Lafayette (39 page)

Our present system has driven American trade away. The ferme can do nothing but impede trade. . . . France has lost the tobacco trade . . . one particular tobacco ship waited in France for nine months, during which Messieurs les Fermiers Généraux [the
ferme’s
governors] would neither buy the cargo nor permit it to go to Marseilles, where the Italians wanted to buy it. . . . Good tobacco currently sells in Philadelphia for 50 to 60 shillings [100 shillings = one livre] a hundredweight. When it arrives in France, the various duties bring the cost to 54 livres. . . . These abuses have long restricted our trade, afflicted our citizens, and . . . offset the advantages we have over other nations. . . . These vexations lead to smuggling and cheating, and for a foreigner ignorant of our customs and language, they are even more intolerable.
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Lafayette proposed a radically new approach to foreign trade:

Looking at France and America, we see on the one side raw materials and on the other manufactured goods, which means a very profitable exchange for France. . . . If we avoid ruining the trade, our broadcloth, our silks of every kinds, our linens and fashionable clothing, etc. will find a considerable American market that with care can be further enlarged. . . . While we return their furs to them manufactured into hats, muffs, etc., use their excellent iron, and import their lumber (as the British did before) for the construction of ships, to which we add our own sails, rigging, and so forth, we should also see that there is a profitable market in France for their indigo, rice, and tobacco.

Here, then is a new source of wealth to revive our productions and our manufactures. It would be stupid to dry up this channel of commerce, since it is much easier to improve it.
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Lafayette’s
Observations
had their desired effect. An embarrassed Calonne wrote to Lafayette from Versailles, sending the king’s pledge of “absolute” duty-free entry for American goods: “The Americans will find all the facilities they need, especially at Dunkerque, to sell their leaf tobacco, rice, wood, and other merchandise, as well as to buy things of use to them such as linens, spirits, woolens, &ca. &ca. We are even thinking of building special warehouses and outlets for American merchants that would be made available to them at special low rates. I have given Orders to the
fermiers généraux
to give preferential treatment and prices to American tobacco, and to give American trade advantages available to no other nation.” He pledged that “the Government will not suffer [American traders] to experience any kind of vexation. . . . I am going to examine immediately how far customs and duties hurt commerce.” To the delight of American merchants, Calonne abolished export taxes on French brandies bound for America.
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Lafayette’s pamphlet—and Calonne’s responses—seemed a spectacular diplomatic and commercial triumph that won praises from American merchants. Washington sent his congratulations, and Congress passed a resolution expressing “the high sense which Congress entertain of his important services to the commerce of France and the United States.”
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To Lafayette’s dismay—and that of American merchants—the French government proved infuriatingly disingenuous. Although Calonne removed government tariffs, he said he had no power to remove other trade barriers, such as piloting fees, anchorage fees, docking fees, loading and unloading fees, and storage fees. Nor could he remove internal duties levied by the
ferme
in each province, town, and privileged area in France on goods traveling overland—even goods bound for another country. Lafayette was as infuriated as his merchant friends and returned to Versailles to confront Calonne, who threw up his hands, saying he could do nothing, that most fees and duties were feudal rights dating back to the Middle Ages. Even more infuriating was his obsequious insistence that, despite his inaction, “His Majesty is at all times prepared to offer the proofs of friendship, based on equity and his sense of justice, that must reign between France and the United States.”
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It was clear that Calonne and the king had placed the interests of friends in the
ferme
above those of the United States and that liberalization of trade between the United States and France would take years to achieve. In the meantime, American merchants would have to establish new trade ties elsewhere.

