by Sarah Vowell
Lafayette paid for four carriages and a few horses to ferry him, Kalb, and the other French officers north. They left Charleston on June 25. According to the diary of one of the officers, Charles-François du Buysson, “Four days later, some of our carriages were reduced to splinters; several of the horses which were old and unsteady were either worn out or lame.” Lafayette, a good sport, quipped to Adrienne, “I set out in a brilliant manner in a carriage, and I must now tell you that we are all on horseback, having broken the carriage . . . and I hope soon to write you that we have arrived on foot.”
As they spent the next month trudging north toward Pennsylvania via North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware, Lafayette delighted in the way “vast forests and immense rivers combine to give to that country an appearance of youth and majesty.”
Du Buysson, on the other hand, complained, “We traveled a great part of the way on foot, often sleeping in the woods, almost dead with hunger, exhausted by the heat, several of us suffering from fever and from dysentery.” Lafayette downplayed the hardships, reporting to Adrienne, “There have been some fatigues; but, although a few of my companions have suffered from them, I have scarcely noticed them.”
The American people, he wrote, “are as amiable as my enthusiasm led me to imagine.” He fawned, “Simplicity of manners, a desire to oblige . . . a sweet equality reign here among everybody.” Which was, in 1777, the kind of thing only a white guy could say. Still, Lafayette’s delight in New World hospitality rings true. While there are many reasons to visit France, warmth is not necessarily one of them. I once complained to a Parisian acquaintance how her city’s mania for exact change can be off-putting for a traveler, what with getting yelled at by cashiers and cab drivers all day long for the crime of paying a sixteen-euro fare with a twenty-euro note. She said that it was nothing personal, that the French are naturally aggressive, especially with one another. Which I suppose is a form of equality, but not the sweet kind experienced by Lafayette.
At least one of Lafayette’s traveling companions would have happily traded American friendliness for French infrastructure. “At last, after thirty-two days of marching, we arrived in Philadelphia,” Du Buysson wrote. “I think I am safe in saying that in Europe, no campaign would be harder to go through than was this journey.”
After disappointing his wife and offending her family, being chased across France by government henchmen, vomiting his way across the Atlantic, and hiking through six humid states, Lafayette was anticipating some sort of congressional attaboy. They all were. According to Du Buysson, “We were encouraged by the bright prospect of the reception we counted upon from the people there.” Alas, what they got was a brusque dismissal from a congressional grouch.
“The moment,” Lafayette recalled, “was peculiarly unfavourable to strangers. The Americans were displeased with the pretensions, and disgusted with the conduct, of many Frenchmen.” Consequently, he wrote, “the Congress finally adopted the plan of not listening to any stranger.”
So when Lafayette and friends called at the State House (then the moniker of Independence Hall), Congressman James Lovell of Massachusetts shooed them away, snarling, “It seems that French officers have a great fancy to enter our service without being invited.”
In fact, most of them, including Lafayette, had been invited—by Beaumarchais or Silas Deane. Hence the throngs of irksome Frenchmen who had been washing ashore for months, expecting to be welcomed with rank and riches.
While the Continental Army was always in need of fresh meat, it needed more men who could follow orders, as opposed to giving them, and preferably in English. Factors ranging from smallpox to enlisted men declining to reenlist at the end of their tours undermined troop strength. In fact, just as Lafayette was on the road between Charleston and Philadelphia, Washington wrote a letter admitting it was “very unlikely that any effectual opposition can be given to the British Army with the Troops we have, whose Numbers diminish more by desertion than Increas’d by Inlistments.”
Even so, Washington had no interest in driving up his numbers with the influx of European dilettantes, complaining, “These men have no attachment nor ties to the country.”
Back in February, when Lafayette was still moseying around London, Washington ranted to Congress about the Frenchmen, “This evil, if I may call it so, is a growing one; for, from what I learn, they are coming in swarms from old France.” Washington deplored their “ignorance of our language” and pointed out that American officers “would be disgusted if foreigners were put over their heads.”
