Washington: A Life (58 page)

During the summer of 1777 Washington invited into his retinue a prepossessing young aide who brought dash and brilliance to the task. John Laurens, twenty-two, was the son of Henry Laurens, who would succeed John Hancock as president of the Continental Congress and was one of South Carolina’s largest slave owners. The younger Laurens had a classy European education—schooling in Geneva, legal study in London—and enhanced both the intellect and the reforming spirit of Washington’s staff. In later describing Laurens, Washington issued the sterling appraisal that “no man possessed more of the amor patria—in a word, he had not a fault that I ever could discover, unless intrepidity bordering upon rashness could come under that denomination, and to this he was excited by the purest motives.”
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As with Hamilton, Tilghman, and several others, Washington showed a special affinity for ambitious young aides who looked trim in uniform or astride a horse and possessed great charm and intelligence.

Because Washington was childless and drew close to several aides, many biographers have been tempted to turn them into surrogate sons, but the only one who closely matched this description was the Marquis de Lafayette, who eagerly embraced the role. The young French nobleman was tall and slim, with a pale, oval face and thin, reddish-brown hair that receded sharply at the temples. His nose was long and slightly upturned, his mouth short but full-lipped. Like the young Washington, Lafayette had an extraordinary knack for endearing himself to older men, and he looked up to them admiringly.

Washington’s fondness for Lafayette’s boyish zest probably expressed some suppressed craving for paternal intimacy. So many things about the younger man—his florid language, his poetic effusions, his transparent ambitions, his well-meaning if clumsy manner—seemed the antithesis of himself. Lafayette was pure-hearted and high-spirited, with an impetuous streak of grandiosity. Where Washington was guarded about his pursuit of fame, Lafayette, Jefferson saw, was always “panting for glory” with an almost “canine appetite for popularity and fame.”
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Abigail Adams found him too assertive: “He is dangerously amiable, polite, affable, insinuating, pleasing, hospitable, indefatigable, and ambitious.”
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Indeed, despite a certain shyness, Lafayette showed a courtier’s love of compliments, was a master of flattery, and liked to hug people in the French manner. Perhaps Washington doted on the young man because he dared to express emotions that he himself stifled, thawing his frosty reserve and opening an outlet for his suppressed emotions. Lafayette seemed to transport Washington back to his own youth, before he was stooped under the weight of responsibility, reminding him of love, passion, and chivalry.

Lafayette fell readily into the deferential, filial role. Unlike the arrogant French officers who flocked to America for self-serving reasons, Lafayette was actuated by true idealism. Though lacking battlefield experience, he was a fast study, showed courage under fire, and had an imaginative mind for military schemes. If he seemed slightly ridiculous at first, he turned into an intrepid warrior and a general of considerable finesse. Once again Washington showed an excellent eye for talent. By the end of the war, he delivered this encomium to Lafayette: “He possesses uncommon military talents, is of a quick and sound judgment, persevering and enterprising without rashness, and besides these, he is of a very conciliating temper and perfectly sober … qualities that rarely combine in the same person.”
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Born into an illustrious family in 1757, Lafayette bore a baptismal name of stupefying grandeur: Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette. “I was baptized like a Spaniard,” he wrote, “with the name of every conceivable saint who might offer me more protection in battle.”
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When he was only two, his father was cut down by a British cannon. This untimely loss and his upbringing on a vast estate in central France bred dreams of military honor: “I remember nothing of my childhood more than my fervor for tales of glory and my plans to travel the world in quest of fame.”
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When he was twelve, his mother died, leaving the orphan with a huge inheritance and relatives sprinkled throughout the French aristocracy. He attended an exclusive riding school at Versailles, socializing with the king’s grand-sons and mingling with grandees. At age sixteen, he married fourteen-year-old Adrienne de Noailles, thereby attaching himself to one of France’s noblest families; the marriage contract was signed by King Louis XV himself. Lafayette joined a Masonic military lodge and captained the Noailles Dragoons. He and his young bride became habitués of the masked balls and banquets hosted by Louis XVI and his foreign bride, Marie-Antoinette. Finding Versailles pretentious and decadent, Lafayette was convinced that he lacked the social talents to thrive there as a courtier: “My awkward manner made it impossible for me to bend to the graces of the court or to the charms of a supper in the capital.”
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So gauche was he that when he once danced with Marie-Antoinette, the queen threw back her head and laughed at him outright.

