that killed his father, Lafayette sent a cannonball crashing through General Phillips’s headquarters, but it was too late. Phillips had died of a fever before Lafayette could claim his blood.

Phillips’s death left Benedict Arnold in command of British forces in Virginia, and he sent Lafayette a message requesting an exchange of prisoners. Lafayette sent it back unanswered, although he told the British courier that “shou’d any other officer have written to me I wou’d have been happy to receive their Letters.”
⁶

“A correspondence with Arnold,” Lafayette explained, “is so very repugnant to my feelings that I can never conquer them so far as to answer his letters . . . and I can not submit to such a . . . rascal.”
⁷
Lafayette later gloated
that his refusal “placed Arnold in an awkward situation with his own army.”
⁸
Washington was as pleased as Lafayette. “Your conduct upon every occasion meets my approbation,” he wrote, “but in none more than in your refusing to hold a correspondence with Arnold.”
⁹

Lafayette’s rebuff so angered Arnold that he threatened to ship his American prisoners to the West Indies. When Lafayette sent lower-ranking officers to arrange the exchange, Arnold is said to have asked one of them, “What do you think the Americans would do with me if they should succeed in making me a prisoner?” One of the American officers replied, “We should cut off the leg which was wounded in the country’s service, and we should hang the rest of you.”
¹⁰

With no word from Wayne, and Cornwallis approaching to reinforce Arnold’s camp at Petersburg, Lafayette pulled back across the James River to the north bank, eight miles below Richmond. He wrote to Brigadier General George Weeden, who was raising a militia in Fredericksburg, and ordered him to come south immediately. The situation, he warned, was “precarious and with the handful of men I have, there is no chance of resisting the combined armies unless I am speedily and powerfully reinforced. . . . Riflemen and cavalry, or at least mounted infantry, are particularly wanting. No time ought to be lost, as the danger is pressing and it will soon be too late to have it in our power to make a becoming resistance.”
¹¹

Lafayette could not understand Wayne’s inexplicable delay and his failure even to send word of his whereabouts. He sent a courier galloping north: “Where this letter will meet you, I am not able to ascertain,” he pleaded, “but ardently wish it may be near this place where your presence is absolutely necessary. . . . I request, my dear Sir, you will let me hear from you. . . . I am extremely anxious to know if your aid will come in time . . . without your detachment we are too weak for a proper resistance.”
¹²