Which was exactly what happened upon the arrival of one Philippe du Coudray, a French veteran of the Seven Years’ War who turned up in Philadelphia a month before Lafayette. Silas Deane had been hoodwinked by Du Coudray’s padded résumé, believing him to be a nobleman well connected at the court of Louis XVI and France’s greatest living artillery hotshot, when he was, in actuality, a wine merchant’s son who had seen a few cannons. Deane, who wasn’t exactly god’s gift to human resources, as the Continental Congress was slowly figuring out, promised Du Coudray the rank of major general and command of the army’s artillery corps and engineers.
Turns out that replacing the Continental Army’s beloved chief artillery officer, Henry Knox, was not as easy and arbitrary as Bewitched casting a second Darrin. Henry Knox was the revolution.
Born in Boston in 1759 to Irish immigrants, Knox dropped out of school to support his mother and siblings after his father’s death, apprenticing as a bookbinder and working as a clerk in a bookstore. He saved enough money by the time he was twenty-one to open his own establishment, the London Book Store.
All Bostonians suffered in the wake of the Coercive Acts of 1774, shopkeepers especially. To rebuke the renegades who had dressed up like Indians and plunked crates of the East India Company’s tea into Boston Harbor, Parliament passed the punitive laws colonists referred to as the Intolerable Acts—including the Boston Port Act that closed the harbor. The troublemakers were supposed to reimburse the East India Company for its drowned merchandise and the crown for its lost tax revenue.
The port closure gummed up international trade, affecting many Bostonians’ livelihoods, including bookseller Knox, who depended on book shipments from the British capital for which he named his shop. Plus, locals were boycotting British goods out of spite anyway. In November of 1774, Knox wrote to a London bookseller to whom he owed money, “I had the fairest prospect of entirely balancing our account this fall, but the almost total stagnation of Trade in consequence of the Boston Port Bill has been the sole means of preventing it.” He added that the patriots’ boycott compounded his woes, complaining, “Now the nonconsumption agreement will stop that small circulation of Business left.”
Meant to slap Massachusetts into submission and serve as a warning to the other colonies, the Intolerable Acts backfired, further radicalizing an already radical Massachusetts and rallying the other colonies to come to its material and political aid. In fact, they started calling themselves the United Colonies, sent food to Massachusetts, and convened the First Continental Congress to mull over the mother country’s increasingly oppressive policies.
A humble, bootstrappy patriot, Knox wooed, then married Lucy Flucker, the highbrow daughter of the Loyalist governor of the province of Massachusetts. Praised by John Adams for his “inquisitive turn of mind,” Knox began preparing for the coming war by reading as many military books as he could find (especially those devoted to ordnance and fortifications), observing redcoat maneuvers around town, quizzing the soldiers who patronized his shop, and joining a local militia, the Boston Grenadiers.
Shots fired in Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, had Knox leaving his faltering shop in his little brother’s care and rowing to Cambridge with his wife, Lucy (who sewed his sword into the lining of her coat), to throw in with the gathering New England militias.
Things could have been worse. The militias techn
ically lost the Battle of Bunker Hill in June, but they fought with so much heart and inflicted such heavy casualties on the redcoats that British general Thomas Gage wrote home to the secretary of state for the colonies, “The rebels are not the despicable rabble too many have supposed them to be,” concluding “that the conquest of this Country is not easy.”
“Despicable rabble,” however, pretty much summed up George Washington’s opinion of the troops when he arrived in Cambridge in July. In a letter to his brother John, the new commander in chief grumbled, “I found a mixed multitude of People here, under very little discipline, order, or Government.”
Both Gage and Washington turned out to be correct: the newly minted Continental Army’s men didn’t always know what they were doing, but they would prove difficult to beat.
