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  It was to no avail. Nearly all were broke, so Lafayette offered to pay their way home. Most of them left over the following months, and Congress eventually coughed up the cost of their passage.

  De Kalb was not about to leave, however. Early in August he petitioned Congress forcefully. “What is deemed genérosity in the marquis de la Fayette would be downright madness in me, who am not one of the first rate fortunes,” he pointed out. “I am heartily glad you granted his wishs, he is a worthy young man, and no one wil outdo him for enthusiasme in your cause of liberty and independence.” However, they had come to America as military men with the same assurances, and “preference, if there was to be any, was due to me,” owing to his thirty-four years of military service.

  The Prussian-Frenchman promised to sue Congress for breach of contract in French courts if he went home without a command. This was a serious threat—it would drag into the open France’s covert support for the American uprising, and its tolerance of Deane’s recruiting. He did not stop there, suggesting that giving him a lesser rank in the American army would also produce bad effects on opinion in the French government and among military men. Congress gave in to this blackmail and offered him a commission as a major general with one day’s seniority over the marquis. Satisfied, he asked for the same date as Lafayette’s commission and got it.32

  De Kalb gave de Broglie the bad news, that his plot had been unhorsed for the last time. He explained that it would be “impossible to succeed in the grand project…it would be regarded as a crying injustice against Washington and an outrage on the country.” No longer de Broglie’s front man, de Kalb had become an American.33

  Lafayette’s other errand was to prepare himself to be a major general in the Continental Army. On August 4, an admiring Philadelphian bought him a slave to be his driver and servant. He spent about two weeks outfitting himself and his aides, buying a carriage and a wagon, horses and furnishings, arms, tents and camp equipage, and accoutrements. Much of the time went to tailors, boot makers, and leather workers turning out magnificent uniforms for the three young Frenchmen. By the time they reached Washington’s camp outside the city, on August 20, they were the best-dressed soldiers in North America.

  When this dazzling display of martial splendor appeared before the commander in chief, Washington came as close as he ever did to a chuckle. “I suppose,” he said, “we ought to be embarrassed to show ourselves to an officer who has just left the French forces.” The marquis replied with pride and innocence, “I have come here to learn, mon général, not to teach.”34

  Lafayette’s education began sooner than he had expected, when Washington hustled him into a private space in his quarters. The marquis had said that he expected command of a division, and had pestered the general about it. Preparing for his arrival at camp, the elder man relayed his concerns to Benjamin Harrison, a member of Congress, suggesting that perhaps Lafayette “has misceived the design of his appointment, or Congress did not understand the extent of his views, for certain it is, if I understand him, that he does not conceive his commission is merely honorary; but given with a view to command a division of this army. True, he has said that he is young, & inexperienced, but at the same time has always accompanied it with a hint, that so soon as I shall think him fit for the command of a division, he shall be ready to enter upon the duties of it.” The commander in chief wanted a clarification of the marquis’ status and how Congress expected him to treat his new major general.35

  Washington was thoroughly confused. Harrison told him he should not be, reminding him that he had said earlier that Lafayette’s commission was “merely honorary.” He and every other member of Congress understood that “his chief motive for going into our service was to be near you, to see service, and to give him an eclat at home, where he expected he would soon return.” He could not have obtained his commission on any other terms. “Congress never meant that he should have [a command], nor will not countenance him in his applications.”36

  Washington and Lafayette sat down for what the marquis would always call their “great conversation.” The older man promised that he would be treated with all respect due to a major general. He wanted him in his headquarters and would involve him in every military activity. It was a fact of life, however, that Congress would not give a foreigner a command over American generals. There was no point in continuing to expect such an assignment or to ask for it. But, Washington said, he held Lafayette in high regard. He would be happy to have his confidence as his “friend and father.”37

  Lafayette took the news well. But Washington did not suspect the reaction going on inside the boy toward his “friend and father.” The orphan of Auvergne, exiled, timid behind his swagger, found what he had missed all his life. He set out to be a dutiful son to “this great man.” He fell completely under Washington’s influence, seeking his approval, wanting to do things as his hero would do them. Washington would have been surprised at this point to know that Lafayette had set him up as a life model. When he realized it later, however, he was more than pleased. Others saw it. Many years later the French politician Talleyrand observed that Lafayette’s “ambition, and his efforts to distinguish himself, do not seem his own, but rather to have been taught him. Whatever he does seems foreign to his nature, he always acts as though he follows someone else’s advice.”38

  Lafayette continued to drop hints about his desire for a line command, and the elder man gently turned them aside. The two were together often over the next few months, the junior presenting one idea after another for campaigns and operations, for his senior’s approval. As Washington evaluated each one, gradually the marquis appreciated the commander in chief’s military methods, so unorthodox from a European perspective. Lafayette became the general’s chief military student during the war. More important, the two of them could understand each other because both knew how to learn from experience. Other young men for whom Washington showed fondness sooner or later turned on him. Lafayette never did.39

