A private letter from Washington to Adrienne went out the next day. Hearing from her, he said, relieved his anxiety, because she was not as destitute as he had feared. “But I have still to sympathize with you on the deprivation of the dearest of all your resources of happiness…. I do it in all sincerity of my friendship for him, and with ardent desires for his relief; in which sentiment I know that my fellow-citizens participate.”
Washington’s position limited his freedom to act, he explained, but he assured Adrienne that he was doing everything he could to free her husband. Knowing that his letter might be intercepted by French agents, he proclaimed that his affection for both France and Lafayette was “unabated.” He thought it was unfortunate that affairs had come between them, and remained “confident that both have been led on by a pure love of liberty.” Accordingly, he expressed his earnest hope to “see them reunited in…their virtuous enterprise.” This was a veiled invitation to the French authorities to liberate Lafayette. He did not understand that if they did so, they would kill him.30
Adrienne learned that Lafayette had been moved to Magdeburg. Other wives of émigrés had divorced their husbands to protect themselves and their children from the Terror. She refused to do that, and sold the little property remaining to her. Then she received Washington’s financial support. “If I ever see and am reunited with my husband again,” she answered, “it will be thanks only to your goodness and that of the United States.” She could do nothing for Lafayette and had no way to communicate with him. “That is the situation I now suffer.”31
She told a friend that she felt herself “possessed of a courage which is not far removed from stupidity.” It enabled her to “judge sensibly and calmly.” Adrienne had never recognized her own strength. Over the coming months she would prove herself a strong, resourceful young woman who challenged France’s enemies, France itself, and the Terror. Her husband was helpless. She became the valiant knight of the Lafayette family.32
France was in chaos, invaded over every border, the Terror spreading its reach. By the fall of 1793 the last of the liberals, Bailly, had gone to the guillotine. Yet the French armies beat back all invaders and put down counterrevolutions. Washington offered Adrienne further consolation, but still he could do nothing officially. Letters from citizens piled up, demanding that his government do something. The president prodded the secretary of state, who prodded the ambassadors in France, England, and Holland. They approached other diplomats but gained nothing.33
Jefferson gave the president a progress report. A legal problem had arisen when the ambassadors used, for the prisoner’s relief, funds not appropriated for the purpose. He suggested that Washington ask Congress to appropriate Lafayette’s back pay from the war by retroactively not accepting his offer to serve without compensation. Washington agreed, and in March 1794 Congress granted $24,424 to Lafayette. As Jefferson observed, the legislation provided a fund to cover both past expenditures and future relief. It did so in a way “which can give offence to nobody,” because Congress had merely paid a debt.34
Adrienne finally heard from her husband. One of her letters had gotten through, and when he learned of her efforts to free him he felt “a need to thank you. I have associated you with stormy destinies which have turned out sadly,” Lafayette apologized, “but I know that you find some satisfaction in the knowledge that your love and esteem are the happiest memories of my life.”35
The Prussians moved Lafayette to Neisse, near the Polish border, early in 1794. He had become an embarrassment to King Frederick William II, who wished to be seen by the world as an enlightened ruler. Prussian courts had never charged Lafayette with a crime, and the government held him only as a favor to Austria, so he insisted that the empire take custody of him. The Austrians moved him to Olmütz, in Moravia, the worst place yet. The prison extended over a river that served as the town sewer, and his cell was filled with its stench, and with bedbugs, roaches, and other pests. His two friends were in the same place, but none of them knew that. They were chained in solitary cells, wearing rags, wallowing in their own filth.
As the Terror turned into the Grand Terror, Jacobin authorities arrested Adrienne and hauled her to a prison in Brioude, to await transportation to Paris, where she would be tried and executed. Her mother, grandmother, and sister Louise de Noailles were already lined up for the guillotine. George and Frestel were in hiding. Aunt Charlotte and the girls remained at Chavaniac, under house arrest. In June 1794 Adrienne landed in a Paris house converted to a women’s prison.
Young George’s resourceful tutor, Frestel, looked up Morris, who went to the authorities with a strong protest, pointing out that Lafayette was much beloved in America. The execution of his wife would “much impair” the friendly feelings between the two countries. France’s only ally was the United States, so his words carried weight, and his protest saved her life. Robespierre kept her name off the condemnation lists. Her mother, grandmother, and sister, however, lost their heads, along with almost all other nobles still in the country. If there was any consolation, it was that Robespierre’s own head bounced into a basket in July 1794.36
Those of his Jacobin allies followed, and two years of Terror came to an end, having claimed over a million lives. Moderates took control of the government, outlawed the Jacobins, and released most political prisoners, including the surviving aristocrats. Rochambeau got out, but Adrienne did not.
