Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

by Sarah Vowell

  The wounded Lafayette, who had fled the capital with Congressman Henry Laurens of South Carolina, sent his wife a script for what the “wife of an American officer” should tell naysayers about the fall of “the rampart of liberty.” He instructed her to spread the word that the British occupied “a poor forlorn town, exposed on every side, whose harbor was already closed.” (’Twas closed at the war’s outset when area patriots, including Franklin, installed obstructions in the Delaware River to block the enemy fleet’s water access to the city.)

  As the patriots’ greatest propagandist Thomas Paine spun it, before bolting from the city ahead of Howe’s entrance, “It is not a field of a few acres of ground, but a cause, we are defending.”

  That fall, every grain of truth washed ashore in France upon a wave of lies. One was that Johnny Burgoyne had conquered Albany and ruled the Hudson. Another was that Lafayette was killed in action. As Adrienne wrote of her protective mother, “She found a way to conceal the rumors of his death from me by taking me far from Paris.”

  Finally a letter dated the day after Brandywine arrived from Pennsylvania in which Lafayette assumed he was gently breaking the news of his injury to his wife as opposed to refuting gossip about his demise. He wrote, “I must begin by telling you that I am perfectly well because I must end by telling you that we fought a difficult battle last night, and that we were not the strongest.” After downplaying his wound, he whimpered, “I will have to stay in bed for a little while, which has left me in a bad mood.” For Adrienne, bad mood was an improvement upon dead mood.

  “When Paris heard rumors of the first battles in which Lafayette and his companions did honor to the name of Frenchmen, there was general approval,” wrote his friend Ségur. “The very persons who had blamed him the most for his bold enterprise”—including Adrienne’s father—“now applauded him. The court showed itself almost proud of him and all the young men envied him.” He concluded, “Thus public opinion, turning more and more toward war, made it inevitable and inevitably dragged a government too weak to resist in the same direction.”

  From Philadelphia, Lafayette was taken to recuperate among the Moravians, a community of German-American Jesus freaks in the future steel town of Bethlehem. Members of an old Protestant sect that predated Martin Luther, the Moravians abhorred violence. The Pennsylvania branch nevertheless set up a hospital to care for the men wounded in a war they denounced.

  “The good Moravian brothers bewailed my passion for war,” Lafayette later remembered, “but, while listening to their sermons, I was making plans to set Europe and Asia aflame.” In one of his screwball memos to government officials back home, he outlined how the French state should strike at Britain’s other colonies in Canada, the Caribbean, and India to pull focus from the redcoat crusade against the Americans. Never mind that France, despite its behind-the-scenes monkey business with Beaumarchais, still had a peace treaty with Britain. Prime Minister Maurepas, perhaps unaccustomed to receiving unsolicited foreign-policy advice from twenty-year-old French soldiers on the lam, quipped that Lafayette would have the government “sell all the furniture at Versailles to underwrite the American cause.”

  On October 1, Lafayette mailed Adrienne a bubbly update about the progress of his apparently adorable wound. “The surgeons are astonished by the rate at which it heals,” he cooed. “They are in ecstasy every time they dress it, and maintain that it is the most beautiful thing in the world.”

  Meanwhile, in less orgasmic corners of the war, Washington attacked the British encampment at Germantown. He planned to surprise and surround Howe’s long line of nine thousand Britons and Hessians camped in the town seven miles north of Philadelphia and force them to surrender—like Trenton, only bigger. Such a beefy offensive wasn’t in keeping with his low-key Fabian strategy but his orders for the operation allude to the wounded pride provoking the beast within: “Our dearest rights, our dearest friends, and our own lives, honor, and glory and even shame, urge us to fight.”

  Washington divided his eight thousand regulars and three thousand militiamen into fourths. Well before dawn on the morning of October 4, four columns were to quietly converge from four directions, arriving on Howe’s doorstep at the same time.

