Adopted Son

by David A Clary

  Advice could go both ways. After Washington talked Maryland and Virginia into chartering his navigation projects on the Potomac and James Rivers, Virginia granted him fifty shares in each of the corporations. He did not know whether to accept them. Lafayette advised him to take the stock as a reward for his services. Washington had told him that the king of Spain had promised him two Spanish jacks to breed to his mares, but they never showed up. Lafayette called that “a farther proof that kings are good for nothing but to spoil the sport.” He sent some Maltese jacks to Mount Vernon.19

  Lafayette made a grand tour of the German states in the summer and fall of 1785. He had been invited by Frederick the Great to join an international mob of generals at the annual maneuvers of the Prussian army. Among them were Cornwallis and the Duke of York, heir to the British throne. Frederick seated him between them at the nightly banquets, and directed all his questions to the Frenchman. “My reception,” Cornwallis complained, “was not flattering; there was a most marked preference for La Fayette.”20

  The marquis told Washington all about it in one of the longest letters he ever wrote, in February 1786. He had met many German veterans of the American war. “Ancient foes ever meet with pleasure,” he observed. Great Frederick had gone to seed. He “could not help being struck by that dress and appearance of an old, broken, dirty corporal, covered all over with Spanish snuff, with his head almost leaning on one shoulder, and fingers quite distorted by the gout.”

  The Prussian army was larger than any Lafayette had ever seen. For eight days, he watched over 30,000 troops perform with mechanical precision. After the demonstrations, he toured several battlefields. Wherever he went, he told his “dear general,” he “had the pleasure to hear your name pronounced with that respect and enthusiasm which altho’ it is a matter of course…never fails to make my heart glow with unspeackable happiness…. And to be your friend, your disciple, and your adopted son was…the pride of my heart.” Despite their admiration for Washington, Frederick and other royalists baited Lafayette on his republican beliefs. They believed the United States was a weak, quarrelsome rabble, and his tour became a constant argument. He ran into the same problem when he met Emperor Joseph II in Vienna.21

  Washington was overwhelmed by the wealth of detail, which made him wax philosophical. “To have viewed the several fields of battle over which you passed,” he mused, “could not, among other sensations, have failed to excite this thought, here have fallen thousands of gallant spirits to satisfy the ambition of, or to support their sovereigns perhaps in acts of oppression or injustice! melancholy reflection! For what wise purposes does Providence permit this?”22

  They discussed what to do about the British, who refused to give up their military posts in the Northwest. Lafayette advised resuming the war; Washington was more patient. The young man was shaken when he learned that Greene had died. Washington told him that “in him you lost a man who affectionately regarded and was a sincere admirer of you.” He was happier to report that Shays’ Rebellion, a tax- and debt-relief uprising in Massachusetts that had threatened the national armory at Springfield, had ended peacefully.23

  America and France entered times of trial in 1787. Washington left Mount Vernon in the spring to preside over the Constitutional Convention. Lafayette was appointed to the Assembly of Notables, summoned by the king because his government faced bankruptcy and he hoped the Notables would find a peaceful way to bail him out. Lafayette, one of thirty-six nobles there, became a leader of upper-class intellectuals who believed France must cease to be a “despotism” and adopt the principles of the American Revolution. The king called them to order in February, and they met into early May.24

  The finance minister, Calonne, recommended big cuts in government spending, meaning the excesses of the spendthrift queen. He wanted to limit the king’s access to state funds, and he wanted tax reform. Crowds filled the streets outside the Assembly, and the whiff of revolution was in the air, so there would be no further taxes on the poor, but new ones on the nobility, who had been exempt. He also wanted to eliminate the Farm. Lafayette was impressed, but his fellow nobles dug in. The Assembly started as an appeal to patriotism. It turned into a near brawl.

  Lafayette was at first optimistic, he told Washington. He planned to push for fundamental reforms, including “a kind of House of Representatives in each province,” and an overhaul of taxes, spending, and the government. Inquiry into the government’s finances soon exposed corruption, causing an open confrontation between Lafayette and Calonne. The marquis called for a National Assembly. This was going too far—an elected legislature would mean the end of royal absolutism. Calonne demanded that Lafayette be arrested, but instead the king banished the marquis from court and fired the finance minister. The proposal for a National Assembly was diverted into a call for the Estates General, a gathering of the country’s leading lights last summoned in the early seventeenth century.

