The Marquis
Page 16
Lafayette’s letters paint a picture of his visit to Mount Vernon as he wished to see it and as the reunion of the former comrades-in-arms has been commemorated since. An enormous 1859 painting by the American artists Thomas Prichard Rossiter and Louis Remy Mignot rendered the scene much as Lafayette described it. The painting—destined to be reproduced in prints, on postcards, and as decorations on collectible plates for years to come—was created to support and to capitalize on the drive to restore the deteriorating Mount Vernon in the middle of the nineteenth century. It portrays the two generals standing on the neoclassical portico of the main house engaged in leisurely conversation. Behind Washington, a young girl clings to the lap of her mother, who sits at a small tea table enjoying a hot beverage and the company of a second woman. Behind Lafayette, in the shadows of a late-afternoon summer light, a young white boy and a black woman sit together on the grass, their playful gestures echoed by the pair of scampering dogs—one white, one brown—who frolic beside them. The manicured lawn stretches into the background until it yields to the gentle flow of the distant Potomac River.
A more complete picture of Mount Vernon at the time of Lafayette’s visit might be less idyllic. Looking beyond the majestic house and landscaped park, we would see five working farms, spread across eight thousand acres, where more than two hundred slaves lived and toiled. Mount Vernon was a fully functional plantation, growing wheat, corn, oats, and other grains. Washington, who firmly believed that a nation’s economic worth and moral value could be measured by its management of its land, surveyed his fields every day he could. He experimented constantly, trying new agricultural tools and techniques, and became a pioneer of modern farming systems through his advocacy of crop rotation, fertilization with manure, and other techniques that are now commonplace. Of course, while much of the intellectual work was his, most of the physical labor was performed by slaves.
Lafayette’s 1784 visit to Mount Vernon as imagined by Thomas Prichard Rossiter and Louis Rémy Mignot in 1859. (illustration credit 9.3)
Lafayette seems not to have mentioned slavery in any letters he sent to France in 1784, but he did not fail to notice the inhumane institution that enabled his adopted nation to flourish. Lafayette evidently saw himself as part of a great American experiment whose long-term success had not yet been fully ensured, and a sense of protective loyalty kept him from airing in Europe his criticisms of the United States. He had stated as much in a letter chiding John Adams, not so much for speaking ill of the Society of the Cincinnati but for letting his grievances be known abroad. Writing on March 8, 1784, Lafayette explained to Adams that “it Has Ever Been My duty and inclination to Set up in the Best light Every thing that is done By a Body of Americans.… Had I Amendments to Propose [to the society’s by-laws], it Should Be in America, and Not in Europe.” Lafayette implied that Adams should adopt the same policy of discretion.
On the matter of slavery, Lafayette followed his own advice. More than a year before visiting Mount Vernon he had written to Washington on the subject, proposing “a plan … Which Might Become Greatly Beneficial to the Black Part of Mankind.” Lafayette asked Washington to join him “in Purchasing a Small Estate Where We May try the Experiment to free the Negroes, and use them only as tenants.” The theory that slavery could be gradually abolished through such a program had been proposed by a handful of writers, mostly in Britain, but with little effect. Lafayette wrote to Washington that “such an example as yours, might render it a general practice. And, if we succeed in America, I will cheerfully devote a part of my time to render the method fashionable in the West Indies.” Lafayette concluded by declaring that “if it be a wild scheme, I had rather be mad that way, than to be thought wise on the other tack.”
Keenly aware that the issue of slavery was a political and economic powder keg threatening to explode the nascent union, Washington crafted a judicious reply. Lafayette’s proposal, Washington wrote, offered “striking evidence of the benevolence of your Heart.” Giving Lafayette just enough encouragement to buoy his hopes, Washington added, “I shall be happy to join you in so laudable a work; but will defer going into a detail of the business, till I have the pleasure of seeing you.” We do not know whether Lafayette and Washington did discuss slavery at Mount Vernon; if they did, their conversation has not come down to us.
