Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

by Sarah Vowell

  Moreover, precisely because there are plenty of straight-dope versions of the Revolutionary War in print, I have room to let these Quakers get under my skin for a minute. Partly because they have a point about how American publishers, writers, and readers fetishize state-sponsored violence and partly because I went to art school. Just as Densmore’s religious ethics seem to filter through his nonfiction, my background bubbles up into mine. Having studied art history, as opposed to political history, I tend to incorporate found objects into my books. Just as Pablo Picasso glued a fragment of furniture onto the canvas of Still Life with Chair Caning, I like to use whatever’s lying around to paint pictures of the past—traditional pigment like archival documents but also the added texture of whatever bits and bobs I learn from looking out bus windows or chatting up the people I bump into on the road. So these Quakers are just chair caning to me—learned, judgmental chair caning.

  The most convincing if dispiriting argument for me to augment the supposedly unnecessary embarrassment of war books is that adding another one to the pile ups the odds of my fellow citizens actually cracking one open. In 2009, the American Revolution Center surveyed one thousand U.S. adults on their knowledge of the Revolution. Among the findings: “Many more Americans remember that Michael Jackson sang ‘Beat It’ than know that the Bill of Rights is part of the Constitution.” A bleak revelation, and yet “Beat It” did win the 1984 Grammy for Record of the Year, so the numskulls who took the test knew at least one fact about American history. Sixty percent of those surveyed correctly identified the number of children parented by reality TV personalities Jon and Kate Gosselin, but over a third did not know the century in which the American Revolution took place. More than half of them believed the American Civil War preceded the Revolutionary War (whenever that was). Based on these findings, the situation appears to be more demoralizing than Americans understanding our history as war. What if we don’t understand our history at all?

  My friend Wesley Stace, a novelist and singer-songwriter, married a woman who was raised Quaker. When I was telling him about Birmingham Friends and researching a war book among people who are miffed about the very idea of more war books, he took their side.

  “That’s not a bad point that the whole of history is seen through war,” he said. “It’s very Quaker. I like it. I condemn your book. Previously I liked it and now I condemn it.”

  He added, “Did I ever tell you about the time I went to a Quaker wedding? People were slightly horrified when the mother of the bride said, ‘Of course I love my daughter—and I’m learning to love her husband-to-be.’ To me, that’s Quakerism in a nutshell: ‘I’m going to say the right thing now, but I’m also going to be a little more honest than the situation calls for.’ Quakers are all about frankness and honesty.”

  Wes and his wife, Abbey, send their kids to the Quaker school in suburban Philadelphia that Abbey attended. A school whose American history courses, Abbey contends, “encouraged a lot of questioning.” She recalls, “They taught an awful lot about underdogs, the Underground Railroad, how black people were being treated. We learned the technical aspects of wars—where armies were and what happened. But I remember my history teacher senior year challenged the entire class to find mistakes in the textbook. You don’t just accept anything as truth. You challenge it.”

  “There is a tendency,” Christopher Densmore tells me, “for sectarian groups to know their history.” After months of encounters with Americans who were hazy on Lafayette’s identity, it is a treat to talk to people who not only know exactly who he was but also actually have a problem with him—and, by extension, with me.

  One of the Birmingham Friends, yet another old man in a straw hat, is nice enough to walk me out to the car and give directions to the next deplorable, militaristic attraction on my to-do list. About a half mile down the road from the meetinghouse, the 1895 monument to Lafayette stands near the general vicinity of where it’s believed he got shot. It is a slender, fifteen-foot-tall Corinthian column taking up a patch of grass next to an appealing old yellow house. Nick drives by it three times before I stop confusing it with a streetlamp. Its Quakerish modesty is apparently the point. According to a commemorative booklet published by its sponsor, the Chester County Historical Society, “This simple and graceful shaft, made of terra cotta, at small cost, is a silent protest against extravagance and show in monuments.”