  Lafayette told Washington he had “made a motion to inquire into bargains by which, under pretence of exchanges, millions had been lavished upon princes and favourites…M. de Calonne went up to the king, to ask I should be confined to the Bastille. An oratory battle was announced betwen us for the next meeting and I was getting the proofs of what I had advanced, when Calonne was overthrown from his post, and so our dispute ended, except that the king and family…don’t forgive me for the liberties I have taken.” He was proud of himself.25

  Lafayette thought he was doing as his adoptive father would have done. Others had already noticed that in him. The wily French bishop and politician Talleyrand concluded that it was as if somebody was telling him what to do, although he did not know who. Madame de Staël, witty chronicler of the French Revolution, said that it was “an extraordinary phenomenon, that a character like M. de Lafayette should have developed among the highest ranks of the French nobility.” She concluded that the only explanation was his devotion to Washington. He had received liberal ideas from his adoptive father, but he entirely forgot the elder man’s discretion and practicality.26

  The debates in the Assembly spilled into the streets, and agitators ranted on every corner. For the first time, Frenchmen shouted about such ideas as liberty, equality, and representative government. Mobs filled Paris, calling for the heads of the king and all aristocrats, and France began its slide into anarchy. As Jefferson told Adams, “The king long in the habit of drowning his cares in wine, plunges deeper and deeper; the queen cries but sins on.” He saw the end coming for royalism.27

  Lafayette became known in court as “the most dangerous man of all.” When Marie-Antoinette urged the king to cancel Lafayette’s commission, the marquis resigned from the army. No longer welcome at Versailles, he lost his attachment to the court and its system. Restrictions on the provincial assemblies did not improve his outlook. “We made loud complaints,” he told Washington in October 1787, referring to his participation in the Auvergne Assembly. It rejected any new taxes without reform of royal spending. Some assemblies sent delegates to Versailles, and they were tossed into prison.

  The king of France was “all mighty,” the marquis complained. He had “all the means to enforce, to punish, and to corrupt.” His ministers had “the inclination, and think it their duty to preserve despotism.” But he was optimistic that his country would follow the American example. Washington sent him a copy of the new Constitution of the United States, telling him that it was “now a child of fortune, to be fostered by some and buffeted by others. What will be the general opinion on, or the reception of it” was not for him to decide. Lafayette declared it “a bold, large, and solid frame for the Confederation.” He had only two objections: it needed a bill of rights, and he thought the office of president had too much power, although he took comfort that Washington could not refuse being elected president. The solution to France’s problems, he decided, was to adopt a constitution on the American model.28

  Washington worried about his adopted son’s safety. A French abolitionist visited
him at Mount Vernon early in 1788. “He spoke to me of M. de la Fayette with the greatest tenderness,” the visitor reported. “He regarded him as his child; and foresaw, with a joy mixed with inquietude, the part that this pupil was going to act in the approaching revolution of France.”29

  “I hope and trust the political affairs in France are taking a favorable turn,” Washington told Lafayette in February 1788. It gave him “great pleasure to learn that the present ministry of France are friendly to America; and that Mr. Jefferson and yourself have a prospect of accomplishing measures which will mutually benefit and improve the commercial intercourse between the two nations.”30

  One of those nations was sliding toward chaos, and the weakness began at the top. King Louis suffered bouts of depression and fell into prolonged silences. When he was worried, he stuffed himself with food and wine until he collapsed. The queen dominated him, and as the months passed he became increasingly isolated. Meanwhile, “clubs” and “societies” sprang up all over Paris, and Lafayette organized one called the Club of Thirty. After Washington sent him the American Constitution, he invoked it so often that they became known as “Constitutionalists,” “Americans,” or “Fayettistes.” Eventually they called themselves “Patriots,” like the American rebels.

  They met often, and Jefferson was usually there, although he did not participate. “This party comprehended all the honesty of the kingdom,” he told a friend. He saw it as the best hope for France’s future. But Jefferson did not know where Lafayette got his ideas for running its meetings. When he hosted one of them, he was “a silent witness to a coolness and candor of argument, unusual in the conflicts of political opinion; to a logical reasoning, and chaste eloquence, disfigured by no gaudy tinsel of rhetoric or declamation…the Patriots all rallied to the principles thus settled.” That could have described Washington’s councils of war.31

  The clubs planned to compete for power in the National Assembly that Lafayette had proposed, but they had to settle for an Estates General. The provincial assemblies met again in February 1788 but were denied freedom of debate and fell apart. The one in Auvergne voted to split into two provinces, and within months other separatist movements arose in almost every province, followed by riots in cities across France. Bowing to pressure from his ministers, on September 23, 1788, Louis called for the first meeting of the Estates General since 1614, for the following spring. He summoned a second Assembly of Notables in November to decide how the Estates General should be assembled.

  There were three Estates—the clergy, the nobility, and everyone else. The king would appoint half the first two, which would elect the rest from their own members. The Third Estate excluded most commoners, because of limited suffrage and a high poll tax. Each Estate had one collective vote, so the first two could outvote the Third. Lafayette proposed that the Notables expand entry to the Third Estate and give it two votes to balance the vested interests. He lost.32

  The affairs of France had “come to a crisis,” the marquis admitted. Washington warned him, “Little more irritation would be necessary to blow up the spark of discontent into a flame that might not easily be quenched…. Let it not, my dear marquis, be considered as a derogation from the good opinion that I entertain of your prudence when I caution you…against running into extremes and prejudicing your cause.”33

  In the fall of 1788, a rumor that Lafayette had been imprisoned in the Bastille threw a scare into Washington. He told the marquis that he hesitated to say anything in his letters that might endanger the young man. Since that time, he said, he had “been made happy by hearing, that public affairs have taken a more favourable turn in France,” a reference to the Estates General.34