  Is it appropriate to call a battle plan romantic? Of course this scheme was way too fussy for these crumpled misfits to pull off. Of course Nathanael Greene’s forces would get lost in the fog and show up late. Of course the redcoat pros, no slouches they, would spot the early birds and sound the alarm before the rest of the stragglers could hit their marks. Yet there is something hopeful and endearing about Washington’s belief in these men. That he actually trusted them to break off in quarters, march in the dark, and come together at some precisely timed rendezvous was an act of intrepid, starry-eyed faith and fealty. That got dozens of them killed, but still.

  Howe, caught off guard by the earliest shots and as fogged in as everyone else, at first failed to understand the magnitude of the attack. When the initial patriot onslaught stupefied some nearby foot soldiers, Howe let rip the veddy British reprimand, “For shame, Light Infantry, I never saw you retreat before, form! form!” Afterward, one of his officers remarked how “pleased” the troops were when shots started whizzing by Howe’s head “after he had accused the battalion of having run away from a scouting party.” Howe later admitted that it simply had not occurred to him that “the enemy would have dared approach after so recent defeat as that at Brandywine.”

  On the one hand, Continentals under General “Mad” Anthony Wayne and General Stephen fought hard. On the other hand, the fog, thickened with gun smoke, prevented them from realizing they were shooting at each other and not the British. The fact that Stephen was drunk did not help.

  A few dozen infantrymen with Britain’s Fortieth Regiment of Foot holed up in the unfortunately well-built Cliveden, the house of the judge Benjamin Chew. In retrospect, the patriots should have just steered clear of it. But Henry Knox ordered an aggressive cannonade that proved futile against the mansion’s thick stone facade. Ensconced in their elegant makeshift citadel, the redcoats picked off scores of Continentals with muskets fired from the upstairs windows. A British officer who was inside the house recalled of his enemy, “To do them justice, they attacked with great intrepidity . . . several of them were killed with bayonets getting in at the windows and upon the steps, attempting to force their way in at the door.”

  When Cornwallis arrived from Philadelphia with reinforcements, the Continentals began their customary retreat, and once again Howe let them slip away. While less than a hundred Britons and Hessians were killed, in the chaos of the fog nearly five hundred were wounded. Washington marched away with a thousand fewer men—about one hundred and fifty killed, more than five hundred wounded, and nearly four hundred taken prisoner. He did politely return one captive to the British: Howe’s dog.

  Surveying the aftermath at the Chew house the following day, the Hessian Johann von Ewald “counted seventy-five dead Americans, some of whom lay stretched in the doorways, under the tables and chairs, and under the windows.” He added, “The rooms of the house were riddled by cannonballs, and looked like a slaughter house because of the blood splattered around.”

  While Washington once again managed to pull out with most of his battered crew intact, Germantown wasn’t quite the jubilant ego boost he had hoped for. Then he got sucker-punched by some theoretically good news from upstate New York. On October 17, General Burgoyne and his six thousand British and Hessian troops surrendered to Washington’s underling, General Horatio Gates, at Saratoga.

  Gates’s ranks had swollen with new recruits and rookie militiamen screaming for British blood after some of Burgoyne’s native allies scalped an area redhead. Gentleman Johnny was simply outnumbered, a fact that would come back to haunt Howe, given his decision to conquer Philadelphia instead of backing up Burgoyne.

  On October 22, after receiving the news of his colleague’s
downfall at Saratoga, a deflated Howe wrote to Secretary of State for America Germain requesting to “be relieved from this very painful service . . . I humbly request I may receive his Majesty’s permission to resign the command.” The request would be granted, and he would sail home the following May. Even though Howe accomplished his stated goal of capturing Philadelphia, the side effect of siphoning off thirteen thousand men who could have reversed the outcome of Saratoga forever dented his reputation. Eventually, Howe demanded a parliamentary investigation to clear his name, but he would never shake off the blame for Burgoyne’s surrender. Ditto Germain, for sloppy management. The buff-and-blue-wearing MP Charles James Fox denounced the bureaucrat as “an ill-omened and inauspicious character . . . unfit to serve the Crown.”