With trade talks adjourned for the summer, Lafayette prepared for the trip to America he had planned at the announcement of peace with England. His mission to Spain had deprived him of the final salutes of his troops and fellow officers in America—and of Washington’s emotional farewell to
his officers at Fraunces Tavern in New York the previous December. John Marshall, Washington’s friend and fellow Virginian, had described the scene:

“‘With a heart full of love and gratitude,’ Washington had said, lifting a glass to toast them, ‘I now take leave of you; I most devoutly wish that your latter days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable.’ Having drunk, he added, ‘I cannot come to each of you to take my leave, but shall be obliged if each of you will come and take me by the hand.’ General Knox, being nearest, turned to him. Washington, incapable of utterance, grasped his hand, and embraced him. In the same affectionate manner he took leave of each succeeding officer. The tear of manly sensibility was in every eye; and not a word was articulated to interrupt the dignified silence, and the tenderness of the scene.”
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Lafayette, too, had wanted to embrace their victory. In every letter to Washington, he never failed to ask his “dear general” to “present my best compliments to my friends in the Army,” and they, in turn, never failed to reciprocate. Henry Knox, who had named Lafayette godfather to his son, pledged to relive “the pleasures of your friendship with the ardor of a lover, and my Harry Your Godson, shall be taught the same sensations.”
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“The dissolution of the army,” Lafayette lamented to Washington, “has not been heard of by me without a sigh. How happy I have been at the head quarters of that army! How affectionately received in every tent I had a mind to visit! My most fortunate days have been spent with that army—and now that it is [no] more, my heart shall ever reverence and cherish its memory. God grant our brother officers may be treated as they deserve.”
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Lafayette’s return took on the character of a pilgrimage: “To my great satisfaction,” he wrote Washington, “my departure is fixed upon the tenth of next month [June]. My course will be straight to Pottowmack.”
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It was not easy to leave Adrienne and the children. Between the gala soirées and visits to Versailles, he had found time, as never before, for some quiet afternoons and evenings at home with Adrienne and the children. He continually instructed them in English and taught them to venerate the godlike Washington. “My little family,” he once told Washington, “are taught before all to revere and to love George Washington.” Now, he would have to leave them and risk his life once more on the treacherous Atlantic crossing.
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The separation caused him “inexpressible heartache,” and, at a stagecoach stop the following day, he hired a courier to take a note to Adrienne: “While we’re changing horses, I wanted to send you a word, I wanted to tell you again how deeply I regret leaving you; never was my separation from you this painful, my sweetheart, and while this absence will not be as long, without the idea of great public service or glory to sustain me a little, there is no consolation for my sadness. This far from America, I cannot yet
feel the pleasure of seeing my friends again, only the pain of leaving behind those I love most. The more time I spend with you, sweetheart, the dearer you become to me, the more I revel in the happiness of our being as one, of being loved by you; but the pain of leaving you also grows worse. . . . Adieu, my sweetheart, it is so sweet to tell you that I love you, so painful to say adieu. . . . I embrace you, my darling, and I hope you know how much I love you.”
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Lafayette left with a young aide, the chevalier de Caraman, on
Le Courrier de l’Europe
, the first ship in history to provide regular passenger service between France and the United States. The new service was another of the many by-products of peace, which ended state-sponsored privateering and unleashed a tide of transatlantic travel. The safety of the seas notwithstanding, the roll of the ship had its usual effect on the French knight, reducing him to a heaving mass of blubber. He reeled out of his cabin and staggered topside to apply Mesmer’s cure for seasickness at the mainmast—only to find the mast too thick to embrace—and coated with tar. “Hugging it,” he complained to Adrienne, “is absolutely impossible without getting tarred from head to foot.”
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While Lafayette’s ship lurched westward, an eastward-bound vessel was carrying former Virginia governor Thomas Jefferson to France to help Franklin and Adams expand American commerce in Europe. After more than a month at sea, both Jefferson and Lafayette reached their destinations, with Lafayette, ironically, setting foot on New York Island for the first time, although he had spent months across the Hudson River with his Light Division.