Nonetheless, we do know that Lafayette addressed the matter at least twice during his 1784 American visit—both times in Virginia, where arguments on the subject had grown particularly heated. On November 16, Lafayette appeared before the Virginia House of Delegates in Richmond to receive its members’ official thanks for his “prudent, calm, and intrepid conduct during the campaign of 1781.” As the legislators put it, they wished that Lafayette might become the “model” for those seeking “glory” and praised the work he had done on behalf of “the interests of humanity.” Lafayette responded graciously, thanking the men of the chamber for the honor and voicing his appreciation for their constant affection and confidence. Yet before he concluded, he issued a plea that the state of Virginia might provide the world with “proofs of its love for the rights of all of humanity, in its entirety.”
At the time, Lafayette had reason to be hopeful that slavery might soon be abolished in Virginia. Now that America had won independence, a wave of abolition and emancipation had been sweeping through many of the northern states, where influential individuals and organizations were successfully arguing that the new nation must extend its promise of liberty to all people. Although slavery had been declared illegal by just two states—Vermont in 1777 and Massachusetts in 1783—systems of gradual emancipation had been introduced in Connecticut, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island and were under consideration elsewhere. Of the southern states that relied on slave labor to perpetuate their plantation economies, Virginia had exhibited the greatest inclination to permit occasional emancipation when, in May 1782, its state legislature had passed an “Act to Authorize the Manumission of Slaves.” This controversial law authorized any slaveholder to free his or her own slaves as long as the emancipation papers were written in “his or her hand and sealed, attested and proved in the county court by two witnesses, or acknowledged by the party in the court of the county where he or she resides.”
But Lafayette arrived at a moment of backlash: on the same day that he addressed the Virginia legislators, two counties submitted pro-slavery petitions, signed by a total of 257 citizens, to the Virginia General Assembly (as the House of Delegates and Senate were collectively known). These petitions were only the beginning; six more counties submitted remonstrances supporting slavery in the next twelve months, bringing the total number of signatories to 1,244. The eight counties mounted a variety of arguments and sought a range of outcomes, but they all had one goal in common: the repeal of the law permitting manumission. According to the petitions of November 16, 1784, “many Evils have Arisen from” partial emancipation, and “many of the same Free Negroes are Agents, Factors, and Carriers to the neighboring towns” of slaves who were stolen from their owners and freed under false pretenses by unwitting county courts.
Yet Lafayette remained hopeful that the law would not be repealed, and he acted accordingly. Still in Richmond on November 21, he wrote a testimonial supporting the application for freedom submitted by a slave named James Armistead, owned by William Armistead, who sought manumission on the basis of his contributions to the success of Lafayette’s 1781 campaign. As Lafayette confirmed, Armistead had “done Essential Service to Me” when he’d “Industriously Collected” intelligence “from the enemy’s camp.” He had, Lafayette wrote, “perfectly acquitted himself with some important commissions I gave him and appears to me entitled to every reward his situation can admit of.” Although it took more than two years, Armistead was freed on January 9, 1787, at which time he adopted the surname Lafayette. Thanks, in large part, to Lafayette’s efforts to publicize his commitment to manumission, his role in securing Armistead’s liberation became widely known on bot
h sides of the Atlantic. While in Paris in 1783, Lafayette had commissioned a painting and engraving depicting himself and Armistead at the Siege of Yorktown. Envisioned as pendants to Lafayette’s 1780 portraits of Washington with a turbaned African servant, the 1783 pictures depict Armistead in a fanciful costume topped by a plumed chapeau—an unlikely uniform for a black man hoping to pass unnoticed in 1781 Virginia. When Lafayette returned to the United States in 1824, a widely circulated broadside that reproduced Lafayette’s handwritten letter beneath a more plausible portrait of Armistead helped secure Lafayette’s reputation as a friend of the abolitionist cause.