  LA FAYETTE IS THE SOLE EXCEPTION

  Whatever starry-eyed images Lafayette had of the Continental Army, his first tour of its camp gave him a shock. This was not what the word “army” brought to the mind of a French officer. “About eleven thousand men, poorly armed and even more poorly clothed, offered a singular spectacle,” he recalled. “In that motley and often naked array, the best garments were hunting shirts.…As for tactics, it suffices to say that, for a regiment formed in battle order to advance on its right, instead of a simple turn to the right, the left had to begin an eternal countermarch. They were always formed in two ranks, with the small men in the front; no other distinction as to height was ever observed.”40

  Lafayette had little direct contact with the army during the next few weeks, because he was part of Washington’s family. The gulf between them and other general officers, on the one hand, and the men and officers of the regiments, on the other, was wide—socially, militarily, and materially. Generals and the family usually occupied houses or great pavilions in the field. Lesser souls lived in huts or tents.

  Washington was no Spartan. He worked hard, and he ended the day in grand style. His dining habits were English, the main meal being a “dinner” late in the afternoon, followed by a “supper” a few hours afterward. Wine and rum were downed by the gallon, with meals and in toasts to this personage or that. Chastellux found these customs amazing. “The repast was in the English fashion,” he said, “consisting of eight or ten large dishes of butcher’s meat, and poultry, with vegetables of several sorts, followed by a second course of pastry, comprized under the two denominations of pies and puddings. After this the cloth was taken off, and apples and a great quantity of nuts were served, which General Washington usually continues eating for two hours, toasting and conversing all the time.” He described the conversation as “calm and agreeable.”

  About half past seven the party arose from the table, which servants shortened for a smaller group. “I was surprised at this manoeu
vre, and asked the reason of it; I was told they were going to lay the cloth for supper.” Chastellux protested the extra trouble, which he assumed was for his benefit, but Washington told him he was accustomed to take something in the evening. He invited the Frenchman to join him and the family, eat some fruit, and participate in the conversation. He “desired nothing better.” The supper offered three or four light dishes, some fruits, “and above all a great abundance of nuts, which were as well received in the evening as at dinner.” After that, the waiters put “a few bottles of good claret and Madeira” on the table. “This supper or conversation, commonly lasted from nine to eleven, always free, and always agreeable.”41

  Claude Blanchard, a French quartermaster, also was impressed. “The table was served in the American style,” he reported, “and pretty abundantly: vegetables, roast beef, lamb, chickens, salad dressed with nothing but vinegar, green peas, puddings and some pie, a kind of tart…all this being put upon the table at the same time.” There were no separate courses: everything was served on the same plate. Madeira wine followed the eating, consumed “whilst drinking different healths.”42

  Except for the anglais custom of eating beef roasted rather than boiled, Lafayette found himself in congenial surroundings. Because he was a major general, he did not share the crowded quarters of Washington’s aides, but otherwise he was folded easily into the “family.” Reigning quietly over all was a tall, slender, handsome businessman with an honorary rank of lieutenant colonel, Tench Tilghman. He had joined Washington as his military secretary at the age of thirty-two in August 1776 and would remain until the end of the war. He was a born bureaucrat who kept the army’s paperwork flowing smoothly. He also kept the younger aides in order and their minds on their jobs. Self-effacing, entirely dedicated to his duties, he was a rock in a swirling storm.43

  Before Lafayette’s arrival, the youngest of the family was Alexander Hamilton, a few months older than he was. The bastard son of a Scottish trader and a West Indian woman, he was orphaned early—his father abandoned the family before he was eleven, his mother dying soon after. He grew up on the slave-holding islands of St. Croix and Nevis, supporting himself into his teen years as a self-taught clerk and then business manager for a trading company. He so impressed his employers that they sent him to New York for a college education in 1773, but he soon devoted himself to revolutionary pamphleteering. When the shooting started, he became captain of a New York artillery battery and later served with distinction at Trenton. Washington talked him into becoming an aide in March 1777, with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

  Alexander Hamilton, by C.W. Peale, early 1790s. Hamilton, Lafayette, and John Laurens formed a triangular friendship that endured until their deaths. (INDEPENDENCE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)

  Hamilton was a small, frail young fellow, less than five and a half feet tall, with a tendency to fall into a sickbed after times of stress. He was reasonably handsome but self-conscious about an odd bump near the top of his nose. There was fire in his fiercely blue eyes. He was a dynamo of lightning-bright intelligence, wide-ranging knowledge, quick temper, and raging passions. He possessed the self-assurance that came with knowing he was smarter than other people, which included almost everyone he met. He was a good writer and spoke several languages.

