The Marquis

by Laura Auricchio

  The very model of a mercenary officer, Mauroy was as cynical as he was avaricious. He actively tried to poison Lafayette’s idealistic views during the long ocean crossing, later explaining that “I wanted by my objections to prepare him for the disappointments he might experience.” Determined to shake Lafayette’s belief that Americans “are unified by the love of virtue, of liberty … that they are simple, good, hospitable people who prefer beneficence to all our vain pleasures,” Mauroy argued that Americans were no different from their European brethren. Having come from Europe, they brought “the views and prejudices of their respective homelands” to the “unspoiled gound” they now inhabited. In fact, Mauroy believed that Americans might be even less admirable than the men and women they’d left behind because, to his mind, “fanaticism, the insatiable desire for wealth, and misery” were the three motivations that kept a “nearly uninterrupted stream of immigrants” flowing to the New World. Where Lafayette perceived only goodness, Mauroy saw greedy men who “sword in hand … cut down, under a sky that is new to them, forests as ancient as the world, water a still virgin land with the blood of its primitive inhabitants, and fertilize with thousands of scattered cadavers the fields they conquered through crime.” Still, Lafayette was unfazed. He landed on North Island as optimistic as the boy who’d once hoped to slay the Beast of the Gévaudan.

  The Victoire dropped anchor under inauspicious circumstances. To begin with, the ship had strayed far off its intended course. The Frenchmen had been heading for Charleston when adverse winds combined with the crew’s scant knowledge of the region to leave them more than fifty miles northeast of their destination at ten o’clock at night. The landing party sent ashore at North Island encountered four dark-skinned men who were out fishing by moonlight, and soon the weary travelers were trudging behind the fishermen to an unknown house where they hoped to receive hospitality from strangers. Their guides, it turned out, were slaves who belonged to one Major Huger; Lafayette had been welcomed to the land of liberty by men who were not free.

  None of this seems to have affected Lafayette’s sunny attitude. Seeing the world through rose-colored glasses, Lafayette was consistently charmed by the places and people of South Carolina. When he met Charles Biddle, he apparently had no idea that the unwilling translator harbored any ill will toward the French. In fact, during his first few weeks in America, Lafayette seems to have remained blissfully ignorant of the hostility routinely directed toward French officers in general. Writing from North Island on his second day in America, Lafayette crafted a glowing letter to Adrienne in which he confirmed his highest hopes. “The manners of this world,” he observed, “are simple, polite, and worthy in every respect of the country where the good name of liberty resounds.” A few days later he elaborated on the theme in a letter from Charleston, praising “the simplicity of manners, the desire to oblige, the love of country and of liberty,” and the “sweet equality” that “reigns over all.” He lauded not only the town—“one of the most attractive, best built, and most pleasantly populated cities that I have ever seen”—but also, and perhaps unwisely in a letter to his wife, its “very pretty” female inhabitants. Sweeping aphorisms about equality and possibility pepper these early letters, which, making no mention of the institution of slavery, take a selective view of already limited experiences. “What enchants me,” Lafayette rhapsodized, “is that all citizens are brothers; in America, there are no poor, and none that one could even call peasants.” He later remembered being struck by the sight of “new products and methods of cultivation” during his first trip to the New World. Even the landscape captured his imagination: where Mauroy saw destruction wrought by European colonists, Lafayette described “vast forests, immense rivers” where “nature adorns everything … with an air of youth and majesty.”

  Lafayette was only nineteen years old and innocent enough to trust his first impressions; he also had a tendency to express himself in rapturous tones no matter the occasion. Although he had come to fight the British, just a few months earlier he had been lavishing praise on the city and people of London. Writing to Adrienne from the English capital on February 28, he had reported feeling completely at home—something that he had never quite felt in Paris. “For once, my love, I am just like these gentlemen,” he wrote, explaining that “we dance all night and, perhaps because my dancing is more on a par with everyone else’s, I like the ball here.” He also liked Englishwomen. As he put it to Adrienne, “to us, all the women are pretty, and good company.” Strikingly, he referred to England—the nation with which he was about to go to war—as “my new country.” Then again, as he admitted, “it is true that I am inclined to see everything in the best light.”

  In America, a unique set of circumstances boosted Lafayette’s natural optimism. Lafayette was the only marquis around—and although his rank counted for little in the drawing rooms of Paris and Versailles, it never failed to dazzle his American hosts. Many of Lafayette’s shipmates bore titles of nobility, but none so exalted as his. And while some could boast of accomplishments that dwarfed Lafayette’s, none of them enjoyed the benefits that were lavished upon the young marquis.