  As for Washington, how could he not envy Gates? Saratoga was the turning point of the war, the most spectacular patriot victory to date. And when it went down, His Excellency was more than two hundred miles away, licking his wounds from his recent setbacks.

  Worse yet, Washington complained to Gates, “I cannot but regret that a matter of such magnitude and so interesting to our General Operations, should have reached me by report only.” In other words, Gates did not inform his commander in chief directly but instead first alerted the Congress. Washington heard the news secondhand, a snub that contributed to his growing suspicions that Gates was plotting to replace him.

  All Washington had to do to rack up some glory was the minor matter of recapturing Philadelphia. Too bad winter was coming and he commanded battered personnel whose most obvious characteristic, as he had written to the Congress after Brandywine, was “the want of Shoes.”

  Tempted by Philadelphia, Washington was nevertheless wise enough to invite his most trusted generals to talk him out of revenge fantasies. Nathanael Greene sanely pointed out that any attempt to recapture the capital “will be attended with vast expence and the loss of many lives to no valuable purpose.” In one of the most perceptive sentences written in an era lousy with perceptive sentences, Greene predicted that an inevitable defeat in Philadelphia would “expose the weakness of the militia to the enemy and not only them but to all europe who now consider them much more formidable than they really are.”

  Lafayette agreed with Greene, writing to Washington, “Europe has a great idea of our being able to raise when we please an immense army of militia.” A defeat in Philadelphia might prove otherwise. After all, “The american interest has always been since the begining of this war to let the world believe that we are stronger than we can ever expect to be.”

  When Lafayette and Greene hinted that the patriots needed to keep putting on a show of strength for “Europe,” what they really meant was France.

  On December 4, a messenger arrived at Benjamin Franklin’s house outside Paris with news of Saratoga. “General Burgoyne and his whole army are prisoners!” he announced. The American envoys sent a quick message to Vergennes crowing about the “total Reduction of the Force under General Burgoyne himself & his whole Army having surrendered themselves Prisoners.” Coincidentally, Beaumarchais was hanging around Franklin’s house when the messenger turned up. The playwright, whose recently unloaded weaponry, ammo, and gunpowder contributed to the Saratoga success, was in such a rush to spread the word in Paris and/or pounce on profiting from it that he got into a carriage accident and broke his arm.

  King Louis XVI wrote to his cousin and co-conspirator in the Beaumarchais plot, King Charles III of Spain, “The destruction of the army of Burgoyne, and the very confined state in which Howe finds himself have totally changed the face of things. America is triumphant and England beaten.” Two days after learning of Saratoga, Louis notified Franklin and the American delegation they were welcome to officially reapply for French aid.

  Saratoga is remembered as the breakthrough that goaded Louis’s government to go public and recognize the independence of the United States. And that remains true, as the king’s letter to his Spanish counterpart portends. Yet a perusal of the correspondence exchanged by French ministers from late 1777 to early 1778 also reveals how captivated they were with Washington’s mettle at Germantown.

  On December 7, Vergennes received reflections on the state of patriot affairs from the French ambassador to Great Britain, Adrienne Lafayette’s great-uncle Noailles. According to his sources in London, Washington’s army was holding up. It was more experienced and, based on its eager offense at Germantown, not afraid “to attack, or defend itself.” Noailles wrote that the American encampment outside Philadelphia blocked Howe’s access to the continent’s interior and hindered his ability to forage for supplies. Hemmed in at the capital, Howe’s army would soon be dependent on the navy, “his only resource for subsisting in a position where he will soon be encircled on all sides.” True enough—occupied Philadelphia is remembered as a Tory party town, but food became short and crucial supplies, including firewood, grew scarce.

  On December 12, Vergennes wrote to the American commissioners regarding Germantown, “Nothing has struck me so much as General Washington’s attacking and giving battle to General Howe’s army. To bring troops raised within the year to this, promises everything.”

