Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

by Sarah Vowell

  The white clapboard Moore house still stands on the grounds of Colonial National Historical Park. John Laurens represented the Continentals, and Lafayette’s in-law the Vicomte de Noailles represented Rochambeau. Cornwallis sent a pair of his underlings, a Major Ross and a Lieutenant Colonel Dundas. The Brits lobbied to perform the ritual of surrender in traditional European military style with their own flags flying and their bands playing an American song as a tribute.

  Before the negotiation began, the American and French leadership had held a meeting about what to do regarding the so-called honors of war. The French were willing to grant this tribute and the Americans tended to agree. But Lafayette recalled in his memoirs that he spoke up and reminded them “that the same enemy had required General Lincoln, at the capitulation of Charlestown, to furl the American colours and not to play an English march, insist[ing] strongly on using the same measures with them in retaliation, and obtained that these two precise conditions should be inserted in the capitulation.”

  Major Ross pointed out to Laurens, “My Lord Cornwallis did not command at Charleston.” Which was true. Henry Clinton was the British commander at Charleston who denied the honors of war to General Lincoln and his Continentals, one of whom was the man across from Ross, John Laurens.

  Laurens refused to budge. He replied, “It is not the individual that is here considered. It is the nation.”

  “The British expected to get good terms of surrender,” said Ranger Williams, “and the Americans were not about to let them have it. They said, no, you’re going to get the same terms of surrender that you gave the American army in Charleston, South Carolina. You’re going to march out with your flags down and furled, you’ll have to give up all your weapons, and you’re all going to be taken as prisoners of war. The Americans were not going to forget how that army had been treated in Charleston. So the British surrendered on those terms, and they didn’t like it very much.”

  Henry Knox wrote to his wife, “They will have the same honors as the garrison of Charleston; that is, they will not be permitted to unfurl their colors, or play Yankee Doodle.”

  It’s hard to believe that the redcoats not being allowed to play a song with the word “macaroni” in it was, in the context of eighteenth-century European military culture, some sort of bone-deep snub. But from what I can tell, it was met with the same combination of revulsion and indignation I once saw on the face of a Japanese tour guide when I accidentally walked on a tatami mat without taking off my shoes.

  And so the official articles of capitulation stipulated, “The garrison of York will march out to a place to be appointed in front of the posts, at two o’clock precisely, with shouldered arms, colours cased, and drums beating a British or German march.”

  No one recorded what those marches were, though decades later there was an apocryphal and later-debunked story that one of the songs the British played was the on-the-nose “The World Turned Upside Down.” The only thing we know for sure is that an American band did strike up “Yankee Doodle” during the surrender ritual, because Lafayette got miffed that the Britons filing up to hand over their weapons refused to look at the Americans, fixing their stares on the French instead. So Lafayette called for a sudden burst of “Yankee Doodle” on the American side as a way of shocking the redcoats into glancing in the patriot victors’ direction.

  Today, the surrender field is a silent, grassy expanse surrounded by trees maintained by the National Park Service. The gauntlet the British and Hessians had to walk to lay down their arms is marked with a picturesque wooden fence. On the afternoon of October 19, 1781, the French lined up along one side and the Americans lined up a few yards across from them, awaiting the nearly eight thousand defeated troops.

  Harry Lee reported, “Every eye was turned, searching for the British commander in chief, anxious to look at that man, heretofore so much the object of their dread. All were disappointed. Cornwallis held himself back from the humiliating scene.” Cornwallis, feigning illness, sent his second in command, Lieutenant General Charles O’Hara, to lead the beaten troops in his stead. Pennsylvanian Ebenezer Denny recorded that the losers marched onto the field accompanied by percussionists whose “drums beat as if they did not care how.”

