Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

by Sarah Vowell

  By the end of April, the Boston Gazette announced the arrival of another French ship bearing fifty-eight cannons, enough clothing and tents for ten thousand men, and ten tons of powder, as well as “a colonel and twenty-four officers.”

  Lafayette was far from the only European soldier of rank aspiring to join the Continental Army. Deane had asked Beaumarchais for help in recruiting experienced warriors, especially engineers to beef up fortifications and artillery specialists to operate the cannons and mortars being shipped. Deane assured Beaumarchais that Congress would pay back the cash signing bonuses the playwright doled out to the men. (Congress never did reimburse Beaumarchais for any of his expenses. According to his biographer Harlow Giles Unger, in 1835, nearly four decades after the playwright’s death, Congress finally offered his heirs about a third of what he was owed—eight hundred thousand francs, or roughly three million dollars in today’s money.)

  Among the officers Beaumarchais recruited and/or shipped to America were all-stars of the Revolution such as the Polish count and “father of American cavalry” Casimir Pulaski, the Prussian officer Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben (whose drills at Valley Forge transformed Washington’s peasants with pitchforks into a professional army), and the architect and engineer Pierre L’Enfant, who stuck around after the war to design the plan of Washington, DC. But these future national treasures were the exception, not the rule.

  With Europe temporarily at peace and France in particular cutting military spending in light of its budget deficit, Deane complained of being “well-nigh harassed to death with applications of officers to go to America.” One of them even wanted George Washington’s job, and Deane was not opposed to giving it to him. “My aim is simply to find a man whose name and reputation alone will demoralize the enemy. Such a man is available, and I believe I have found him,” Deane wrote to Congress. He added, “The question is to win his confidence, which can only be done by heaping sufficient honors upon him to gratify his ambition, as, for instance, naming him commander-in-chief.” Even accounting for Washington’s thumping in the New York campaign, this was a tacky, literally un-American plan. The scheme was obviously thwarted, but interestingly enough, the Frenchman conniving to steal Washington’s job was none other than Lafayette’s old commanding officer, the Comte de Broglie, though Lafayette was ignorant of the plot.

  Congress was soon neck-deep in arrogant boobs whom Beaumarchais or Deane had promised high ranks and higher salaries. “Men cannot be engaged to quit their native country . . . in a cause which is not their own” is how Deane rationalized the incentives to Congress.

  Lafayette and his two best friends from the Noailles Regiment, his brother-in-law the Vicomte de Noailles and the Comte de Ségur, were keen to sign up. “We were tired of the longeur of the peace that had lasted ten years,” Ségur recalled, “and each of us burned with a desire to repair the affronts of the last wars, to fight the English and to fly to help the American cause.”

  Lafayette met Silas Deane through Johann de Kalb, a Bavarian-born French officer and a veteran of the Seven Years’ War. Lafayette wrote, “When I presented to Mr. Deane my boyish face, (for I was scarcely nineteen years of age), I spoke more of my ardor in the cause than of my experience.” And if all-purpose gusto wasn’t enough of a selling point, Lafayette “dwelt much upon the effect my departure would excite in France, and he signed our mutual agreement.”

  Unlike the orphan Lafayette, his friends Ségur and Noailles asked their families’ permission to leave, which is how the king, Vergennes, and, worst of all, Lafayette’s father-in-law, Jean de Noailles, found out about their plans. Rumors that three such highborn military blue bloods were preparing to fight the English in America threatened to aggravate the international incident whipped up by Beaumarchais. The three boys were expressly forbidden from going. In fact, to placate the English, Louis XVI publicly banned all French soldiers from volunteering in America. The foreign minister Vergennes notified the Paris police that officers or infantrymen intent on sailing to America were to be arrested “with plenty of publicity and severity.” As an act of damage control, Vergennes even held his nose and sent the British ambassador to France a nice phony note congratulating him on “the happy news of the successes of the British arms” in New York.