Perhaps Lafayette was searching for some escape when he attended a dinner in 1775 and heard rousing tales of the American independence movement: “When I first heard of [the colonists’] quarrel, my heart was enlisted, and I thought only of joining my colors to those of the revolutionaries.”
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He was then in a military camp at Metz, and Adrienne was pregnant with their first child, but he began to plot a path to North America. In April 1777 Lafayette, only nineteen, took charge of a cargo boat named
La Victoire,
stocked it with food and munitions, and secretly set sail in defiance of a royal order. The beau monde of Paris was electrified by this quixotic deed, and Voltaire knelt before Adrienne in homage to her husband. On the voyage, between bouts of seasickness, Lafayette brushed up on his English and studied military strategy. Already intoxicated with revolutionary rhetoric, he wrote to his wife, “The happiness of America is intimately connected with the happiness of all mankind.”
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In June Lafayette landed in South Carolina and viewed this new land through rose-colored glasses. “What charms me here is that all the citizens are brothers,” he told his wife. “In America there are no paupers, or even the sort of people we call peasants.”
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Armed with a letter from Benjamin Franklin, the starry-eyed young nobleman went straight to Philadelphia and met John Hancock. In his letter Franklin recommended that the well-connected Lafayette be coddled and shielded from danger, expressing hope that “his bravery and ardent desire to distinguish himself will be a little restrained by … prudence, so as not to permit his being hazarded much but on some important occasion.”
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Lafayette was so young that his friends wanted to send him money via Washington, who would then dole it out like an allowance. Heeding Franklin’s advice, Congress found a way both to flatter and to constrain Lafayette: he would enjoy the rank of major general, with the caveat that the title was strictly honorary.

Washington first met Lafayette at the City Tavern in Philadelphia on the evening of July 31, 1777. On the spot the young man, already decked out in a major general’s sash, was awestruck. “Although [Washington] was surrounded by officers and citizens,” Lafayette wrote home, “the majesty of his figure and his height were unmistakable.”
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Aware of Lafayette’s diplomatic value, Washington befriended the young man and invited him to tour Delaware River fortifications with him the next day. Despite immediate cordiality between the two, an unspoken tension lurked as well. Lafayette didn’t accept that his rank was merely for show and asked for two aides and command of a division, thereby presenting Washington with an excruciating dilemma. “If Congress meant that this rank should be unaccompanied by command,” Washington complained to one congressman, “I wish it had been sufficiently explained to him.”
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He decided to invite the young Frenchman into his military family as an honorary aide.

