Lafayette (14 page)

Lafayette urged his father-in-law to influence the French court to provide more aid to the United States. “America is most impatiently expecting us to declare for her, and France will one day, I hope, decide to humble the pride of England. This hope, and the measures which America appears determined to pursue, give me great hopes for the glorious establishment of her independence. We are not, I confess, as strong as I expected, but we are strong enough to fight; we shall do so, I believe, with considerable success; and with the help of France, we shall win the cause I so cherish because it is just, because it honors humanity, because it is in the interest of my nation, and because my American friends and I are deeply committed to it.”

Lafayette ended his letter impressively—and shrewdly: “This letter will be given to you by the celebrated [John] Adams, whose name you undoubtedly know. . . . He wished me to give him letters of introduction in France, especially [to] you. May I hope that you will have the goodness to receive him in a kindly manner.”
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With Adams ready to sail for France, Lafayette wrote hurriedly to Adrienne on the birth of Anastasie: “I have never been as happy in my life as the moment when the news arrived . . . I love you with unspeakable tenderness, I love you more than ever, and I hope we shall be happy the rest of our lives together.” Knowing that the duc d’Ayen would be disappointed at her not bearing grandsons, Lafayette added tenderly, “What pleasure it will give me to embrace my two poor little girls. You do not believe me so hard hearted, and at the same time so ridiculous as to suppose that the sex of our new infant can have diminished in any way my joy at its birth. . . . I kiss each of our daughters a thousand times; tell them their father loves them madly, as he loves their wonderful mother. Believe me, I shall not lose a moment rejoining you as soon as I can. Adieu, adieu I kiss you ten million times.” There was no way for him to know that his older daughter, Henriette, had died two months earlier.

Lafayette finished by expressing the hope that “Mr. Adams will tell you a lot about my dear and charming friend, the great and respected Gnl. Washington.”
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Adams was on his way to replace Silas Deane in Paris and negotiate peace with Britain. Eager to befriend this new figure in French-American relations, Lafayette entrusted him with his letters to Adrienne and her father and offered Adams his family’s hospitality: “I must beg your pardon, sir, for making myself free enough to recommend you to some friends of mine in France; but as I do not believe you have many acquaintances in that country, I thought it would not be disagreeable to you if I would desire Madame de la Fayette . . . to introduce you to some of my other friends. . . .
Such is the desire of a friend to your country and the noble cause we are fighting for. I wish you a pleasant and safe voyage, and with the highest esteem and greatest affection for a man to whom the hearts of every lover of liberty will be indebted forever.”
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Before sailing, the often grumpy Adams acknowledged Lafayette’s letter with uncharacteristic warmth. “I am happy in this opportunity to convey intelligence from you to your friends, and think myself greatly honored and obliged by your politeness and attention to me, a favor which makes me regret the more my misfortune in not having had the honor heretofore of a more particular acquaintance with a nobleman who has endeared his name and character to every honest American. . . . [I] Shall at all times be happy to hear of your welfare, and to have an opportunity of rendering you any service in my power.”
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As Adams sailed from Boston harbor, a British envoy arrived in Paris to discuss reconciliation with Deane, Franklin, and Arthur Lee, a Virginia lawyer who had been Congress’s representative in London and now joined the others as a third negotiator. After Franklin warned Vergennes that “Britain would be making some propositions of accommodation,” Vergennes acted to disrupt the negotiations before they could begin by approving Lafayette’s proposal for an alliance with America. In a letter to Congress, Franklin reported that “his majesty was determined, to acknowledge our independence, and make a treaty with us of amity and commerce. . . . Besides his real good will to us and our cause, it was manifestly the interest of France that the power of England should be diminished by our separation from it. . . . There is every appearance of approaching war . . . we obtained a promise of an additional aid of three millions of livres, which we shall receive in January. Spain, we are told, will give an equal sum.”
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Although winter’s first snows forced an end to skirmishing, Lafayette’s successful attack at Gloucester provided unexpected benefits by fooling Howe into believing the main Patriot camp had been left undermanned and vulnerable to attack. As he would throughout the war, Washington used a simple but brilliant scheme to confuse enemy commanders about his military strength. Always beset by attrition, Washington himself never knew how many troops he would have at any given time. Deserters were legion, and those who did not desert had contracts to serve for specific periods of only thirty, sixty, or ninety days. Most went home at the end of their terms— sometimes in the middle of battle, if planting or harvest seasons beckoned. Washington, however, deceived the enemy by setting up large numbers of tents, many of them empty, when he wanted the enemy to believe he had a large force, and a small number, with a dozen or more men crammed in each, when he wanted to send the opposite message. So when Howe attacked what he thought was a small encampment at Whitemarsh, the
tents disgorged three times the expected number of troops and sent the British retreating double-time to the safety and warmth of winter quarters in Germantown and Philadelphia.