  Once word of the losses in New York arrived in France, Deane gave Lafayette an out on going through with his plans. “I called upon Mr. Deane,” Lafayette recalled, “and I thanked him for his frankness. ‘Until now, sir,’ said I, ‘you have only seen my ardor in your cause, and that may not prove at present wholly useless.” Lafayette reassured Deane that he was still resolute about going to America: “I shall purchase a ship to carry out your officers; we must feel confidence in the future.” Must we? Even a cool customer like Washington was said to have wept when he watched Fort Washington fall. Confidence was not a rational response to the debacle of the New York campaign. But Lafayette not only sent a guy to Bordeaux to buy a twenty-two-ton ship; he also had it renamed La Victoire, i.e., the Victory.

  Not until Theodore Roosevelt resigned his prestigious position as assistant secretary of the navy in 1898 to fight with the Rough Riders in the Cuban dirt would there be a rich man as weirdly rabid to join American forces in combat as Lafayette was. The two shared a child’s ideal of manly military glory. Though in Lafayette’s defense, he was an actual teenager, unlike the thirty-nine-year-old TR.

  Looking back on Lafayette’s biography, a few incidents foreshadow what a headstrong pill he would be about absconding to America, such as foiling his father-in-law’s attempt to get him hired by the king’s brother. The words Lafayette used to describe that triumph—“I did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence”—applied to getting his way regarding America as well. Perhaps the most emblematic anecdote foretelling Lafayette’s stubborn refusal to give up his American dream was the boyhood story about how one day, one of his Parisian schoolteachers was talking up the virtues of an obedient horse. According to Lafayette, “I described the perfect horse as one which, at the sight of the whip, had the sense to throw his rider to the ground before he could be whipped.”

  And so, bucking the king’s orders and his father-in-law’s admonitions, Lafayette pretended to drop the idea of dashing off to America, all the while furtively planning his getaway. As he described his deceptions, “The secrecy with which this negotiation and my preparations were made appears almost a miracle; family, friends, ministers; French spies and English spies, all were kept completely in the dark as to my intentions.”

  Perhaps his most bratty act of misdirection was to bop over to London for a previously scheduled visit to his father-in-law’s uncle, the French ambassador to Great Britain. Ambassador Noailles trotted out Lafayette at various parties and social functions, including the opera, where the boy bumped into General Sir Henry Clinton, future commander in chief of the British army in America.

  “While I concealed my intentions,” Lafayette admitted of his time in London, “I openly avowed my sentiments; I often defended the Americans; I rejoiced at their success at Trenton”—news of which had just arrived. A clueless Ambassador Noailles even presented Lafayette to King George III, a courtesy that would prove plenty embarrassing to the diplomat once Lafayette escaped to the colonies. Later on, Lafayette would blame this mischief on his youth, conceding that he was “too fond of playing a trick upon the king he is going to fight with.”

  Without a word to Noailles, Lafayette skipped town and crept back to France, but not to his in-laws’ home. He hid out with Kalb outside Paris, and then the two made their way to Bordeaux and the Victory.

  Lafayette’s family found his goodbye letters after he was gone. “You will be astonished, my dear papa,” he wrote to his father-in-law, “by what I am about to tell you. I am a general officer in the army of the United States of America.” He was right—Jean de Noailles was flabbergasted and enraged. Ditto the king, Vergennes, and the rest of the royal
cabinet. An embarrassed Ambassador Noailles wrote to the French prime minister Maurepas from London, “Fortunately his age may excuse his thoughtlessness.” Maurepas nevertheless described Lafayette’s flight as “a hostile act.” Though the aforementioned authority figures were more than justified in being miffed with Lafayette, the person with the most cause for contempt was Adrienne, Lafayette’s knocked-up teenage wife.

  In the letter Lafayette left for Adrienne, he confessed, “I am too guilty to vindicate myself. Do not be angry with me. Believe that I am sorely distressed.” He asked her to “embrace our Henriette,” their two-year-old, adding that Adrienne’s pregnancy “adds to my torment. If you knew how painful this is . . .”