  O’Hara approached Rochambeau to surrender Cornwallis’s sword, but Rochambeau’s aide blocked the path, and Rochambeau pointed at Washington across the way. Harry Lee watched as O’Hara “advance[d] up to Washington, asked pardon for his mistake, apologized for the absence of lord Cornwallis, and begged to know his further pleasure. The general feeling his embarrassment, relieved it by referring him with much politeness to general Lincoln.” In other words, Washington refused to accept the sword of surrender from Cornwallis’s second in command and referred O’Hara to his second, General Lincoln, who then handed back the sword.

  Dr. Thacher remarked that the British troops’ “mortification could not be concealed. Some of the platoon officers appeared to be exceedingly chagrined . . . many of the soldiers manifested a sullen temper, throwing their arms on the pile with violence, as if determined to render them useless.”

  The following day, Cornwallis wrote to Clinton, “I have the mortification to inform your Excellency that I have been forced to give up the posts of York and Gloucester, and to surrender the troops under my command, by capitulation, on the 19th instant, as prisoners of war to the combined forces of America and France.” Clinton and the British fleet were just then barreling south to come to Cornwallis’s rescue. Too late.

  Lafayette would no doubt approve of the bombastic name of the town’s state-sponsored history museum, the Victory Center. But I do wonder what Washington would think of it. His orders the day after the surrender set an austere tone, encouraging the troops to commemorate their victory by attending church services with “seriousness of deportment and gratitude of heart.”

  Lafayette, who would soon sail back to France, celebrated the surrender by penning perky letters home to Vergennes and to his wife. To French prime minister Maurepas, the man who once groaned that Lafayette wanted him to sell all the furniture at Versailles and give the proceeds to the Americans, Lafayette summed up the significance of Yorktown: “The play, sir, is over—and the fifth act has just been closed.”

  While Lafayette’s letters from Yorktown reached France in an unheard-of eighteen days, word of Cornwallis’s surrender was slower to reach London. On November 25, Lord George Germain made his way to Downing Street to inform the prime minister, Lord North. North took the news, according to Germain, as if he had just been shot, exclaiming, “O God! It is all over!”

  That night Germain was hosting a dinner party at his house, and he decided to keep the bad news about Yorktown to himself. He did, however, mention to his guests that he had heard that French prime minister Maurepas was on his deathbed. One of the guests quipped that it was too bad that Maurepas would die before he found out how the war in America was going to turn out. So Germain decided to spill his guts about Virginia after all, announcing that Maurepas did know who won the war. “The army has surrendered,” blurted Germain.

  At Yorktown, Ranger Williams announced, “This was the battle that won the American Revolution. And remember, just six months before this, George Washington had been in such desperation that he had written, ‘We are at the end of our tether.’ Within six months of Washington writing those desperate words, events remarkably aligned themselves. This was the last major battle of the American Revolution. By now, it had become a world war. You had Spain involved. France involved. The Netherlands involved. Seemed like everybody had something against Great Britain. So, because of that, the peace treaty was going to be very complex and it was going to take two years to negotiate and finalize.”

  In the Treaty of Paris of 1783, “His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States . . . to be free sovereign and Independent States.”

  Benjamin Franklin gingerly informed foreign minister Vergenn
es that the American delegation had worked out a tentative agreement with Britain behind the backs of the French, technically a violation of the Franco-American Treaty of Alliance of ’78 that had the soldiers at Valley Forge shouting, “Long live the King of France!” Vergennes lamented, “We shall be but poorly paid for all that we have done for the United States, and for securing to them a national existence.” For all their efforts, the French take for helping the Americans wasn’t much more than ownership of the disputed island of Tobago.

  Ranger Williams concluded her talk at the Yorktown battlefield: “Ladies and gentlemen, you are standing here on very special ground. You are standing with the likes of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Lafayette, and Cornwallis. People from several different nations converged on this village of Yorktown to determine the fate of an independent America. And every year on July 4th, what do Americans celebrate? The signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, when, after one year of war, America officially declared its independence from Great Britain with a radical document, particularly that second paragraph that began with these famous words, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Now, we know in America’s history we sure have stumbled on that. We have made horrible mistakes, and we’ve had incredible successes. As a nation, we’re still working out what those ideals mean to us. But those would have just been beautiful words on a beautifully written piece of paper if what happened here had not happened.”