Publicly, Washington issued orders to the men “that all Distinctions of Colonies will be laid aside; so that one and the same spirit may animate the whole.” Privately, to a fellow Virginian, he despaired of “an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people which, believe me, prevails but too generally among the officers of the Massachusetts part of the Army.” So much for that jazz Lafayette was going on about all Americans being brothers.
As Washington tried to deal with a dangerous shortage of gunpowder and an overabundance of smallpox and drunkenness among the men, one of the few bright spots of his arrival in Massachusetts was making the acquaintance of the neither drunk nor stupid Henry Knox.
Knox wrote to his wife that once Washington surveyed the homemade fortifications Knox had erected in Boston’s environs, the general “expressed the greatest pleasure and surprise at their situation and apparent utility.”
The British occupied the peninsula of Boston, and their navy controlled the harbor, resupplying the city with provisions shipped down from Canada. But the patriots had them surrounded and had been keeping the city under siege for months. To break the stalemate, the Continentals needed bigger, better guns. The good news from Lake Champlain was that Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys, with an assist from Benedict Arnold, had captured Fort Ticonderoga and its cache of cannons, mortars, and howitzers. The bad news was that the fort was nearly three hundred miles away, and the problem with heavy artillery is that it’s kind of heavy.
Enter Henry Knox. The twenty-five-year-old bookworm approached Washington and volunteered to go to Fort Ticonderoga to fetch the equipment. Washington approved the cockamamie mission. And so, that November Knox and his brother set off for New York. Who knew they would return in January with forty-three cannons, fourteen mortars, and two howitzers dragged across frozen rivers and over the snowy Berkshire Mountains by oxen on custom sleds. This is the derivation of that old Yankee proverb that if you can sell a book, you can move sixty tons of weaponry three hundred miles in winter.
The crafty Washington had the guns dragged up the hills of Dorchester Heights in the middle of the night. When the British and Loyalist Americans ensconced in Boston woke up on March 6, 1776, they were shocked to see the scary fruits of Knox’s labor pointing down in their direction. “My God,” marveled the British general William Howe, “these fellows have done more work in one night than I could make my army do in three months.”
With the forecast calling for a heavy rain of cannonballs, on March 17 the redcoats and the Loyalist townsfolk promptly hightailed it out of Boston by ships bound for Nova Scotia. (Including Knox’s Tory in-laws—Lucy Knox never saw her family again.) In a grim report to Lord George Germain, secretary of state for America, Howe admitted to “there not being the least prospect of conciliating this continent until its armies shall have been roughly dealt with,” adding, “I confess my apprehensions that such an event will not be readily brought about.”
While the triumph in Boston was not a particularly representative episode in the long war, it does bear the closest resemblance to the stories we tell ourselves about the Revolution. It was opry defeats opera, a model of DIY Yankee pluck. A patchwork of amateur militias made up of barely trained farmers, lawyers, shopkeepers, and artisans who, thanks to a hometown book nerd’s folkloric stunt, drove some of earth’s most experienced professional warriors out of a long-suffering city.
So, the moral of that story, other than never underestimate an independent bookseller, was that the Continental Army and its commander in chief had a soft spot for Chief Artillery Officer Henry Knox. It’s poetic that the Kentucky fort protecting the United States Bullion Depository was named after him: for Washington, Henry Knox was money in the bank.
Hence the group flip-out the following year when Congress instructed Washington to hand over command of the artillery corps—composed of men recruited and trained by Knox—to the newly arrived French stranger Du Coudray.
“General Knox, who has deservedly acquired the character of one of the most valuable officers in the service,” Washington wrote to Congress, “would consider himself injured by an appointment superseding his command.” Knox, in fact, mailed Congress his resignation. Generals Nathanael Greene and John Sullivan sent Congress nasty notes threatening to quit. Congress got paranoid that the military leadership was attempting to undermine civilian authority and passed a resolution asking the generals to apologize. The lawmakers had as much hope of getting the offending officers to say they were sorry as the East India Company had of being reimbursed for its waterlogged tea. Because Du Coudray proclaimed to Congress that he was “the most learned officer in France” and an aristocrat “so near the throne,” as John Adams put it, the delegates worried that offending Du Coudray was the equivalent of insulting Louis XVI, whose official help Benjamin Franklin was in France working to obtain.