Washington led his army to safer ground for the winter, on a wooded plateau about ten miles west of Whitemarsh, with a clear, elevated view of the British in the east. To the north, the plateau sloped down to the Schuylkill River, near a particularly wide ford for quick, easy withdrawal. On the bank of nearby Valley Creek stood the forge that gave the area its name.

As the snow fell, Lafayette watched Washington’s exhausted troops set to work “artfully felling trees. I saw a small city of wooden huts emerge.”
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Arranged in a grid, with parallel streets and avenues, the huts each measured sixteen feet by fourteen feet and housed either twelve soldiers or two, four, or six officers, depending on rank. As a major general, Lafayette had a hut to himself. He acknowledged that he could have bought a warm furnished home nearby, but preferred to adopt “American clothes, habits and food, to appear more simple, frugal and austere than the Americans themselves . . . and embrace privation and fatigue.”
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He used his own funds to buy his Virginians shoes and clothes and earned a reputation as “the soldier’s friend.”

“I don’t know whether General Howe will visit our little city,” Lafayette wrote cheerfully to Adrienne, “but if he does, we will try to accord him the appropriate honors.”
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The huts withstood the harsh winter winds only slightly better than tents. Before the year ended, one of the worst winters in memory reduced the camp to unimaginable squalor. “Our position was untenable,” Lafayette recalled. “The soldiers lived in misery; they lacked for clothes, hats, shirts, shoes; their legs and feet black from frostbite—we often had to amputate. . . . The army often went whole days without provisions, and the patient endurance of soldiers and officers was a miracle which each moment served to renew. Their misery prevented new enlistments; it was impossible to recruit. The sacred fire of liberty burned on, however. . . . Which is why . . . the strength of that army never ceased being a mystery; even congress seemed unaware of it.”
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In Philadelphia, Howe and his officers commandeered some of the city’s most elegant homes and hosted lavish dinners and dances. Major John André, General Henry Clinton’s handsome, twenty-seven-year-old adjutant, settled into Benjamin Franklin’s home to profit from Franklin’s huge library. A confirmed bibliophile and accomplished wit, he was also a skilled artist, whose quick hand sketched flattering likenesses of loyalist ladies on their programs at officers’ balls.

Not far away, the discomforts of Valley Forge made Lafayette long for home. The wife he had never really known grew vividly inviting in his
imagination. “Do you not think we shall be old enough to live in our own house when I return—to live there happily together, receive our friends. . . . I like to dream of building castles of happiness and joy; you always share them with me, my sweetheart, and once we are together again, nothing shall ever separate us or keep us from the happiness of our love for each other. Adieu, my heart; I wish I could make my dream come true today. . . . Adieu, Adieu; love me always, and never forget the unhappy exile who thinks of you always with ever increasing love.”
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Washington sponsored Lafayette’s induction into the military lodge of the American Masons, forging closer ties between the two men and between Lafayette and other American officers. The Frenchman eagerly embraced them as “brothers,” regardless of rank, and they quickly fell victim to his disarmingly open, boyish enthusiasm, courage, and idealism. Of all the foreign soldiers and officers in the American army with claims to titles, Lafayette was the only person legitimately entitled to one by birth in one land and by zeal in another. His fellow officers dubbed him “Our Marquis,” and, by winter’s end, every Patriot soldier and, soon after, every Patriot in America called him “Our Marquis,” a title he retained for the rest of his life.