  Lafayette’s less privileged companions had a very different experience of their arrival in the New World. The passengers from the Victoire set off for Charleston in two groups: one, including Mauroy, sailed with the ship to its destination, while the rest, including Lafayette and de Kalb, made the journey overland. De Kalb described the three-day march from North Island to Charleston as an exhausting ordeal made with great difficulty in unbearable heat. His letters report on the fevers and illnesses suffered by his companions, as well as the purges and rest cures they underwent. Perhaps a bit of boasting was involved—“I believe I’ll bury all our young men,” the fifty-six-year-old de Kalb wrote to his wife—but his story tallies with the recollections of his aide-de-camp, the Chevalier Dubuysson. In a lengthy memoir sent back to France that autumn, Dubuysson elaborated on the journey to Charleston. Offering details overlooked by Lafayette and de Kalb, Dubuysson recalled that a shortage of horses had left the group to set out on foot. Armed to the hilt for fear of marauders, and too weighed down to carry any fresh clothing, they plodded slowly through the oppressive humidity. It did not take long for the men to realize that their heavy riding boots were adding to their misery, and with no other shoes at their disposal, they chose to walk barefoot through stretches of “burning sand” and dense woods. Three days later, Lafayette and his companions arrived in Charleston looking a great deal like “beggars and bandits,” as Dubuysson put it, and they “were received accordingly.”

  Dubuysson encountered anti-French sentiment everywhere. He offered no excuses for the swarms of ill-mannered French soldiers of fortune he witnessed in Charleston, many of whom, he believed, were bad seeds who had been “ruined by debt” or “chased out of their corps.” But he was nonetheless critical of Americans who routinely heaped invective upon the foreign soldiers who had come to the colonies’ aid. With an unseemly harshness, he complained that “all the French here are paid very little for the sacrifices they make on behalf of a populace that offers them no gratitude, and that merits just as little.”

  Lafayette was immune to such problems. Dubuysson found the honors abundantly bestowed upon his companion bewildering and altogether out of proportion to the middling rank of a marquis. But in America, the sudden appearance of a group of titled Frenchmen in South Carolina was so noteworthy that it made the papers as far north as Boston. The Independent Chronicle and the Universal Advertiser carried a dispatch from Charleston reporting that “a number of Volunteers and French Officers, who have three Years Leave to serve in America, are just arrived here.” The author seemed not to be entirely clear who the important personages were: “among them,” the article announced, “are the Marquis de Moncaim, and the Marquis de Fayette, the last said to be Son-in Law to the Duke d’Aguen.” The identities are garbled, but the errors didn’t make much difference in this context. The foreign
names were all the same to an American audience seeing them for the first time, and the salient idea was conveyed quite clearly: highborn, influential French officers were joining the American army. To the reading public, the men’s arrival must have seemed a sign of hope.

  On June 26, 1777, the group set off for Philadelphia, where they expected the Continental Congress to confirm their appointments, assign them commands, and send them off to fight in General Washington’s army. The 650-mile trip north began comfortably enough for the dozen or so officers and their servants, or at least for the lucky ones who started out in open carriages—the most luxurious means of transportation they could find, albeit a step down from the sleek cabriolets, ornamented with lacquer and gilt, that Lafayette and his friends had once raced through the narrow streets of Paris. As Dubuysson describes it, the European convoy must have made for an unlikely spectacle: homespun wagons, piled high with baggage and pulled by teams of wheezing horses, lurched violently as they crept along behind an incongruously majestic guide—one of Lafayette’s servants dressed for the occasion in the colorful costume of a hussar, which customarily featured horizontal gold braids running across the jacket, vertical gold braids coursing down the legs of the trousers, and a tall black hat surmounted by a prominent plume completing the opulent look.

  The parade was nearly as brief as it was conspicuous. Four days of jostling over rocky paths proved too much for the rickety vehicles; somewhere in North Carolina the axles gave way and the coaches ground to a halt. Leaving behind a trail of baggage, the men continued on horseback through Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. Writing from Petersburg, Virginia, on July 17, Lafayette related the scene to Adrienne with a measure of self-deprecating humor: “I started out brilliantly by carriage,” he reported, but now “we are all on horseback, after having broken the carriage, in my usual laudable fashion, and I hope to write to you in a few days that we have arrived on foot.”

  And so they would. Over the course of the next ten days, the horses proceeded to collapse of exhaustion, one by one, in the steamy heat of the mid-Atlantic summer. On the morning of Sunday, July 27, the Frenchmen reached Philadelphia, a bedraggled crew plagued by fever and dysentery. No military campaign in all of Europe, Dubuysson complained, could have been “harder than this voyage,” which offered no pleasures to mitigate the pain. But the men had been buoyed by the infectious “zeal of Lafayette” and now, with the thirty-two-day journey ended, a grateful Congress would soon welcome the travelers—or so the Frenchmen imagined.

  The reception they received was in fact rather cold. John Hancock of Massachusetts was serving as president of the Second Continental Congress, and with Congress out of session for the day, his home was a natural destination for the French visitors. Pausing just long enough to wash up, the exhausted but still eager officers made their way to Hancock’s pleasantly situated house at the intersection of Arch and Fourth Streets. But Hancock was not interested in speaking with these disheveled foreigners who appeared unbidden on his doorstep. He suggested they call on Robert Morris, a wealthy Philadelphia merchant who represented Pennsylvania in Congress and was a member of the Committee of Congress for Secret Correspondence—the same body that had appointed Silas Deane to drum up French support for the revolution. As far as Hancock was concerned, if Deane had sent these men to America, Morris should be the one to deal with them. So off they went to find Morris, who at least had the courtesy to arrange an appointment for the following day before putting them back on the streets of Philadelphia.