The reputation was well earned. Throughout the 1780s and 1790s, Lafayette became increasingly active in various strains of the international abolitionist movement. His archives include correspondence on the subject with the English abolitionists Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp, as well as with the Marquis de Condorcet, who thanked him in 1785 for reading his Reflections on Negro Slavery, and Benjamin Franklin, who, as president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, sent Lafayette several copies of the society’s constitution on May 27, 1788. In 1788, Lafayette joined France’s Society of the Friends of the Blacks, an organization spearheaded by the writer and humanitarian Jacques-Pierre Brissot (also known as Brissot de Warville). In the same year, Lafayette became a corresponding member of the New York Manumission Society and the British Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. And he continued to keep abreast of developments in abolitionism even amid the tumult of the French Revolution, acquiring, for example, a handwritten French translation of James Phillips’s anti-slavery broadside Description of a Slave Ship, published in London in 1789.
It would, however, be a mistake to understand Lafayette’s views on slavery as being any more clear-cut than those of his abolitionist contemporaries. Although Lafayette championed liberty as an inalienable right, he never proposed the sudden or universal emancipation of slaves. Instead, his goals were similar to those articulated by Franklin, who spoke for many members of anti-slavery movements in describing the “final purposes” of the Pennsylvania Society as “the suppression of the slave trade and the gradual abolition of slavery itself.” Like Franklin and like Jefferson, who wrote frequently of his efforts to improve the lives of the roughly two hundred slaves on his plantation and devised plans to repatriate slaves to Africa, Lafayette advocated ameliorating the conditions of enslaved men, women, and children. He first broached the idea of improving the lot of slaves in the French colonies (the only territories in which France permitted slavery) in his 1783 memo on Franco-American commerce. By way of arguing that France’s colonies in the Americas should be allowed to import foodstuffs from the United States, Lafayette appealed to “the double voice of self-interest and humanity.” He observed that “as long as feeding the slaves depends on laws prohibiting the importation of foreign produce into the colonies the slaves will be few and poorly nourished, will work little and die sooner.” It was a cold calculus to be sure, and an unusually pragmatic position for Lafayette—a man who usually traded in absolutes.
Marie-Joseph-Yves-Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette at Yorktown. Engraving after Jean-Baptiste Le Paon by Noël Le Mire. 1782. (illustration credit 9.4)
An 1824 broadside reproducing Lafayette’s 1784 testimonial in support of the manumission of James Armistead, who spied for Lafayette during the 1781 Virginia campaign, beneath a portrait of Armistead. (illustration credit 9.5)
Tying himself into a moral knot that he never managed to untangle, Lafayette opted paradoxically to demonstrate the benefits of gradual emancipation by becoming a slaveholder himself. Although Washington declined to join in the venture, Lafayette put his plan for an ideal plantation into action in 1785, when he acquired two properties in Cayenne, the capital of the South American colony of French Guiana: Saint Régis (which he renamed L’Adrienne, in honor of his wife) and Le Maripa. For the fields planted with clove trees and sugarcane, and forty-eight slaves to work them, Lafayette paid 125,000 livres. A third property, La Gabrielle, worked by twenty-two slaves, was acquired in 1786 in a profit-sharing arrangement with the French government. According to a list compiled on March 1, 1789, seventy slaves were living on the three plantations. They ranged in age from the one-year-old Seraphim, who was brought to Le Maripa from a nearby plantation along with her parents and her four-year-old brother, to the blind sixty-year-old Hosea, who would die at L’Adrienne. As Lafayette wrote to Washington on February 6, 1786, his intention was “to free my negroes in order to make that experiment which you know is my hobby horse.” Washington replied with a lament that captured the contradiction of a slaveholder who had led a nation to freedom: “would to God a like spirit would diffuse itself generally into the minds of the people of this country, but I despair of seeing it.” Neither man could have foreseen that, when faced with the political and financial exigencies of the French Revolution and its aftermath, Lafayette would fail to live up to his own expectations.