Washington and his cabinet had been all along discussing what to do about both Lafayettes. He considered writing a personal appeal to the king of Prussia, but the transfer to Austrian control ended that. The ambassadors had continued their informal advances to other diplomats, still getting nowhere. Before the Jacobin government fell, word reached Washington that it had declared Morris persona non grata and demanded his recall. At Jefferson’s urging, Washington sent James Monroe to France with a plan to get American citizens and Adrienne out of prison.37
Monroe got along with the five-man Directory better than Morris had with its predecessors. He got Tom Paine and other Americans set loose, but Adrienne was not an American citizen. Legally, she was the wife of a French deserter. He approached the authorities about her case, and they moved her from place to place. He found her and sent his wife, Elizabeth, to visit her in prison. The scene was “most affecting,” he recalled. News of the visit flashed across Paris, raising sympathy for the prisoner. Monroe soon joined his wife, their frequent visits embarrassed the authorities, and Adrienne’s liberation soon followed, on January 22, 1795.38
Her husband had not been so fortunate. While Monroe had been working to get her out of jail, a group of Lafayette fans in London hatched their own daring plot. Two of them, a young German doctor named Justus-Erich Boll-man, and Francis Huger, son of Lafayette’s first host in South Carolina, went to Olmütz. They learned that the prison doctor had ordered the guards to take Lafayette on a carriage ride into the country every day. The two swashbucklers stopped the carriage and told Lafayette to go. He misunderstood them, and in the confusion all three were captured. The Frenchman returned to his cell, while a sympathetic magistrate freed the other two.
James Monroe, attributed to Felix Sharples, ca. 1807–11. Monroe and his wife saved Adrienne from the guillotine. Later, he gave Lafayette the good news about his Louisiana land grant, and even later invited him to tour the United States as “the nation’s guest.” (INDEPENDENCE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)
Adrienne decided that if anybody was going to get her husband out of his hellhole, it would have to be herself. Like her countrywoman Joan of Arc, she set off on a righteous crusade.39
COURAGE, CHILD OF WASHINGTON!
Adrienne asked Monroe to arrange American passports for herself, her daughters, George, and Frestel. George received papers under the old family name of Motier, while Frestel traveled under his own name. He and George headed to the coast to find passage to America, carrying a letter from Adrienne to Washington. “Monsieur, I send you my son,” she began. With “deep and since
re feeling” she placed George “under the protection of the United States…and under the especial care of their president, the nature of whose sentiments toward my husband I so well know.” She wanted the boy to live obscurely, resume his education, and fulfill “the duties of a citizen of the United States.”40
Adrienne was an arsenal of energy and determination. She went to Chavaniac to pick up the girls, and to ensure that Lafayette’s aunt retained her home, she dipped into the loan from Morris and bought Chavaniac. Back in Paris, she retrieved something of her own. Neither she nor her mother had been émigrés, so she felt entitled to La Grange, a small estate and château in Brie, seventy-five miles east of Paris, as an inheritance from her mother. She won that case also. She dealt with creditors and secured more loans. Finally, Monroe gave her passports, stamped for America, so she and the girls could leave on an American ship. They sailed for Hamburg in September 1795.41
Washington described to her his sincere pleasure in learning that she had been released from confinement. He instructed Monroe on how to help her further, because he had no idea that she was doing well enough on her own. Meanwhile, the president had sent John Jay to London to negotiate a treaty with Britain and to ask the government there to help free Lafayette.42
Adrienne’s passport identified her as Mrs. Motier of Hartford, Connecticut—the only American community that had granted citizenship to Lafayette’s entire family. She pressed on to Vienna. Her grandfather had once been an ambassador there, so she gained an audience with Emperor Francis II. She asked for permission to join her husband in his cell, with their daughters. The startled emperor agreed but warned her that it would not help gain his release. He also told her to write him directly if she had any complaints about conditions in the prison. He added that she would find Lafayette well fed and well treated. “I hope that you will do me justice,” he begged, in what she said to others about him. She reached Olmütz in the middle of October and joined her husband in prison.
Lafayette was starving, practically naked, and swarmed over by insects. Adrienne protested to the commandant about his condition. He refused to answer her, and when she wrote to Vienna she was rebuffed there also. She and her daughters were confined to a cell next to Lafayette’s, and saw him only a few hours a day. She heard beetles clicking in the walls and prisoners being tortured in a nearby courtyard. For all the horror of the place, however, she was happy, because she was with her husband. The guards made the mistake of letting her and the girls keep their books and writing materials, and let them send letters to anywhere except America. The world soon learned about conditions at Olmütz.
Adrienne’s brave and dramatic gesture—a theatrical stroke worthy of a Lafayette—set off an international scandal. It was not enough that this heroic woman had joined her persecuted husband, but two young girls also were subjected to the frightful conditions. Plays, newspaper articles, songs, and poems celebrated the noble “Prisoners of Olmütz.” Debates erupted in the French, American, and British legislatures. Those in Congress were choked off because of the country’s neutrality in France’s wars with its neighbors. In the House of Commons, the unforgiving William Pitt the Younger declared, “Those who start revolutions will always be, in my eyes, the object of an irresistible reprobation. I take delight in seeing them drink to the dregs the cup of human bitterness that they have prepared for the lips of others.”