  All the same, five thousand celebrants gathered on this back road in Nowhere, Pennsylvania, to dedicate the thing. Its base is engraved, “On the Rising Ground A Short Distance South of This Spot LAFAYETTE Was Wounded at the Battle of Brandywine, September 11th, 1777.” Also chiseled are sentiments expressed by Lafayette when he revisited the area on his tour in 1825: “The honor of having mingled my blood with that of many other American soldiers, on the heights of the Brandywine, has been to me a source of pride and delight.”

  Pride I get. Delight seems a bit demented. My uncle the vet had a long diagonal scar across his back from his shoulder to his waist, thanks to a Japanese bayonet slicing into him when he peeked out of a foxhole in the Philippines. I don’t recall him being particularly giddy about it, but who knows, those World War II guys always were tight-lipped.

  As Lafayette described the wound in a letter to his wife, “[It] hurt my leg a little, but it is nothing, my sweetheart; the ball touched neither a bone nor a nerve.” The night of, Lafayette was a good sport on the long, dark slog from the Brandywine Valley. Toward the end of the march he was lucid and persnickety enough to command his fellow stragglers to re-form into proper disciplined lines for their entrance into Chester. When he was finally laid out on a dining table to have his wound dressed, some fellow officers walked in and he made a wisecrack about hoping no one would eat him for supper. As he recuperated, he quipped to Adrienne, “If a man wished to be wounded just for his own amusement, he should come and see my wound and have one just like it.” This best of all possible injuries came to represent his grit, good humor, and disregard for personal safety. Washington noted afterward, “The Marquis is determined to be in the way of danger.”

  The verdant corner of the Brandywine Valley where he was wounded looks so upstanding and American dreamy, there would be no indication of the mayhem that went down here unless this Lafayette doodad marked the spot. Gilbert Cope, one of the speakers at the 1895 dedication, decreed, “Amidst the shifting scenes of the Revolution it fell to the lot of this fair landscape to be the arena of war, horrible war!”

  Kathy Garrison, the yellow house’s owner, walks across the grass to say hello. She’s about my age, friendly, what a cop on a police procedural would call a citizen. We jabber over the noise of her teenage son Chris mowing their well-kept yard. We marvel at the depth of feeling for Lafayette that could have summoned such a crowd to the dedication of this dinky tribute on the edge of her lawn. A crowd that was the same size as the mob of bobby-soxers screaming for Frank Sinatra at his breakout show/riot in New York City on New Year’s Eve 1942. In the historical society booklet, the turnout is chalked up to “a spontaneous outpouring of the people, prompted by sentiments of patriotism.”

  On the other side of Garrison’s house is Sandy Hollow Heritage Park, site of the day’s battle reenactment. On September 11, 1777, a division of Virginians commanded by the Scottish-born General Adam Stephen tried to fend off Cornwallis in this big, open green space neighboring some woods. To underline that fact, the organizers of the reenactment posted a sign that says, “Beneath you, a Soldier of Washington’s Army Bled to Give YOU LIBERTY.” True enough, but how many more bled here unnecessarily because Washington screwed up?

  I needn’t have worried about how the event planners could possibly turn a bummer like Brandywine into a celebration. If Americans can transform Memorial Day, technically a remembrance of all our war dead ever, into the official kickoff of summer, we can handle adapting one demoralizing battle into a wholesome, chipper get-together.

  When the
reenactors march out of their encampment to line up on opposite sides of the field of battle, I hear a woman tell her children, “We know how this ends!” By which I think she means the patriots’ ultimate victory in 1783, not them leaving behind their ordnance and four hundred POWs when they hightailed it out of here in 1777.

  The sponsors have promised “Music! Battles! 18th-century celebrities!” and they deliver. Parents hound a George Washington impersonator for cell phone photos of him with their children as if he were Mickey Mouse. The battle reenactment takes place behind a safety fence too far away for spectators to get any real sense of the chaos unleashed here in 1777, though that’s probably what the inhabitants of such a litigious society deserve. At least the artillery is loud. I bump into Kathy Garrison during the cannon barrage and she frets, “My dog must be going nuts.”

  As for the “Music!” it is mostly “Fifes!”