Notwithstanding his fervent devotion to the cause, Lafayette sensed that Washington didn’t trust him. “This thought was an obsession,” he recalled almost fifty years later, “and it made me very unhappy.”
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Fortunately, the young man possessed a superb sense of Washington’s psychology and behaved in a becomingly modest fashion. A week after their first meeting, Washington asked him to review the Continental Army with him, which Lafayette described as “eleven thousand men, poorly armed and even more poorly clothed.”
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Watching these threadbare men, Washington confessed to Lafayette that “we should be embarrassed to show ourselves to an officer who has just left the French army.”
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Lafayette’s response was inspired: “It is not to teach but to learn that I come hither.”
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Such modesty won Washington’s affection, and he grew closer to this young French acolyte. Nothing pleased Washington more than unconditional loyalty, and Lafayette served it up in abundance. The marquis told his wife that the general, “surrounded by flatterers or secret enemies,” had found in him “a sincere friend, in whose bosom he may always confide his most secret thoughts, and who will always speak the truth.”
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Lafayette’s modesty was especially beguiling considering that many French officers preened and jockeyed for positions. It had become fashionable in Paris for bumptious young officers and prodigal sons to seek commissions from American diplomats Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane. “The noise of every coach now that enters my court terrifies me,” Franklin admitted. “I am afraid to accept an invitation to dine abroad, being almost sure of meeting with some officer or officer’s friend.”
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Unlike with Lafayette, these cynical officers were motivated less by idealism than by pure vanity. America simply represented a handy battlefield for winning honors. Washington bristled at the parade of pretentious French officers who strutted into his presence, demanding high appointments. He didn’t speak French and delegated correspondence in that language to the bilingual Hamilton, whose mother came from a French Huguenot family, and to John Laurens, who had studied in Geneva. Swamped by foreign officers, Washington complained to John Hancock that they were “coming in swarms from old France and the islands … Their ignorance of our language and their inability to recruit men are insurmountable obstacles to their being ingrafted into our Continental battalions.”
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He pleaded with Franklin to stanch the flow of military frauds and pretenders. “Our corps being already formed and fully officered,” he wrote, “every new arrival is only a source of embarrassment to congress and myself and of disappointment and chagrin to the gentlemen who come over.”
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Compared with the persistent French officers who clamored noisily for commissions, the Marquis de Lafayette seemed the soul of humility.

FROM THE LATE SPRING through early summer of 1777, George Washington anxiously tracked British movements in New York, attempting to divine their hidden meaning. General Howe commanded an army double or treble the size of his own, keeping him in an agony of suspense. Would the British general suddenly lunge north to hook up with General Burgoyne, who was then marching south from Canada? Or would he head for Philadelphia by sea or land to exploit the propaganda triumph of expelling the Continental Congress from the city?

To guard against any action along the Hudson River, Washington kept forces in the Hudson Highlands; to protect Philadelphia, he kept another portion of his army stationed at Middlebrook, New Jersey, ready to rebuff thrusts into the state. As usual, Howe proved diabolically clever at deception, making several feints into New Jersey. When he had tried to draw the Americans camped in Morristown into open combat, Washington had refused to rise to the bait. “We have such contradictory accounts from different quarters,” a confounded Washington reflected, “that I find it impossible to form any satisfactory judgment of the real motions and intentions of the enemy.”
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Reports that Howe was recruiting pilots acquainted with the Delaware River strengthened Washington’s hunch that the British planned to invade Philadelphia by water. Howe’s reconnaissance of American defenses on the Delaware would persuade him to try a novel approach to the city.

During this period, as he drilled his men, Washington had to sacrifice the comforts of his winter camp. At Middlebrook he slept for five weeks in one of his official tents, or “sleeping marquees.” At one point he led his troops to a “very difficult and rugged gorge” called the Clove in the Hudson Highlands, where he found only a tumbledown log cabin for shelter. He occupied the sole bed, while aides dozed on the floor around him. “We had plenty of sepawn [boiled cornmeal] and milk and all were contented,” said Timothy Pickering.
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While at the Clove, Washington was blindsided by shocking news: Fort Ticonderoga, in upstate New York, had fallen. In an ignominious defeat, the American garrison had surrendered without a shot. Simply staggered, Washington spluttered to General Schuyler that it was “an event of chagrin and surprise not apprehended, nor within the compass of my reasoning.”
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Washington feared that Ticonderoga’s downfall was merely the prelude to a British attempt to slice the country in half along the Hudson River; Howe would move up the river from New York to rendezvous with Burgoyne. Then on July 23 Howe’s New York-based fleet—the biggest armada ever to cruise North American waters—set sail from Sandy Hook, its mysterious movements keeping Washington suspended “in a state of constant perplexity.”
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Guessing correctly that Howe was bound for Philadelphia, Washington began deploying his men southward. After breakfast on July 31, a messenger came to him with fresh tidings: the British fleet of 228 ships had surfaced off the capes of the Delaware River. By occupying Philadelphia, Howe hoped to tap latent Tory sentiment in the mid-Atlantic states and break American morale.