  Following the lead of John Adams, Americans prefer to think of the American Revolution not as an eight-year war but rather as a revolution “effected before the War commenced.” We like to believe, as Adams did, that “the Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people,” as opposed to the amputated limbs and bayoneted torsos of Continental and French casualties.

  Of course Americans celebrate Independence Day as opposed to Yorktown Day. Who wants to barbecue a hot dog and ponder how we owe our independence to the French navy? Who wants to twirl sparklers and dwell on how the French government’s expenditures in America contributed to the bankruptcy that sparked the French Revolution that would send Rochambeau to prison, Lafayette into exile (then prison), and our benefactor His Most Christian Majesty Louis XVI to the guillotine.

  That said, Americans finding themselves in Paris on the Fourth of July should swing by Picpus Cemetery, where Lafayette is buried under dirt from Bunker Hill. There is an emotional annual ceremony there, in which representatives of the French and American governments and military join the descendants of Lafayette, along with anyone else who cares, to witness the American flag flying over Lafayette’s grave being swapped out for a fresh Stars and Stripes. I went with my friend Steven, a dual citizen of France and the United States, who confessed to being touched by “the most patriotic event I have ever attended.”

  Around the corner from the Place de la Nation, where a guillotine cranked out corpses at a quick clip during the Terror, Picpus was established as a private cemetery, partly through the efforts of Lafayette’s wife, Adrienne. The bodies of her mother and sister were discarded there, along with the thirteen hundred beheaded nobles, commoners, clergymen, and nuns whom the radicals tossed into the mass graves dug on the site. Among the victims lies the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who discovered and named oxygen and hydrogen. “It took them only an instant to cut off that head,” a mathematician remarked on Lavoisier’s execution, “but France may not produce another like it in a century.”

  Adrienne, imprisoned in Paris during the Terror after Austrians captured Lafayette, was spared the guillotine only by the lobbying of the U.S. minister to France, the future president James Monroe, and his wife, Elizabeth. In his Fourth of July speech at Lafayette’s grave, Mark Taplin, the U.S. embassy’s deputy chief of mission, recalled, “As Lafayette faced years of imprisonment in an Austrian dungeon, his family the prospect of starvation . . . Elizabeth Monroe bravely visited Lafayette’s wife, in prison, and the Monroes secured her and her daughter passports so they could join Lafayette in Austria.” (Georges Washington Lafayette escaped unscathed to the United States, where he attended Harvard and lived for a time with his namesake’s family at Mount Vernon.)

  Taplin proclaimed, “Lafayette, in turn, never relented in his devotion to America, even for all her faults. He acknowledged to his American hosts on his triumphal return tour to the U.S. that there was ‘much to deplore’ in the South’s practice of slavery. But there was still much to admire there, he quickly added. Lafayette lifted his glass at one reception to toast ‘the perpetual union of the United States,’ adding, ‘it has always saved us in time of storm; one day it will save the world.’”

  Whether or not the United States has saved the world, it did save France a time or two. When the American Expeditionary Forces commanded by General John J. Pershing came to the aid of France during World War I, they marched into Paris on July 4, 1917, heading straight for Picpus Cemetery. Colonel Charles E. Stanton, whose uncle had been Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war, addressed the French people while standing before Lafayette’s tomb. “America has joined forces with the Allied Powers,” he said, “and what we have of blood and treasure are yours. Therefore it is that with loving pride we drape the colors in tribute of respect to this citizen of your great republic. And here and now, in the presence of the illustrious dead, we pledge our hearts and our honor in carrying this war to a successful issue. Lafayette, we are here.”

