Lafayette (9 page)

For more than a month, Lafayette postponed writing to the pregnant wife he had so abruptly deserted without a word. On May 30, he finally faced the responsibility of trying to justify the unjustifiable:

“A bord de la Victoire,”
he headed the letter: “Aboard the
Victoire.”

“It is from far away that I write you, sweetheart, and to this cruel separation is added the still more dreadful uncertainty of the time when I shall hear from you again. . . . Have you forgiven me? . . . Your grief, that of my friends, Henriette [their baby]—it all came into my mind with rightful vividness, and for an instant I felt that I had nothing to say in defense of what I was about to do. If you knew what I have suffered, what weary days I have passed fleeing everything I love best in the world! Must I yet learn, besides all this, that you refuse to forgive me? Indeed, my sweetheart, in that event I should be too unhappy.”

Lest she think he was enjoying himself, he described the discomforts of the voyage: “One day follows another, and, what is worse, they are all alike. Nothing but sky and nothing but water; and tomorrow it will be just the same.” He rambled on, almost incoherently, until shame overcame him, and he abandoned his hypocrisy for a week. A week later, on June 7, he picked up his plume to resume his adolescent lamentations of the hardships afflicting him at sea: “I am still out upon this dreary plain, which is beyond
comparison the most dismal place that one can be in. I try to console myself a little by thinking of you and of our friends at home, and I picture to myself the joy . . . when I come home, when I rush in unexpectedly to take you into my arms—and perhaps I shall find you with your children.” He tried to justify his desertion: “While defending the liberty I adore—of my own free will, as a friend, offering my services to this most interesting republic, I bring with me nothing but my heart and good will, with no personal ambitions to fulfill, no selfish interests to serve, working only for my own glory and for the happiness [of the American republic]. I hope that, for my sake, you will become a good American, for that feeling is worthy of every noble heart. The happiness of America is intimately connected with the happiness of all mankind; she is destined to become the safe and venerable asylum of virtue, of honesty, of tolerance, and of peaceful liberty.” He put down his letter. The crow’s nest had spotted birds, and he went topside. Later, after dinner, he resumed: “We have begun today to see certain kinds of birds which indicate that land is near. The hope of arriving there is sweet. . . . Adieu. Night obliges me to stop, for I have lately forbidden the use of lights about the ship . . . but with my fingers directed a little by the impulses of my heart, I have no need of lights to tell you that I love you and shall love you all my life.”
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It would be mid-August—two months later—before his wife would receive these first words from her husband in the six months since he abandoned her in February.

On June 12, 1777, Lafayette’s ship neared Charleston and encountered an American man-of-war that warned of two British frigates blockading the entrance to Charleston Bay. The
Victoire
sailed northward, and the next afternoon, fifty-four days after leaving Los Passajes, reached the South Carolina coast, sixty miles north of Charleston. It anchored near North Island at the entrance to Georgetown Bay.
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Lafayette had arrived.

At two in the afternoon on Friday, June 13, 1777, seven sailors rowed Lafayette, Kalb, and four other officers in the jolly boat of the
Victoire
along the shore of North Island off the coast of South Carolina, seeking a pilot to guide the ship through the narrow mouth of the bay to safe harbor. Finding no sign of life, they continued rowing, stepping ashore occasionally, only to confirm the absence of civilization before reboarding and resuming their labor. It was ten o’clock at night before they reached the northern tip of the island and found some unintelligible black slaves combing for oysters. When the outgoing tide left the jolly boat mired in mud, Lafayette and the others climbed into the oyster boat—a crude, hand hewn, flat-bottomed craft. The slaves rowed them along the shore until a beam of light from their master’s house flickered through the tall marsh grasses. It was midnight when they stumbled ashore.

“When I felt American soil under my feet for the first time that night,” Lafayette wrote later, “my first words were an oath to conquer or die for America’s cause.”
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As Lafayette and the others sloshed their way across the marsh toward the light, dogs sounded a fierce alarm of yelps and barks, and, fearing a party of marauders from British privateers, a harsh voice demanded that the men identify themselves. Kalb answered that they were French officers seeking a pilot for their ship and a place to spend the night. As candlelight blossomed in each window, the doors opened and Major Benjamin Huger, one of the state’s major rice growers, offered what Lafayette described as “a cordial welcome and generous hospitality” at his plantation home.
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After inviting Lafayette and his party to spend the night, he told them Georgetown Bay
was too shallow for the
Victoire
, and promised to find a pilot to steer her to Charleston the next morning. He urged Lafayette to ride overland to Charleston, to avoid possible capture by the British at sea.

“I retired to rest that night,” Lafayette recalled, “rejoicing that I had at last attained the haven of my dreams and had safely landed in America beyond the reach of my pursuers. The next morning was beautiful. Everything around me was new to me, the room, the bed draped in delicate mosquito curtains, the black servants who came to me quietly to ask my commands, the strange new beauty of the landscape outside my windows, the luxuriant vegetation—all combined to produce a magical effect and fill me with indescribable sensations.”
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Lafayette had never before seen or slept in a home built entirely of wood or lifted a wooden sash window; French homes were stone, with windows that opened like doors. He had never tasted corn bread or sweet potatoes.