On August 28, 1784, Lafayette and Caraman were once again on the road. Setting out from Mount Vernon, they were heading some four hundred miles due north to Fort Stanwix (also called Fort Schuyler), near Lake Ontario in what is now Rome, New York, to witness the signing of a treaty between the government of the United States and the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. With three appointed commissioners representing the interests of Congress, Lafayette had no official role in the proceedings, but he was eager to visit the Oneidas, whose young men had fought alongside him at the Battle of Barren Hill.
As Lafayette made his way through the mid-Atlantic region, his entourage grew. Future president James Madison, who was on a brief hiatus from public service, reported in a letter to Thomas Jefferson that he “fell in with the Marquis” at Baltimore and embraced the voyage as an opportunity to “gratify my curiosity in several respects.” From Baltimore, the men set off by barge to Albany. There, they awaited the arrival of the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois, France’s Philadelphia-based chargé d’affaires, whose diary offers a colorful chronicle of the group’s westward journey from Albany to Fort Stanwix. A fifth man, a certain Demanche, served as an aide. Although neither rank nor position designated Lafayette the leader of his group, he overshadows all others in Barbé-Marbois’s account, as even the weather played second fiddle to Lafayette’s persona in Barbé-Marbois’s telling. While the other members of the party bundled in cloaks and rugs to ward off the autumnal chill of central New York in late September and early October, Lafayette, the diplomat related, “seemed to be impervious to heat, cold, draught, humidity, and the inclemency of the seasons.” His only protection was “an overcoat of gummed taffeta,” in which he must have been a sight to behold. Evidently, the coat had been shipped from France packed “in newspapers that had stuck to the gum. There had been no time to pull them off, and the curious could read on his arm or his back the Courrier de l’Europe or the news from various places.”
Lafayette insisted that the travelers’ first stop be the settlement of Niskayuna, nestled deep in the woods near Albany. There, as Barbé-Marbois explains, Lafayette “wished to examine at firsthand phenomena that seemed very similar to those associated with Mesmer.” Niskayuna had been established in 1779 by the celibate yet rapidly growing Protestant sect known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing—known colloquially as the Shakers. Lafayette was not disappointed. As he described them to Adrienne, the Shakers were “enthusiasts who go through incredible contortions and who claim to perform miracles, in which I have found some of the methods of magnetism.”
According to Barbé-Marbois’s journal, Lafayette and his friends reached Niskayuna on foot on a Sunday, and the sound of “slow, melancholy, but rather melodious music” greeted the approaching visitors, who found the Shakers “in the midst of their religious devotions.” When the dancing and singing drew to a close, Lafayette set about the task he had come to perform: testing the powers of animal magnetism on one of the Shakers. An old man
“of extreme simplicity” was selected for the honor, and Lafayette was soon “magnetizing him with all his power,” but to no avail. The community looked on warily as Lafayette continued laying hands on the man, “trying without success the effects of magnetism on all his poles,” until an elderly Shaker, presaging the question put to Dorothy in Oz, asked whether this exercise was being performed “in the name of a good spirit or of an evil spirit.” So convincing was Lafayette in explaining the beneficent goals of mesmerism that the Shaker in question perceived an opportunity and attempted to convert the earnest Frenchman on the spot, hoping that Lafayette might proselytize for the community while spreading the good news about mesmerism. As Barbé-Marbois reports, “We were unable to shake him off until we left Niskayuna.”
The next leg of the trip was an eighty-mile drive “across a superb” but war-torn landscape. Duties were divvied up equally: Lafayette looked after the horses, Caraman arranged lodgings, Madison served as navigator, and Barbé-Marbois “was the cook for the troop.” Expecting provisions to be scarce, they had stocked their carriages with everything from cornmeal to chocolate, but the men wanted for nothing. With Lafayette in their midst, “people gave us butter in abundance,” reported Barbé-Marbois. “If we asked for milk, they brought it to us in great wooden pails.” Children were eager to serve as human candlestick holders or fire screens, and fought for the privilege of turning the wooden spit on which the visitors roasted their meats.