  Oddly enough, the most historically detailed presentation during the festivities is the Penn’s Woods Puppet Theater’s presentation of Lafayette’s biography in puppetry form. Sitting on hay bales with the under-ten set, I am impressed with how many facts they cram in. The Lafayette puppet, who has a high-pitched Monsieur Bill sort of voice, steps on the Marie Antoinette puppet’s feet on the dance floor at Versailles, listens to the Duke of Gloucester puppet talk smack about his brother George III, abandons his puppet wife, gets bitten by mosquitos in South Carolina, fights in the revolution, and becomes, according to the Washington puppet, “the son I never had.” All pretty accurate except for when the Beast of Gévaudan puppet lip-synchs “If I Only Had a Brain” from The Wizard of Oz, which is a crowd-pleaser thanks to its absence of fifes.

  My favorite thing about the Brandywine shindig is just ambling around the reenactors’ canvas tent city, scrutinizing the hobbyists and their stuff. I eavesdrop on a couple of sweaty infantrymen dressed up in the red wool getup of Britain’s Forty-third Regiment of Foot, discussing their spouses’ indifference to living history. One asks, “Does your wife put up with this?” He says it in a tone that implies that his wife barely puts up with this. His buddy answers, “Sort of. She let me hang my Monmouth photos in the upstairs hallway.” The way he emphasizes the word “upstairs” hints that he and his memorabilia have surrendered the sweet spot above the living room mantel and decamped upstairs like Washington retreated to Chester.

  There are female reenactors here, including a handful in Continental uniforms, perhaps channeling Deborah Sampson, alias Robert Shurtliff, a woman who pretended to be a man and enlisted in the Fourth Massachusetts. But most of them engage in the girl jobs of the camp followers: those civilians, including mistresses and wives (Martha Washington among them), who traveled with both armies to perform support roles such as doing laundry. A wench in a linen dress barbecues a cake in a tin pot over an open fire. “As soon as lunch was done,” she coughs, “we got started on dinner.”

  Downwind from the cake smoke, I come across a pair of Continentals in the slouchy hunting shirts Lafayette described the first time he accompanied Washington to review the troops. The Yanks stare down the pretend Highlanders of the Eighty-fourth Regiment of Foot, the elite British battalion of Scottish emigrants to Canada that served in New York and down South. They’re decked out in smart uniforms and black bonnets bedazzled with tufts of bear fur.

  Pointing at the Highlanders, I ask the patriots if they ever find themselves wishing their army could afford such handsome duds.

  “No way,” one replies. “Who wants to wear wool on a hot day like this?”

  Bet he’ll be eating those words come winter at Valley Forge—words being just about the only thing there will be to eat.

  To me, the highlight of the event is watching a reenactor in a long striped dress sitting alone on a blanket, winding yarn. Absorbed in the task of wrapping strands of wool around her hand, she never looks up. Watching her is so mesmerizing and oddly sacred that it never occurs to me to interrupt her and ask her name or how she got into the yarn-winding reenactment biz, maybe because she isn’t recreating; she is creating.

  Even though she and the parking attendants are about the only people around here doing anything remotely useful, nobody seems to notice her or her wool. But what she’s doing, completing a step in manufacturing her own textiles, is as integral to and emblematic of the revolution as what was done by any Minuteman with a musket. Years before the first shots were fired, women like her were quietly sticking it to their colonial overlords with their needles and pins.

  Between the Stamp Act of 1765 and Lexington a decade later, one of the colonists’ most widespread tools of resistance against arbitrary taxation without representation was boycotting British imports, particularly luxury items. While the melodrama of hucking crates of tea into Boston Harbor continues to inspire civic-minded hotheads to this day, it’s worth remembering the hordes of stoic colonial women who simply swore off tea and steeped basil leaves in boiling water to make the same point. What’s more valiant: littering from a wharf or years of doing chores and looking after children from dawn to dark without caffeine?