  He could be cold. He admired Washington, as almost everyone did, and instinctively understood what power meant in human affairs. The commander in chief was a powerful man, but he was also a childless one who adopted a paternal attitude toward youngsters in his charge. The orphaned bastard from the West Indies might have wanted a father figure to give his life the stability he had never known, but he was ferociously independent. When he joined the family, he resolved that if Washington offered any “advances” of personal friendship toward him, he would receive them “in a manner which showed at least I had no inclination to court them, and that I wished to stand rather on a footing of military confidence than of private attachment.”44

  Lafayette and Hamilton formed a lifelong friendship. That became a triangle at the end of August with the arrival of John Laurens. Twenty-three years old, he also was a slender young man, whose head seemed large for his body. It carried a handsome face with a high brow, noble nose, and strong chin. His wide eyes, as blue as Hamilton’s, were set deep. His full mouth seemed always on the verge of a smile, from either amusement or arrogance, depending on the situation. He was almost as brilliant as Hamilton, but his mind was of a different order. While the one wanted to build a model world as if it was an engineering project, Laurens was on a crusade to improve mankind. He shared Hamilton and Lafayette’s lust for glory on the battlefield. Reckless as they were, neither matched Laurens’ tendency to lunge into the fight without thinking. They survived the war. He did not.

  Laurens was from South Carolina, son of a prosperous Huguenot (Protestant) family that had fled religious oppression in France a century earlier. His father owned large plantations and hundreds of slaves, and had once been a slave trader before going into politics. Remarkably, Henry Laurens became increasingly uneasy about the injustice of slavery as the younger Laurens was growing up. When John’s mother died in his sixteenth year, Henry took him and his brothers to Europe for their education. After a year in London, John and one brother spent the next three in Geneva, a hotbed of radical ideas about the equality of men and the logic of republican government. Besides those heady notions, Laurens acquired a wide grounding in the classics, philosophy, and languages—he became a master of several. His father sent him back to London to read law in 1775, but the uprising in America distracted him. He had a passing affair with the daughter of a wealthy family and got her pregnant. He married her but never bothered to tell his father about that.

  John Laurens, by C.W. Peale. The Latin inscription around this miniature echoes the epitaph on Laurens’ gravestone, and means “It is sweet and fitting to die for your country.” He did, in a skirmish in 1782, after he had opened Lafayette’s mind to the injustices of slavery and religious intolerance. (INDEPENDENCE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)

  Abandoning his little family early in 1777, John went to Paris, met Franklin, and made his way back to America. Once he joined the army, Washington developed a great deal of fondness for the younger man. Laurens, although he had a loving father of his own, returned the regard, accepting friendship where Hamilton spurned it. Not even he, however, could match the place in the elder man’s heart that Lafayette filled.45

  Laurens and Hamilton hit it off. Hamilton showed a strong attachment to the South Carolinian that he never demonstrated even to the woman he later married. When Laurens was absent, Lafayette filled his place in Hamilton’s affections. The three wrote gushy letters to each other. Hamilton routinely addressed Laurens as “my dear” and vowed his “love.” Such language was usual in their time, the age of “Sentiment.” Letter writing was almost a sport and flowery talk was the norm, especially for young fellows burning with passions for war and politics.46

  Hamilton, with his penetrating mind and gift for argument, and Laurens, with his fierce beliefs and crusading zeal, made great impressions on Lafayette. They talked about things that had never before crossed his mind—what was justice, what was the basis of government, what was right and wrong. Laurens especially broadened the Frenchman’s thinking—and he could do it in flawless French—on two subjects. One was religious intolerance. The other was slavery. Laurens had returned from Europe a dedicated abolitionist. Eventually he aroused similar sentiments in Lafayette.

  The relation between them was not all one-way, as Lafayette turned Laurens into a clotheshorse. After his arrival in the army, John wrote his father continually to ask him to send articles of clothing, hair powder, and other adornments. He had never before been so conscious of his appearance, and Henry was mystified. If he had visited the camp, he would have seen the explanation. John wanted to match the marquis’ splendid appearance.47

  Before Lafayette and the family became fully acquainted, on August 21 Washington i
nvited him to a council of war. The generals decided that the Howes were probably taking their fleet and army to South Carolina, and agreed to ask Congress for permission to leave Philadelphia and challenge Clinton in New York. Lafayette signed the minutes along with the other major generals present, and above the brigadiers. Although he had been too junior to have attended a council of war in the French army, he recognized that this meeting was nothing like what a French general would have conducted. In Europe, commanders did the talking, and subordinates listened and agreed. Washington let everyone speak his mind, guiding the discussion but aiming for the broadest possible agreement, because he remembered from Braddock’s example that he did not have a monopoly on good ideas. He did not know it at the time, but his conduct of councils of war gave Lafayette another example to follow in the future.48

  There were two other major generals present, the rest of them being on detached duty. Lafayette charmed both of them. The oldest general in the army, at age fifty-one, was “Lord” Stirling, from New Jersey. He was named William Alexander but claimed to be the rightful Earl of Stirling. Authorities in Scotland did not agree, but his American colleagues called him and his wife Lord and Lady Stirling. The same courtesy extended to their pretty daughter Lady Kitty, who made Lafayette’s head spin when he met her. His sexual escapades were not as frequent in America as in France, but his appetites were undiminished. He tried but failed to conquer “the most charming Miss Ketty,” as he called her.