In France, equally indescribable sensations—all of them unpleasant— were overwhelming the Noailles family, who feared Lafayette had been lost at sea—not an uncommon fate for transatlantic voyagers. Adrienne was frantic: “My mother spent all her time trying to console me.”
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French prime minister Maurepas sent a note of consolation to Ambassador Noailles in London. “I am truly distressed for you and your family. . . . I had the honor of seeing the Maréchal [Adrienne’s grandfather, the Ambassador’s brother] yesterday, and he seemed to me to be as distressed as I know you are. Neither you nor your family have any reason for self-reproach, and the king in no way holds you responsible for the behavior of a young man whose head had been turned.”
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Foreign Minister Vergennes was even more distressed. Lafayette’s impetuous departure risked exposing his policy of clandestine help for America. The British navy and British privateers were stopping every French ship they spotted to try to capture Lafayette. As it was, they captured so many other French officers bound for America that Vergennes feared war was inevitable. He sought help from Spain, whose king had a
pacte de famille
with his nephew the French king: war against one meant war against both. “If one examines . . . where things stand between France and England,” Vergennes wrote to the Spanish foreign minister, “should we not anticipate that open warfare will . . . break out in a few months and [should we not] consider immediately the measures we should undertake advantageously?”
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If Lafayette’s adventure plunged Versailles in gloom, it had the opposite effect in the salons and streets of Paris, where the flames of patriotism burned high and bright, stoked by fiery anti-British editorials. Across the city—across France—the young knight’s daring quest inspired hundreds of young officers of every nationality to travel across Europe to queue outside Deane’s door in Paris. The arrival of the celebrated Benjamin Franklin as unofficial ambassador to France added to the frenzy. Crowds gathered outside
his house in Passy, west of Paris, to catch a glimpse of the legendary philosopher-scientist and cheer his every move.

“All Europe is for us,” Franklin and Deane exulted in a letter to Congress, “and it is a very general opinion that if we succeed in establishing our liberties, we shall, as soon as peace is restored, receive an immense addition of numbers and wealth from Europe, by the families who will come over to participate in our privileges, and bring their estates with them. Tyranny is so generally established in the rest of the world, that the prospect of an asylum in America, for those who love liberty, gives general joy, and our cause is esteemed. . . . The desire that military officers here, of all ranks, have of going to the service of the United States is so general and so strong as to be quite amazing. We are hourly fatigued with their applications and offers.”
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In Philadelphia, Congress had grown even more fatigued with the applications of foreign officers, and Washington was outraged. In an angry letter to Congress, he protested “the distress I am . . . laid under by the application of French officers for commission in our service. This evil . . . is a growing one . . . they are coming in swarms from old France and the Islands. . . . They seldom bring more than a commission and a passport, which, we know, may belong to a bad as well as a good officer. Their ignorance of our language and their inability to recruit men are insurmountable obstacles to their being ingrafted into our Continental battalions; for our officers, who have raised their men, and have served through the war upon pay that has hitherto not borne their expenses, would be disgusted if foreigners were put over their heads.”
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When Congress failed to act, Washington sent another angry note to Richard Henry Lee, his friend and fellow Virginian, asking “what Congress expects I am to do with the many foreigners they have at different times promoted to the rank of field officers. . . . These men have no attachment nor ties to the country . . . and are ignorant of the language they are to receive and give orders in . . . and our officers think it exceedingly hard . . . to have strangers put over them, whose merit perhaps is not equal to their own, but whose effrontery will take no denial.” Washington told Lee he was “disgusted” by the practice of “giving rank to people of no reputation or service.”
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Washington’s second letter had its desired effect; Congress stopped granting military commissions to foreigners unless Washington himself requested it. Franklin and Deane, however, asked Congress to make an exception for Lafayette. Duped by de Broglie into believing that the French government had tacitly approved the Lafayette mission, Franklin and Deane exaggerated its importance:

The Marquis de La Fayette, a young nobleman of great family connections here and great wealth is gone to America in a ship of his own, accompanied by some officers of distinction, in order to serve in our armies. He is exceedingly beloved and everybody’s good wishes attend him; we can not
but hope he may meet with such a reception as will make the country and his expedition agreeable to him . . . we are satisfied that the civilities and respect that may be shown him will be serviceable to our affairs here, as pleasing not only to his powerful relations and to the court but to the whole French nation. He has left a beautiful young wife big with child and for her sake particularly we hope that his bravery and ardent desire to distinguish himself will be a little restrained by the General’s [Washington’s] prudence, so as not to permit his being hazarded much, but on some important occasion.
¹⁰

The morning after Lafayette’s arrival at Major Huger’s rice plantation, Huger sent a pilot to guide the
Victoire
to Charleston Bay, while Lafayette and his party set off by horseback over seventy-five miles of sands, swamps, and trackless woods. Three days later, wrote one of Lafayette’s officers, “we arrived looking like beggars and brigands. People mocked us when we said we were French officers here to defend their liberty. Even the large number of French who had preceded us to Charles-Town called us adventurers.”
¹¹
But the following day, Lafayette’s ship “sailed into port triumphantly, and their attitude turned full circle. Everyone welcomed us everywhere. The French outcasts who had been first to mock us paid homage obsequiously to the Marquis de la Fayette and sought to enlist in his expedition. . . . The city’s leading citizens opened their arms to us and entertained us . . . for eight days of feasts and gala celebrations. They showed the marquis all the honors due a marshal of France and protector of liberty.”
¹²

The city’s leading citizens were Freemasons, and they embraced the young Frenchman as a brother when he identified himself at the tavern that served as the Masonic lodge. Almost every American town and city had one. South Carolina assembly president John Rutledge and General William Moultrie, the heroic leader who had successfully repelled the British assault on Charleston, embraced their French “brother” and opened their homes to him.
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