  Lafayette’s note to Adrienne follows the same callous template as the one George Washington addressed to his wife, Martha, after he agreed to become the commander in chief of the Continental Army. Martha burned their letters upon George’s death to preserve their privacy, but the one from June 18, 1775, survived because it was stuffed in a desk drawer and forgotten. “I should enjoy more real happiness and felicity in one month with you, at home, than I have the most distant prospect of reaping abroad,” he whimpered. At least Washington could point out to his middle-aged spouse that he was chosen for this duty, acknowledging, “It has been a kind of destiny that has thrown me upon this Service.” Lafayette, on the other hand, was more of a make-your-own-destiny type of fellow, disobeying orders from the king and abandoning a pregnant girl for an entirely optional adventure.

  “I was with child, and I loved him dearly,” Adrienne wrote. “My father and the rest of the family were all in a violent rage at the news.” While Lafayette’s father-in-law was ratting him out to Versailles, his mother-in-law got stuck with notifying her preggers daughter. As Adrienne recalled, “She brought the painful news of his cruel departure to me herself and tried to console me.” While her father was egging on the government to send men to hunt down Lafayette and drag him home, her mother tried to look on the bright side of her son-in-law’s perhaps idealistic antics. Adrienne wrote, “She had no knowledge of great quests or glory, but predicted two years before everyone else that Lafayette would achieve both.”

  Before the Victory put out from Bordeaux, Lafayette received bleak news from home. “The anger of the government” gave him pause, especially orders to report forthwith to the French military barracks in Marseilles. “The letters from my family were terrible,” he wrote. “They forbade my going to America . . . They reminded me of the grief I was causing my pregnant, loving wife.”

  He nevertheless set sail, but as the ship headed south along the coast, the guilt ate at him. When the ship docked in Spain, Lafayette left his mates, including a furious Kalb, to wait there while he rode back to France to make amends—sort of.

  Back in Bordeaux, Lafayette once again received orders to report to Marseilles, and he wrote to Prime Minister Maurepas asking for a reversal on the royal order banning his trip to America. Meanwhile, Kalb informed the Comte de Broglie that he and the other enlistees on the Victory were stalled in Spain waiting for Lafayette to either return or release them. Broglie was (unbeknownst to Lafayette) counting on Kalb to convince the Continental Congress to hire him to replace George Washington. Thus the old man was anxious for Kalb to get going. To that end, Broglie sent an aide to Bordeaux to cajole Lafayette with a fib about how the royal order was all a big show meant to humor Lafayette’s father-in-law and how the French government was secretly cheering him on. Since this hooey was exactly what Lafayette wanted to hear, he happily chose to believe it. He then wrote the prime minister a ridiculous follow-up note claiming that since he had not received a reply to his request to lift the command to remain in France, he considered the minister’s “silence was a tacit order” to proceed to America.

  Since tacit orders couldn’t exactly be handed over to the men chasing him, Lafayette pretended to head to Marseilles per the official orders. He then disguised himself in a courier’s getup, made a U-turn for Spain, and sweet-talked an innkeeper’s daughter he had flirted with en route to point his trackers in the wrong direction.

  How did adults understand teenage hijinks like this before neuroscientists discovered that a human’s prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for planning, evaluating risk, and considering consequences—is not fully developed until around age twenty-five? I bet the nineteen-year-old Lafayette’s infuriated father-in-law might have had more empathy for the boy’s half-baked decisions if he could have watched a couple of segments of that Frontline episode “Inside the Teenage Brain.” When a kid practicing tricks at a skateboard ramp explains he doesn’t wear a helmet because “it’s not that risky,” the documentary’s narrator deadpans, “Well, ‘not that risky’ would be one way to put it.”

  The clumsy slapstick of Lafayette’s exodus concluded on April 20, 1777, when he finally shipped out from Spain. On the eve of his exit he posted a gloomy note to Adrienne, pledging, “My heart is broken. Tomorrow is the moment of cruel departure.”