  On the occasion of Lafayette’s return visit to Brandywine in 1824, his secretary Levasseur acknowledged, “This battlefield was not remembered for a victory.” But given the fact that there would have been no Saratoga if Howe’s thirteen thousand troops had not been otherwise occupied duking it out with Washington’s in Pennsylvania, Levasseur noticed that the memory of the Philadelphia campaign “is no less dear to Americans who recall with gratitude the blood that their fathers and the young Lafayette spilled.” Levasseur concluded, “Happy is the country in which events are appreciated more for their influence on the destiny of the Fatherland than for the glamour of the moment!”

  • • •

  After Brandywine, the wounded Lafayette suffered as much from boredom as from the hole in his calf. Fortunately his religious fanatic hosts out in the Pennsylvania hinterlands were kind enough to provide entertainment to while away his convalescence. Unfortunately for the cooped-up twenty-year-old, their idea of fun was lending out books about the accomplishments of Protestant missionaries in Greenland.

  On October 14, 1777, Lafayette wrote to Washington, “Give me leave, dear general, to speack to you about my own business with all the confidence of a son, of a friend.” The business in question being Lafayette’s desire to command his own division, to actually be a general, as opposed to just being called one. He offered the commander his “respect” and “affection,” at a moment in time when Washington was a little lacking in both. “I’l conduct myself by your advices,” he pledged, adding, “I want to do some thing by myself, and justify that love of glory which I left to be known to the world.”

  Four days later he had not heard back from Washington, so he wrapped his bum leg in a blanket and quit Bethlehem to ride to HQ and plead his case in person.

  In a letter to the president of the Congress dated November 1–3, Washington wrote from his camp in Whitemarsh, around fifteen miles north of Philadelphia, “I feel myself in delicate situation with respect to the Marquis Le Fayette. He is extremely solicitous of having a Command equal to his Rank.” Previously opposed to this, Washington had softened, recommending, “It will be adviseable to gratify him in his wishes.” Compared with the other French officers Washington had so often railed against, he reported that Lafayette “is sensible, discreet in his Manner, has made great proficiency in our Language and from the disposition he discovered at the Battle of Brandy Wine, possesses a large share of bravery and Military ardor.”

  While Lafayette’s letters home to France reflect his occasional delusions of grandeur, on the ground in America he apparently made a point of reining in his flights of fancy, especially around authority figures like Washington. Otherwise the stoic commander never would have gone on record complimenting the boy as “sensible.” Lafayette wrote t
o his father-in-law, “I am cautious not to talk too much, lest I should say some foolish thing, and still more cautious in my actions, lest I should do some foolish thing.”

  Meanwhile, Howe’s forces were swatting at the patriot fortifications along the Delaware River to open up water access to Philadelphia. Washington dispatched General Greene across the river to southern New Jersey to see what Cornwallis was up to, and Greene took Lafayette along. Greene tasked Lafayette to take a few hundred riflemen and militiamen to get a head count of the redcoat camp at Gloucester. It was the boy’s first command.

  On November 25, Lafayette hobbled stealthily close to the British base, eyeballed its troop strength, identified a vulnerable pocket of about four hundred Hessians, went back and fetched his men, and led them in ambushing the unsuspecting Germans. The patriots pursued the fleeing Hessians until backup from Cornwallis arrived. Greene informed Washington, “The Marquis, with about four hundred militia and the rifle corps, attacked the enemy’s picket last evening, killed about twenty and wounded as many more, and took about twenty prisoners.” He added that they “drove the enemy about half a mile and kept the ground until dark.” Greene echoed what Washington had already written of Lafayette: “The Marquis is determined to be in the way of danger.”

  Careful not to exaggerate the incident’s importance and to give his troops the credit, Lafayette wrote to Washington, “I want to acquaint your excellency of a little event of last evening, which tho’ not very considerable in itself will certainly please you on account of the bravery and alacrity a small part of ours showed in that occasion.” Regarding Greene, Lafayette, like a linebacker imploring his coach to put him in, declared, “I should have been very glad if circumstances had permitted me to be useful to him upon a greater scale.”