  The next morning, Lafayette and twelve other French officers gathered in front of the Chestnut Street entrance to Independence Hall, ready for what they hoped would be a history-making conversation with Morris. After waiting quite some time, they saw Morris walking toward them in the company of yet another American representative, James Lovell of Massachusetts, who was hastily introduced as a gentleman who “speaks French very well and has been charged with dealing with all of your countrymen.” Having been passed around like so many hot potatoes the day before, Lafayette and his compatriots were disheartened when Morris departed just as brusquely as he had arrived. But as far as Lovell’s language skills were concerned, the visitors were indeed impressed. Dubuysson recalled that Lovell “received us in the street, which is where he left us after calling us, in very good French, adventurers.”

  If nothing else, the abbreviated conversation with Lovell explained the hostility they had experienced since reaching Philadelphia. Lovell “ended his harangue,” as Dubuysson put it, by complaining about Silas Deane. It seems that Deane had been asked to send back four French engineers but had instead inflicted upon Congress a certain Monsieur du Coudray, who had made a very poor impression, along with “some so-called engineers … and some useless artillerymen.” Fortunately, Lovell continued, Benjamin Franklin had saved the day by locating four real engineers in Paris. Since those engineers had recently arrived, no further Frenchmen would be required. Lafayette and his companions, Lovell concluded, should feel free to head home.

  Major General Philippe Charles Tronson du Coudray had all but ensured his countrymen’s icy reception when he’d arrived in the colonies bearing exorbitant demands, an imperious manner, and exaggerated claims to political influence. Lovell’s denunciation notwithstanding, du Coudray did possess some valuable qualities. He was an experienced army engineer selected by France’s minister of war to oversee the transfer of French guns to ships bound for America, but he had arrived in June bearing a letter from Silas Deane placing him in charge of all of America’s artillery and engineers and promising tremendous funds to match this high authority. Unfortunately, the position Deane so freely assigned to du Coudray was already occupied. The occupant—Brigadier General Henry Knox, for whom Fort Knox is named—was only one of the many American generals who threatened to resign if Deane’s agreement with du Coudray was to be honored.

  Du Coudray’s intimations of close ties to the French court had left Congress in a quandary. On June 19, John Adams was among those who had equivocated. Acknowledging that du Coudray’s “terms are very high,” Adams nonetheless concluded that “he has done us such essential service in France, and his interest is so great and so near the throne that it would be impolitic, not to avail ourselves of him.” Undaunted by the disputes raging around him, du Coudray persisted in inspecting the region’s fortifications, which he critiqued in contemptuous reports. And although his bleak assessments of Philadelphia’s defenses would unfortunately prove to be accurate, his high-handed denunciations of the Delaware River forts, designed and built by American hands, endeared him to no one. Writing of Fort Billingsport, du Coudray deemed its plan “very bad” and executed “without judgment.” Fort Mifflin he termed “badly situated,” its battery “improperly directed,” its embrasures “badly constructed”—in short, “it can answer no valuable purpose.” And the best he could say of Fort Bull was that its faults “do not render it as useless as the two former Forts.”

  By the time Lafayette’s group arrived, the far more satisfactory Louis Lebègue Duportail, handpicked by Franklin, had appeared to save the day. He, too, was exasperated by the sad state of American military affairs, but being more discreet than du Coudray, he shared his caustic, condescending thoughts primarily with the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes. “There is a hundred times more enthusiasm for this revolution in a single café in Paris than in all the united colonies,” Duportail ludicrously lamented to Vergennes in a November letter. Nonetheless, he believed the revolution a fight worth having. Duportail was well aware that “shepherding the colonies to victory would cost France several millions,” but he deemed it an investment that would “be amply repaid by the destruction of the maritime power of England, which, having no more colonies, will soon have no marine.” Shortly after reaching America’s shores, Duportail was placed at the head of the army corps of engineers. With that, the American army had received all that it imagined it needed from France.

  Convinced that their
cause was hopeless, Lafayette and his companions were surprised the following morning when the man who had dismissed them so unceremoniously in front of Independence Hall appeared at Lafayette’s door. Mistakes had been made, explained the contrite Lovell, who was now accompanied by another French-speaking congressman, William Duer of New York. Congress wanted to make amends—but only to Lafayette, and only on America’s terms. If Lafayette would renegotiate some details, he would be granted “the rank and commission of major general in the army of the United States” that Deane had promised. First, in the interest of fairness to American officers who had been fighting for months before Lafayette’s arrival, Congress would rescind the misleading seniority Deane had awarded him: Deane had stipulated that Lafayette’s tenure begin on the date of their agreement, December 7, 1776, but Congress changed his official start date to July 31. Second, no salary would be attached to this commission—a condition already written into Lafayette’s appointment. Lafayette eagerly agreed, and on July 31, he was in possession of a major general’s sash and a letter from Congress confirming his rank.