Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier set sail for America just months after the Declaration of Independence was signed by 56 founding Congressional delegates who risked their lives signing a document in Philadelphia that put to parchment a treasonous act which Great Britain and its monarch George III were eager to punish with complete military conquest.
General Washington’s headquarters along Brandywine Creek at Chadds Ford, Pa. Lafayette’s first battle as an honorary officer was at Brandywine, where he was seriously wounded.So enthralled was this 19-year-old Frenchman with the Declaration’s eloquent complaints against George III – and its radical statement proclaiming that America’s future would not be a monarch’s rule, but rather a republic based on democratic representation of the people – that he was willing to die for America’s quest for liberty. All of Europe in the 1770s was dominated by monarchs and colonial empire rule. There were no democracies, and the common ground nations found with each other was their disdain for the British Empire which stretched from India, Africa and to the Americas. France too was ruthlessly ruled by a king, Louis XVI, who feared America’s inspired political revolution might spread across the Atlantic. Of all the European countries in the 19th century, it was France who loathed the British the most.
Gilbert du Motier, better known by his noble title Marquis de Lafayette, heard French officers were being commissioned to help the Americans in their expanding war with the British in Boston, New York City and Philadelphia in late 1776. Lafayette was born in 1757 into an incredibly wealthy family in Chavaniac a province of Auvergne in southern France, at the time when England and France were fighting the Seven Years’ War in western Pennsylvania and southern Canada. Lafayette’s lineage was arguably the finest in aristocratic, nearly all-Catholic France. His family was a devout Catholic family with a large family tree on both sides who owned millions of acres of land.
An obscure monument marks the spot where Lafayette was wounded at Brandywine. The monument was erected in the early 20th century and is on private land.Moreover, his father died in 1759 when Lafayette was only a toddler. A rich, pious man dying heroically on a battlefield courageously fighting for his king was a status the young Lafayette would use to his advantage for his entire life.
Lafayette lobbied America’s newly-sent emissary, Benjamin Franklin, who was in Paris drumming up support financially and militarily for the cause. Franklin sent officer after officer from the French armies to help Washington, who by early 1777 had had enough French meddling.
“I am sensible, sir, that it’s a delicate and perplexing task to refuse applications patronized by some of the first characters in the French kingdom where you are and whose favor it is of importance to conciliate,” Commander-in-Chief General George Washington tersely wrote Franklin.
Yet Franklin cut Washington back in a reply: “Please give me the favor of a young nobleman of great expectations and exceedingly beloved here in Paris,” Franklin wrote. “His friends here have sent him over with 4,500 sterling and have proposed sending him more.”
Translating Franklin to Washington: the young man may be a naïve youthful fool, but his money and his friends’ money was too great to dismiss with a bout of military snobbery, which Washington was prone to do. Washington had no time for the French. He had fought against them in the Seven Years’ War when he was 19, barely escaping injury in several missions to free French-held forts near Pittsburgh. Washington was fearless in battle, having his horse shot from under him multiple times. So too did musket balls pierce his coat and hat. “Providence,” he wrote his brother, “was looking after him.”
British and American dead were placed in common mass graves during the Revolutionary War. This grave site is on Birmingham Hill, where the Battle of Brandywine’s fiercest fighting took place. Washington’s loss at Brandywine opened the door for the British occupation of Philadelphia 249 years ago.Washington agreed to an honorary command for Lafayette, but the nobleman did not see his position as honorary. That drew the ire of Washington. “As soon as I shall think of him fit for command of a division, he shall be ready to engage under the duties of it,” General Washington sarcastically wrote a future U.S. president, surmising Lafayette would never see command under his watch.
But when Washington met the teenager at a Congressional dinner in Philadelphia in August 1777, the general was impressed by his humility and maturity. After all, he spent nearly 200,000 pounds of his own money on a boat to sail to Georgetown, South Carolina, in the middle of an active Atlantic hurricane season. Lafayette was a courageous, fearless soul, much like Washington.