Contrary to his expectations, Lafayette found the United States far from united. The Articles of Confederation had left Congress impotent and the states all but sovereign, independent nations. What started as a league of friendship had become a league of enemies. Instead of warring with England, they were warring with each other, over boundaries, trade, and rights to immigrate into one state from another. They banned many of each other’s products and priced others out of local markets with high duties. Eight states had armies, two had fired against each other, and Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland were on the verge of war over navigation rights in Chesapeake Bay. Nor were leaders of different states welcome within the borders of other states to discuss mutual problems and resolve conflicts. There was one exception: Lafayette, who had pledged his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor to every state. He belonged to the nation, and his arrival set off a deluge of nonstop revelry across America, interrupted only on Sundays, when piety kept Americans in church or at home. Every village, city, and state sought to rally around his mystical presence and the ethereal spirit of nationhood he represented.

On the morning of August 5, 1784, Lafayette conquered New York as he had not been able to do during the war. Cannons boomed, church bells rang, bands blared, and thousands cheered as his open carriage displayed him to the city, escorted by a smartly dressed horsetroop, their swords drawn in honor of their former general. Flags and bunting flew from houses and buildings; men, women, and children squeezed through every window to see him, cheer him, and cry out to him by the only name they had ever known: “Mar-quis, Mar-quis, Mar-quis.” That evening, according to the French consul in New York, about a hundred former comrades in arms staged a banquet for him at the Masonic lodge, as “the flag of America, unfurled on the roof of the house, heralded . . . the joy in our hearts as well as the solemnity of the occasion that was being celebrated.”
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The following day, General Horatio Gates, whom Lafayette had once suspected of masterminding the Conway Cabal, took him on a tour of the city’s defenses. Thousands cheered their every step. “The Marquis has an old head upon young shoulders,” Gates commented,
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recognizing that the Marquis had matured well beyond his twenty-seven years. He had been an adolescent when he first set foot on American soil; seven years later, he returned an experienced and skilled military leader, diplomat, and statesman—with a receding hairline and expanding paunch to prove it.

After two days of continuous celebration, he left for New Jersey and the road south to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Mount Vernon. Ten miles outside Philadelphia, a huge cortège of former officers joined the Pennsylvania militia, the City Troop of Horse, and a crowd of city, state, and national officials to escort him into Philadelphia. As in New York, cannons boomed, church bells tolled, and huge crowds cheered hysterically.

“What a thrill it was to see so many of my former soldiers in the crowd,” he wrote Adrienne, who was spending the summer at Chavaniac with the children, her mother, and his aunt Charlotte. “Every step I take in this country, sweetheart, brings me new joys. The nation is happy, peaceful, prosperous; the houses I saw burnt are now rebuilt; abandoned properties are now occupied; everything seems to be on the way to complete recovery; I can only hope that my presence here will be useful in promoting the domestic interests of the United States [and] the union that must reign between them—in short, a federal union.”
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When the cortège arrived in Philadelphia, the legislature named a county in southwest Pennsylvania Fayette County—adjacent to Washington and Greene Counties. Lafayette responded with a plea for a “federal union” to preserve “sacred friendship between the states, which is so necessary . . . [for] free government.”
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A huge dinner celebration followed. As church bells continued pealing and darkness fell, the people of the city honored him by setting every window in the city aglow with candlelight until ten that
evening. “Not even for General Washington was more done,” the startled French ambassador François Barbé de Marbois wrote to Foreign Minister Vergennes.

The following day, “Mad” Anthony Wayne and the officers of the Pennsylvania Line who had served with Lafayette in Virginia sponsored a banquet. After embracing his French comrade, Wayne toasted him “in behalf of the line [with] all the warmth of affection arising from the intercourse of the field, and while we look back on the scenes of distress freedom had to encounter, we can never forget, that when destitute of foreign friends, you generously stepped forth, the advocate of our rights—the noble example you gave by early bleeding in our infant cause . . . endears you to us as a soldier.”
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Always moved to the verge of tears at such ceremonies, the emotional Frenchman called Wayne and the others “my dear brother officers” and assured them, “that I early enlisted with you in the cause of liberty shall be the pride and satisfaction of my life.”
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