In the winter of 1777, Lafayette’s hopes for America sank into a mire of misery at Valley Forge. While Tory Loyalists wallowed in superabundance in British-held New York and Philadelphia, Washington tried unsuccessfully to provision his starving army with continental dollars, the paper money that Congress was printing. The enemy, however, printed and distributed enough forged dollars to render continental dollars all but worthless.
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As word of the wretchedness at Valley Forge reached York, supporters of the Conway Cabal pressed Congress to replace Washington as supreme commander with a board of war headed by General Gates, the hero of Saratoga. Saratoga had been America’s only military victory since the beginning of the war, and like other cabalists, Gates argued that Washington’s strategy had failed; that he had been too timid, had lost too many battles, and had surrendered Philadelphia, the American capital, without firing a shot.

“The Tories fomented all these dissensions,” according to Lafayette. “Greene, Hamilton, and Knox, his best friends, were slandered.”
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Although Congress did not remove Washington as commander of the Continental army, it did establish the new Board of War, which represented a new layer of command between him and Congress, to determine war policies and grand strategy. Congress named Gates to head the board and make strategy decisions. To dilute Washington’s authority still further, Congress appointed Conway inspector general, to report to the board and advise on all military promotions. “They speak of Conway as a man sent by heaven for the liberty and happiness of America,” Lafayette grumbled. “He told so to them and they are fools enough to believe it.”
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Devastated by the wounds Congress inflicted on his idol, Lafayette reassured Washington of his loyalty:

I don’t need to tell you that I am sorry for all that has happened. . . . When I was in Europe I thought that here almost every man was a lover of liberty, and would rather die free than live a slave. You can conceive my astonishment when I saw that toryism was as openly professed as whiggism: however, at that time I believed that all good Americans were united together. . . . I wish you could know, as well as myself, what difference there is between you and any other man . . . you would see very plainly that if you were lost for America, there is nobody who could keep the army and the revolution for six months. . . . There are open dissensions in Congress, parties who hate one another as much as the common enemy; stupid men, who, without knowing a single word about war, undertake to judge you, to make ridiculous comparisons; they are infatuated with Gates . . . and believe that attacking is the only thing necessary to conquer . . . perhaps secret friends to the British Government, who want to push you . . . to some rash enterprise upon the lines or against a much stronger army.

He called Conway “cunning” and pledged, “I am now fixed to your fate, and I shall follow it and sustain it as well by my sword as by all means in my power.”
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Washington replied immediately:

My Dear Marquis,—Your favour of yesterday conveyed to me fresh proof of that friendship and attachment, which I have happily experienced since the first of our acquaintance, and for which I entertain sentiments of the purest affection. It will ever constitute part of my happiness to know that I stand well in your opinion; because I am satisfied that you can have no views to answer by throwing out false colours, and that you possess a mind too exalted to condescend to low arts and intrigues to acquire a reputation. Happy, thrice happy, would it have been for this army and the cause we are embarked in, if the same generous spirit had pervaded all the actors in it. But one gentleman [Gates], whose name you have mentioned, had, I am confident, far different views; his ambition and great desire of being puffed off, as one of the first officers of the age, could only be equaled by the means which he used to obtain them . . . he became my inveterate enemy; and he has, I am persuaded, practiced every art to do me an enjury [
sic]
. . . . The fatal tendency of disunion is so obvious . . . but we must not, in so great a test, expect to meet with nothing but sunshine. I have no doubt that everything happens for the best, that we shall triumph over our misfortunes, and, in the end, be happy; when, my dear marquis, if you will give me your company in Virginia, we will laugh at our past difficulty and the folly of others.
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