The story became more dramatic when the world learned that Adrienne had become sick. She developed a fever, her arms and legs swelled, and she broke out in blisters. The prison doctor wanted to send her to Vienna for treatment. When she asked the emperor for permission, he granted it on condition that she and the girls would not be allowed to return to Olmütz. She refused to be separated from her husband again.43
Lafayette and his family in prison, engraving by John Jeffreys, based on an earlier picture, 1805. Schmaltz ran thick and sticky for the Prisoners of Olmütz. (LILLY LIBRARY, INDIANA UNIVERSITY)
The international uproar spilled over to America. A French traveler reported that he heard everywhere “the same language expressive of attachment to France, of hatred and especially of distrust in regard to England, and of affection for M. de la Fayette,” except in seaport cities dominated by commerce with Britain.44
Newspapers and taverns were filled with stories, songs, and poems about the Prisoners of Olmütz. The papers also carried illustrations of their plight, ranging from hopelessly romantic to horribly graphic. Schmaltz flowed thick and sticky. When the new attorney general, William Bradford, saw Washington weep at the mention of Olmütz, he composed “The Lament of Washington,” which was set to music and sung or recited everywhere:
As beside his cheerful fire,
Midst his happy family,
Sat a venerable sire,
Tears were starting in his eye,
Selfish blessings were forgot,
Whilst he thought on Fayette’s lot,
Once so happy in our plains,
Now in poverty and chains.
CHORUS:
Courage, Child of Washington!
Though thy fate disastrous seems,
We have seen the setting sun
Rise and burn with brighter beams.
Thy country soon shall break thy chain
And take thee to her arms again.45
These outcries added to Washington’s burdens. Relations between the world’s two revolutionary powers had deteriorated ever since Edmond-Charles-Edouard Genêt had arrived as French ambassador in May 1793. “Citizen” Genêt wore out his welcome quickly. He castigated Washington for not doing enough to pay the American debt to his country, and subsidized newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsheets accusing the government of favoring the British side in the war. He bought a ship, outfitted it as a privateer, and announced that it would sail to the West Indies to raid British shipping. A neutral power could not tolerate that, so Washington had him recalled.
Genêt left behind a network of Democratic Societies, which agitated against the central power of the United States, playing on the country’s divided attitudes toward the French Revolution and its wars. The societies became the Democratic-Republican Party, the country’s first, which was soon opposed by the Federalists. The latter supported neutrality in the European conflict, but favored better relations with Britain. American merchants wanted to trade with both sides, but the Royal Navy commanded the seas, and seized neutral ships supplying France.
As Washington sent John Jay to London to work out a treaty, calling for neutral rights and evacuation of the forts in the Northwest, the country broke into a sectional conflict. The West mistrusted the central government anyway, and when it imposed an excise tax on whiskey, the region exploded in the Whiskey Rebellion. Troops put it down, and the tax was later repealed, but resentment lingered.
In 1795 Jay returned with a treaty that included few concessions from Britain, the main one being a promise to abandon the western forts. Fearing public reaction, Washington hesitated to ask the Senate to ratify it, but to get the redcoats off American soil he had to send it over. Then Ambassador Thomas Pinckney sent his own treaty from Spain in February 1796. He had won free navigation of the Mississippi and fixed the southern boundary of the United States on Spanish Florida’s border. The British evacuated the western posts and stopped raiding American shipping, Anthony Wayne defeated the Indians in the Northwest, and East and West both calmed down.
The behavior of France next aggravated American factionalism, however. The French wildly misinterpreted the Jay Treaty, seeing it as an alliance against France, so early in 1797 President John Adams sent a delegation to Paris to negotiate a treaty of amity and commerce and restore peace between the two revolutionary powers. At first rebuffed, in October 1797 the American delegates met with a demand for loans to France and a bribe for three French agents identified as “X, Y, and Z,” although the intended recipient was known to be Foreign Minister Talleyrand. By that time, American and French privateers were raiding each other’s sh
ipping, and the two countries were locked in what became known as the Quasi War. The XYZ Affair, as it was called in America, set a new low in Franco-American relations. With talk of a real war between the United States and France in the air, the Federalists gained the upper hand, authorized the United States Navy, began fortifying ports, and enlarged the army.46
Into this political thicket walked George-Washington Lafayette. He and Frestel landed at Boston in late August 1795 and wrote to the boy’s godfather, forwarding Adrienne’s letter. Washington wanted nothing more than to throw his arms around the fifteen-year-old, but his cabinet advised him to back off. The boy’s presence in the United States could be interpreted as hostility to France, which had condemned his father. French agents might try to kill him on American soil, or retaliate against Adrienne. The British might decide that he favored the other side if he took the French youngster into his home.
The president needed time to think, so he asked a friend in Boston, Senator George Cabot of Massachusetts, to stall George and Frestel. He told him to enroll the boy in Harvard, and sent money to cover the cost. “Let me in a few words,” he said, “declare that I will be his friend.” At that point he could not even write to George directly, so he asked Cabot to talk to him, and offer “the most unequivocal assurances of my standing in the place of and becoming to him a father, friend, protector, and supporter.” He should explain that, as president, he could not make his feelings public, and asked Cabot to explain to George and his tutor, in the clearest terms, why he could not take them into his house just yet. Washington’s love for George’s father was undiminished, “and my inclination to serve the son will be evidenced by my conduct.”47
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