  • • •

  Nowadays, Lafayette is a place, not a person. Lafayette is a boulevard in Phoenix, a Pennsylvania college, and a bridge across the Mississippi in St. Paul. It’s the Alabama birthplace of boxer Joe Louis and three different towns in Wisconsin—four if Fayette counts. If so, then it’s also Fayette County, which the Chicken Ranch, better known as the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, put on the map. It is without question Lafayette, Indiana, where the founders of both C-SPAN and Guns N’ Roses were born.

  When I bumped into an old neighbor whilst visiting my Montana hometown, she asked me what I was working on, and I answered a book about Lafayette. So she inquired if I would be spending a lot of time in Louisiana. I was confused, wondering if she forgot that Thomas Jefferson decided against his initial impulse of appointing Lafayette as the former French colony’s first governor after the Louisiana Purchase. Then I realized that the city of Lafayette, Louisiana, must be her go-to Lafayette-labeled noun—even though from Montana it’s actually a closer drive to Lafayette, Utah, not to mention the ones in Oregon, California, Kansas, and Colorado. So I explained that I meant Lafayette the French teenager who crossed the Atlantic on his own dime to volunteer to fight with George Washington in the Revolutionary War. Therefore, I said, I was more likely to visit Pennsylvania, where he got shot. She nevertheless professed her fondness for zydeco.

  This encounter aroused such indignation in my breast that I moralized upon the instability of human glory and the evanescence of many other things. No, wait, that’s what Herman Melville did in 1870 when a random stranger in a cigar store had never heard of his Revolutionary War–hero grandfather. When I found out my old neighbor had never heard of my Revolutionary War–hero protagonist, I went and got a taco with my sister. Still, it does seem eerie how one day in 1824 two-thirds of the population of New York City was lining up to wave hello to Lafayette and nineteen decades go by and all that’s left of his memory is the name of a Cajun college town.

  Thanks to the nationwide euphoria over the elderly Lafayette’s return tour of the United States, countless American streets, parks, cities, counties, schools, warships, horses, and babies bear his name. The long list includes Scientology founder Lafayette Ronald “L. Ron” Hubbard and my Arkansas-born great-great-uncle Lafayette Hinds, who went by “Fate” for short.

  The most meaningful namesake by far is Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House. Also known as Lafayette Park, this is the nation’s capital of protest, the place where we the people gather t
ogether to yell at our presidents.

  In each corner of this seven-acre park stands a statue of four of the most revered European officers who served in the Revolutionary War: Lafayette, Rochambeau, Steuben, and Thaddeus Kosciuszko, the Polish engineer whose defensive works contributed to the Continental Army’s victory at Saratoga. Or as one of the anti-nuclear protesters who have kept up a continual peace vigil in the park since 1981 referred to the warrior statues when I chatted with her the last time I visited the park, “goons with guns.”

  While I am baffled by the off-topic inclusion of an equestrian statue of President Andrew Jackson lording over the center of a square honoring the contributions of foreign fighters, I do approve of the bronze Jackson’s gesture of tipping his hat, evoking Walt Whitman’s explanation for the “genius” of the American people as “the President’s taking off his hat to them and not they to him.”

  Lafayette Park has hosted civil rights activists picketing Lyndon Johnson to send federal troops to protect their comrades in Alabama after the “Bloody Sunday” march in Selma, various tent cities called “Reaganville” that homeless advocates erected throughout the 1980s, and the demonstrators against the Persian Gulf War, who, George H. W. Bush once complained to Parade magazine, were “beating those damn drums in front of the White House when I was trying to have dinner.”

  Of all the rallies, sit-ins, and acts of civil disobedience staged at Lafayette Square over the decades, perhaps the one that Americans should be the most proud of is the gathering the Ku Klux Klan convened there in 1982. The three dozen or so white supremacist dunderheads who showed up to demonstrate were provided police protection against the hordes of agitated counterprotesters pouring into the capital to demonstrate against their demonstration. Freedom of expression truly exists only when a society’s most repugnant nitwits are allowed to spew their nonsense in public. In Lafayette Park distasteful speech is literally permitted, with permits issued by the National Park Service, the federal agency managing the site.