Though the Du Coudray dilemma was one of the war’s dumber deadlocks, a hapless Lafayette stumbled right into the middle of it. Luckily some new French engineers personally recruited by Franklin landed in Philadelphia, including the soon-to-be-invaluable future chief engineer of the Continental Army, Louis Duportail. The new arrivals set the Congress straight on the poser Du Coudray. Then Du Coudray was nice enough to drown when he and his horse fell in the Schuylkill River. Win-win: Knox happily kept his job, and the horse lived. As for the source of the aforementioned confusion, Silas Deane: his days were numbered.
As the culmination of the patriots’ indignation about French officers, the Du Coudray business narrowed Lafayette’s chances of being hired on. Still, the aristocratic Lafayette was also so close to the French monarchy he had stepped on Marie Antoinette’s toes on the dance floor of Versailles. Those credentials stirred up the same congressional heebie-jeebies about insulting the French court as the Du Coudray incident had. For men who signed a document declaring that all men are created equal, the Continental Congress sure spent an awful lot of time kowtowing to French bigwigs.
A letter to the Congress signed by Franklin and Deane in Paris introduced Lafayette as “exceedingly beloved” and “a young nobleman of great family connexions here.” Furthermore, “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.” In other words, a failure to welcome this kid to Philadelphia would be seen as a faux pas in Paris and Versailles.
If his swanky backstory wasn’t reason enough for the delegates to reverse their initial knee-jerk rejection, Lafayette delivered to Independence Hall a letter that would thaw the cold, cold hearts of needy patriots. “After the sacrifices I have made,” he wrote, “I have the right to exact two favours: one is, to serve at my own expense,—the other is, to serve at first as a volunteer.”
Compared with the demands of the previous boatloads of French opportunists, this was the generous offer of a good egg. It’s worth noting that right from the start, America brought out the best in Lafayette, as if he had vomited up his adolescent petulance somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic and come ashore a new and wiser self. General Nathanael Greene later desc
ribed Lafayette as “a most sweet tempered young gentleman.”
On July 31 Congress commissioned him as a volunteer major general, which is to say, he was basically an unpaid intern wearing a general’s sash. The resolution acknowledged that he had “at his own expence come over to offer his services to the United States without pension or particular allowance, and is anxious to risque his life in our cause.”
Lafayette was able to hire as aides two of the men who had sailed with him, Louis de la Colombe and Jean-Joseph de Gimat. The others, except for Kalb, would eventually give up and go home. Congress would finally grant Kalb a commission as a major general in September, after he threatened to sue them for reneging on Silas Deane’s contract. (Kalb then broke the news to Broglie that the Frenchman’s scheme to replace Washington as commander in chief was “impossible to execute.”)
A few days after Lafayette received his commission, Washington arrived to meet with Congress. The Howe brothers’ fleet was spotted off the Jersey shore, a portent of trouble for Philadelphia.
Lafayette then met his new boss at dinner with some congressmen at City Tavern. If the menu of the present-day replica of the aforementioned eatery is any indication, I hope they were in the mood for sauerkraut.
They didn’t call Washington “His Excellency” for nothing. Recording her initial sighting of the six-foot-four Virginian for her husband, Abigail Adams wrote, “I was struck with General Washington. You had prepared me to entertain a favorable opinion of him, but I thought the half was not told me.” Sizing up his civilian allure along with his martial charisma, she noted, “The gentleman and soldier, look agreeably blended in him. Modesty marks every line and feature of his face.”
As the starstruck Lafayette later described his first glimpse of Washington, “It was impossible to mistake for a moment his majestic figure and deportment; nor was he less distinguished by the noble affability of his manner.” What a sweet memory. Still, it does get on my nerves how easy it is for tall people to make a good first impression.