  At least there was a kind of symmetry in Adrienne enduring morning sickness alone in Paris while seasickness was smiting her deadbeat husband across the Atlantic. He spent the miserable voyage learning English, presumably mastering how to conjugate the verb “to puke.” While on board, he complained in a letter to Adrienne, “The sea is so melancholy, that we mutually, I believe, sadden each other.” The enthusiastically named Victory had become “the most wearisome of all human habitations.”

  At sea, he unveiled the grandeur of his mission to Adrienne and attempted to include her in it. He wrote, “I hope that as a favor to me you will become a good American.” He really wasn’t in a position to ask her for favors, especially this baffling request for a Parisian aristocrat to somehow live by New World republican principles in her mansion in the old regime.

  Lafayette proclaimed to his wife, “The welfare of America is intimately bound up with the happiness of humanity. She is going to become the deserving and sure refuge of virtue, of honesty, of tolerance, of equality, and of a tranquil liberty.”

  To establish such a forthright dreamland of decency, who wouldn’t sign up to shoot at a few thousand Englishmen, just as long as Mr. Bean wasn’t one of them? Alas, from my end of history there’s a big file cabinet blocking the view of the sweet-natured republic Lafayette foretold, and it’s where the guvment keeps the folders full of Indian treaties, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and NSA-monitored electronic messages pertinent to national security, which is apparently all of them, including the one in which I ask my mom for advice on how to get a red Sharpie stain out of couch upholstery.

  Lafayette confided to his wife, “In coming as a friend to offer my services to this intriguing republic, I bring to it only my frankness and my good will; no ambition, no self-interest; in working for my glory, I work for their happiness.” Disregarding the inherent contradictions of proclaiming his lack of ambition and self-interest in the same sentence, he revealed that attaining glory was one of his two stated goals. The phrase “coming as a friend” glows on the page because it turned out to be the truth.

  It’s appropriate to ding Lafayette for the casual cruelty with which he abandoned his family, roll the eyes a bit at his retro quest for fame, or envy his outlandish optimism. But none of that negates the fact that he turned out to be the best friend America ever had. And I am not only referring to his youthful derring-do on battlegrounds up and down the Eastern Seaboard. I am also referring to any number of his dull grown-up kindnesses later on, such as assisting Thomas Jefferson, the United States minister to France in the 1780s, in opening up French markets to American goods. Lafayette’s lobbying procured Nantucket whalers the contract to supply the whale oil that lit the streetlights of Paris. Because of Lafayette, the City of Lights glowed by New England’s boiled blubber. And to say thanks for getting them the gig, all Nantucket rallied its milk cows to send him a giant wheel of cheese. When Lafayette visited Monticello in 182
4, his old friend Thomas Jefferson toasted him: “When I was stationed in his country for the purpose of cementing its friendship with ours, and of advancing our mutual interests, this friend of both, was my most powerful auxiliary and advocate. He made our cause his own . . . His influence and connections there were great. All doors of all departments were open to him at all times. In truth, I only held the nail, he drove it.”

  Finally, after Lafayette had spent two months on the Victory “floating on this dreary plain”—land ho. Lafayette, Kalb, and a few men came ashore north of Charleston around midnight on June 13, 1777, waking up the household of Major Benjamin Huger of the South Carolina militia. Huger put them up. “I retired to rest that night rejoicing that I had at last attained the haven of my dreams,” Lafayette recalled. He went on to gush, “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.”

  In other words, it was a buggy swamp chock-full of slaves. But Lafayette was a man in love. He proceeded to Charleston, and of course Charleston was the tops, “one of the best built, handsomest, and most agreeable cities that I have ever seen.” After hobnobbing with local luminaries, including Continental Congress delegate John Rutledge, Lafayette wrote to his wife, “All the persons with whom I wished to be acquainted have shewn me the greatest attention and politeness (not European politeness merely).”

  Charleston’s embrace inspired him to report, “What delights me most is that all citizens are brothers.” Then again, he was mostly hanging out with other Masons. The only Carolinians that failed to captivate him had wings. “I am devoured by gnats covering me with big bites,” he wrote.