  When Washington received a letter from Lafayette in January 1789, it put him at ease. As for his own situation, he was still reluctant to accept the American presidency, but he would if he had to. While Europeans were quarreling among themselves, he observed, his young friend need not doubt that Americans would “continue in tranquility.”35

  The year 1789 would see big changes in both countries and in the separate roles of Washington and Lafayette. The strong bond between them guided the American’s response to what happened across the ocean. He saw the events through Lafayette’s eyes, hoping that his adopted son would achieve the success he desired. What actually happened took both of them by surprise.36

  HE IS SENSIBLE HIS PARTY ARE MAD

  Early in 1789 Washington sent Gouverneur Morris to France as a trade representative and as his confidential agent. A former congressman who had supported Lafayette during the aborted Canadian campaign in 1778, Morris was a gigantic man, as tall as Washington, who wore a peg leg because of a carriage accident a few years earlier. He had a ringside seat at France’s unraveling and gave Washington candid reports on what his adopted son was up to.37

  After Lafayette was elected to the Estates General from Auvergne, Morris told Washington that it was because “[h]e was too able for his opponents. He played the orator with as much éclat [brilliance] as ever. He acted the soldier and is at this moment as much envied and hated as his heart could wish. He is also much beloved by the nation for he stands forward as one of the principal champions for her rights.” Lafayette and the other liberals were friends of the United States, but the other members of the Estates showed “extreme rottenness.” The nobles were thieves and liars, and the people had “no religion but their priests, no law but their superiors, no moral but their interest.” The first use they made of liberty was “to form insurrections everywhere.”38

  The government answered unrest by sending troops to shoot into crowds. Earlier, in the summer of 1788, a colossal hailstorm had flattened crops in the central part of the country. That followed two years of drought, and the worsened food shortages caused more riots. The court had lost its financial credit, so it issued paper money, backed by nothing. Nobody would accept it. The Farm doubled its duties on foodstuffs, prices soared, markets crashed, and factories closed, laying off 200,000 workers. By 1789, leaflets papered the cities, accusing the court of trying to starve the country into submission.39

  Gouverneur Morris, by Edward Dalton Marchant, after Thomas Sully, 1873–74. A man of biting wit, Morris had a ringside seat at the French Revolution and gave Washington candid reports about what his adopted son was up to. He also helped to save Adrienne’s life, and resented Monroe’s claiming full credit for that. (INDEPENDENCE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)

  Lafayette was the champion of the Third Estate, but he had been elected to the Second with warnings to defend his own class’ interests. He was torn. Early in May 1789 he went to Jefferson’s house to ask for advice. Morris was there, and they both urged him to wait until things became clear before he played his hand. Jefferson told Washington that he was “in great pain for the M. de Lafayette.” He told the marquis, “As it becomes more and more possible that the noblesse will go wrong, I become uneasy for you. Your principles are decidedly with the tiers état [Third Estate], and your instructions are against them.” He cautioned against giving “an appearance of trimming between the two parties which may lose you both.” He expected Lafayette to go over to the Third eventually, and warned him that he was playing in a dangerous game.40

  The king opened the Estates General at Versailles in May and told the three bodies to meet separately. The Abbé Sieyès, one of Lafayette’s Club of Thirty, proposed that they all meet together, with every member voting on his own, instead of the three collective votes. The Third naturally went along with that, and Sieyès talked the poorer clergy in the First into agreeing. Lafayette could get only 46 of 234 nobles in the Second to agree. Not much happened until the dauphin died a month later and the king retired with his ministers to mourn. The “court party” was leaderless, and the Fayettistes gained more converts in the First. Sieyès talked them into converting the Estates General into a National Assembly, ending 500 years of absolutism.

  When the members tried to enter their meeting hall the next day, they were barred by troo
ps. Inside, the remaining members of the First and the majority of the Second voided all resolutions of the Assembly. Lafayette’s ally Sylvain Bailly of Paris led the assemblymen to the royal tennis court, where he declared that the Assembly was going to prepare a constitution, restore public order, and uphold the principles of a limited monarchy. The members swore the “Tennis-Court Oath,” pledging to stick together. They reassembled in a church, their membership including the whole of the Third, 150 clergy, and two nobles.

  Lafayette was at home working on a document that he hoped would resolve everything. He showed up the day after the oath, when the king ordered the Assembly to adjourn and reassemble as separate Estates. Bailly and the pugnacious comte de Mirabeau (critic of the Society of the Cincinnati) defied him. “A nation assembled does not accept orders,” Bailly roared. The delegates cheered, then voted to end absolutism once and for all. “The National Assembly will now concern itself,” Bailly declared, “without distraction or rest, with the regeneration of the realm and the public welfare.”41

  Morris told Lafayette that a people who had known nothing but tyranny could not become republicans overnight. The marquis, he confided to his diary, “tells me I ignore the cause, for that my sentiments are continually quoted against the good party. I seize this opportunity to tell him that I am opposed to the democracy from regard to liberty. That I see they are going to destruction and would fain stop them if I could…. He tells me he is sensible his party are mad, and tells them so, but is not the less determined to die with them.” Morris suggested that “it would be quite as well to bring them to their senses and live with them.”42