  An outgrowth of the colonists’ non-importation agreements that emerged every time Parliament dreamed up a deplored new levy, the Homespun Movement was an extensive effort by American women to abstain from purchasing fabrics imported from Britain, particularly the finer ones like silk. Instead, they spun their own cloth to sew their families’ clothes. For instance, the Yale graduating class of 1765 announced it would celebrate its commencement ceremony “wholly dressed in the manufactures of our own country,” which was a college-boy way of saying their moms and sisters most likely tailored their suits out of wool from the household sheep.

  After the Intolerable Acts of 1774 inspired a renewed wave of boycotts, John Adams wrote to Abigail, “I hope the Ladies are every day diminishing their ornaments, and the Gentlemen too. Let us Eat Potatoes and drink Water. Let us wear Canvass, and undressed Sheepskins, rather than submit to the unrighteous and ignominious Domination that is prepared for Us.”

  When Benjamin Franklin became the American envoy in Paris, he received a letter from his daughter, Sally, in Philadelphia asking him to send her French linen, lace, and feathers. He teased her that the request “disgusted me as much as if you had put salt into my strawberries. The spinning, I see, is laid aside, and you are to be dressed for the ball!” Yet Sally, along with her cohorts in the Philadelphia Ladies Association, still managed to sew 2,200 shirts by hand, which they donated to the “almost naked” Continental Army soldiers pitied by Lafayette.

  The movement culminated in the moral, political, and sartorial victory of the brown homespun wool suit George Washington wore to his first inauguration in 1789.

  Thus, “homespun” took on a deeper, grander meaning beyond handwoven women’s work. It came to signify an earthy, self-reliant, utterly American way of life.

  Because of Enlightenment thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influential ideas about the virtues of natural man, the French were particularly enamored with such folksy charms. To escape the glitz of the palace of Versailles, Marie Antoinette built a pastoral farm getaway, a place where she could unwind in her plain muslin dresses and milk a cow or two for fun.

  Ben Franklin’s mission was to secure France’s formal commitment as an ally. To him, it wasn’t enough for the French to hate the British. The old flirt wanted them to fall in love with Americans. To that end, he reinforced their idealized notions of his plainclothed, plainspoken countrymen. Even though Franklin’s impressive “scientific amusements” included making the first map of the Gulf Stream, in Paris he always made a point of appearing in public in a frontiersman’s marten fur cap, so as to personify the rustic soul of America. Soon Frenchwomen were sporting weird wigs “à la Franklin,” imitating his signature backwoods hat. If he could inspire Europe’s most fashionable ladies to wear varmint hair, maybe he had a shot at convincing their menfolk to lend him their navy.

  Tha
t dead animal on Franklin’s bald spot blanketed a wily brain. When the gloomy news arrived in France that General Howe had occupied Franklin’s hometown of Philadelphia after trouncing Washington at Brandywine, Franklin famously brushed off a French acquaintance’s pity: “You mistake the matter. Instead of Howe taking Philadelphia, Philadelphia has taken Howe.” Which was some seriously sly double-talk. But in the end, Franklin was not wrong.

  Philadelphia’s significance was more emotional than strategic. Whereas he who controlled the Hudson could restrict the lower colonies’ access to and communication with New England, he who ruled the capital was in charge of a few very nice buildings—including Independence Hall and Franklin’s house. What better symbol of a bruised rebellion than stashing wounded patriot prisoners of war in the structure where the Declaration of Independence was signed? Captain John André moved into Franklin’s home, ripping off books and musical instruments as well as a painting of the homeowner that got shipped to England and wasn’t returned to the United States until 1906. “Our enemies,” Franklin groused, “made a prisoner of my portrait.”

  John Adams agonized over the ramifications of forfeiting the city. A few days after Brandywine he recorded his mood in his diary: “gloomy, dark, melancholy, and dispiriting. When and where will the light spring up?” He wondered, “Is Philadelphia to be lost? If lost, is the Cause lost? No—the Cause is not lost—but it may be hurt.”

  Sam Adams gave his colleagues a pep talk about the importance of not bellyaching in public. He declared, “If we despond, public confidence is destroyed, the people will no longer yield their support to a hopeless contest and American liberty is no more.”