And he proved it in his first military engagement on September 11, 1777, along the banks of the Brandywine Creek 25 miles south of Philadelphia where British and German Hessians outflanked Washington’s army and smashed it in the war’s biggest fight. It was Lafayette who calmly rode into a storm of Hessian bullets to help stem the rout caused by the enemy’s relentless attacks. There on Birmingham Hill by a Presbyterian Church, which still stands today, Lafayette was shot through the calf. His boot soon filled with blood, and though he was only yards from the hard-charging enemy forces, Lafayette saved Washington’s army by coolly staging a fighting withdrawal from a battlefield littered with thousands of wounded Americans. It was a disastrous 9/11, even more so than the casualty list would be 224 years later.
Washington rode upon the wounded Lafayette and helped him to safety and put him under the care of his personal physician who whisked him off to the safety of Moravian friends in the Lehigh Valley to recover. Washington was so moved by his bravery and calmness in the bold, slow retreat that a life-long bond was formed there at Brandywine.
Washington’s winter headquarters at Valley Forge. Lafayette recuperated from his leg wound as he lived here during the winter of 1777-78 when the American army almost disintegrated via starvation, smallpox and dysentery.By December, Washington’s tattered army encamped at Valley Forge where the only food was flour and water mixed with charcoal ash. But Lafayette spent the entire winter there with George and Martha Washington in a modest stone house along the Schuylkill River. The Washingtons never had children between them, but this heroic young man became George’s adopted son for the rest of the war.
At Yorktown four years later, it was Lafayette and his personally secured French troops and navy that bottled up British troops under Lord Cornwallis, making the British finally realize that conceding America’s independence was inevitable.
Later in life, Lafayette had two children, a boy born on Christmas Eve he named George and a couple of years later a girl he named Virginia – a tribute to a man he had grown to love.
Washington and Lafayette often argued over perplexing issues like slavery and religion during their decades-long relationship. Though not proven by any known historical source, rumors were rampant that the Catholic Frenchman even coaxed the Episcopalian Washington to attend Holy Mass with him many times.
One French army officer named Count Barbé-Marbois wrote in his diary about talking with Washington about Lafayette, “Tears fell from his eyes. He clasped my hand and could hardly utter the words, ‘I do not know a nobler, finer soul and I love him as my own son.’”
A painting of the Marquis in his handsome youth. When he returned to America in 1824, Lafayette weighed more than 250 pounds and was in poor health.In 1824, an aging Lafayette returned to America for a last adieu to his beloved adopted country. He visited all 24 states, including Central Pennsylvania, where at parades and formal state dinners he was lavished with praise and gifts thanking him for his service to the Continental Army that somehow survived its Pennsylvania whippings and then winter humbling at Valley Forge to ultimately out endure a British army – an army that nearly always fought with odds 2 to 1 in their favor. It was the British, contemptuous towards the American ragtag army of militia fighters, who quit a war they had every advantage and means to win. France’s help ultimately turned the tide of the Revolutionary War.
Without the iron-forged partnership between Frenchman Lafayette and American Washington, this nation arguably would not be having a 250th birthday this 4th of July.
Author’s Note:
The information for this article was used from various accounts, but namely new books published in the past year. H.W. Brands: American Patriarch is an outstanding biography of George Washington. It brims with Washington’s own words. The Last Adieu by Ryan Cole chronicles Lafayette’s final journey in 1824 to visit all 24 states in the Union. This volume is wonderfully researched and chock full of anecdotes about how beloved Lafayette was in America. Thy Will Be Done is another new book written by scholar John Garrison Marks that explores Washington’s place in history and his legacy as a slaveholder. Washington owned some 320 slaves at the time of his death. Upon his unexpected death, most were freed, and when Martha died a few years later, all were freed. Washington died on December 14, 1799, and a great book about his dying moments is Washington’s End by Jonathan Horn. George Washington arguably is the bravest soldier this country ever has produced, yet his fear of being buried alive is breathtakingly irrational.
By Chris Heisey, The Catholic Witness
