Adopted Son Page 2
MONTBAREY, Alexander-Marie-Léonor de Saint-Mauris, comte (later prince) de (1732–1796), French minister of war
MORGAN, Daniel (1736–1802), major general, Continental Army, risen from captain
MORRIS, Gouverneur (1752–1816), member of Continental Congress; ambassador to France
MORRIS, Robert (1734–1806), Pennsylvania speculator and financier; member of Congress; superintendent of finance for the United States; Lafayette’s banker
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE (1769–1821), French general, dictator, emperor
NELSON, Thomas Jr. (1739–1789), Virginia militia commander; governor
NOAILLES, Louis-Marie, vicomte de (1756–1804), Lafayette’s wife’s cousin and brother-in-law
O’HARA, Charles (1740?–1802), British major general, American Revolution
ORLÉANS, Louis-Philippe, duc d’ (1773–1850), leader of Orléanistes in the National Assembly; as Louis-Philippe, “citizen king of the French” 1830–1848
PAINE, Thomas (1737–1809), revolutionary pamphleteer
PHILLIPS, William (1731?–1781), British major general, American Revolution
PINCKNEY, Thomas (1750–1828), Continental Army officer; South Carolina governor; American diplomat
POIX, Philippe-Louis-Marc-Antoine de Noailles de Mouchy, prince de (1752–1819), cousin to Lafayette and to Lafayette’s wife
REED, Joseph (1741–1785), aide to Washington
ROBESPIERRE, Maximilien (1758–1794), French Jacobin revolutionary
ROCHAMBEAU, Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, comte de (1725–1807), lieutenant general commanding French expeditionary force in America 1780–1782
ST. CLAIR, Arthur (1737–1818), Continental Army major general
SAINT-GERMAIN, Claude-Louis, comte de (1707–1778), French minister of war
SAINT-SIMON-MONTBLÉRU, Claude-Anne de Roubroy, marquis de (1743?–1819), French general commanding troops accompanying de Grasse to Yorktown 1781
SARTINE, Antoine-Raymond-Jean-Gaulbert-Gabriel de (1729–1801), French minister of marine
SCHUYLER, Philip John (1733–1804), New York politician; Continental Army major general
SÉGUR, Louis-Philippe, comte de (1753–1830), Lafayette’s friend and fellow officer
SÉGUR, Philippe-Henri, marquis de (1724–1801), French minister of war
SHORT, William (1759–1849), aide to Jefferson in Paris, later chargé there
SIEYÈS, Emmanuel-Joseph, l’abbé (1748–1836), French revolutionary
SIMCOE, John Graves (1752–1806), British commander of Tory troops
SIMIANE, Diane-Adélaïde de Damas d’Antigny, madame de, comtesse de Miremont (1761–1835), Lafayette’s mistress
STAINVILLE, Etienne-François, duc de Choiseul, comte de (1719–1785), French general; foreign minister
STARK, John (1782–1822), Continental Army brigadier general
STEUBEN, Frederick William Augustus, “Baron” von (1730–1794), inspector general of the Continental Army
STIRLING, William Alexander, Lord (1726–1783), Continental Army major general
SULLIVAN, John (1740–1795), Continental Army major general
TALLEYRAND-PÉRIGORD, Charles-Maurice de (“Talleyrand,” 1754–1838), French archbishop; politician; scalawag
TARLETON, Banastre (1754–1833), British cavalry commander
TERNAY, Charles-Henri d’Arsac, chevalier de (1723–1780), French commodore
TILGHMAN, Tench (1744–1786), Washington’s aide and military secretary
VERGENNES, Charles Gravier, comte de (1717–1787), foreign minister of France
WASHINGTON, George (1732–1799), commander in chief, Continental Army
WAYNE, Anthony (“Mad Anthony,” 1745–1796), Continental Army brigadier general
WEEDON, George (ca. 1730–1793), Continental Army brigadier general
PROLOGUE
An Inexplicable Charm
(JUNE 28, 1778)
And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment…informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever.
—PLUTARCH
The air smelled like rotten eggs. The gunsmoke had settled since the end of the fighting, but its sulfurous stench hung on in the hot, humid atmosphere. To the officers of the Continental Army, it was a further reminder of an opportunity lost, thanks to the bungling (some said it was treachery) of Major General Charles Lee.
This was the aftermath of the Battle of Monmouth Court House, June 28, 1778, among the hills and hollows of central New Jersey.
More than 700 men, about half Continentals and half redcoats and Hessians, were missing or lay scattered, wounded or dead, across the sprawling battlefield. It had been the longest action of the war, over nine hours, and one of the largest. For the Americans it was also the most frustrating day’s work of the whole struggle for independence. A chance to strike a real blow against the enemy, by mauling his rear guard on its retreat across New Jersey, had been thrown away, or so the American officers believed.
As night fell over the ghastly scene, the Americans did not know that the British were already planning to creep away. They muffled the wheels of their wagons, abandoned their dead and many of their wounded, and themselves were soon abandoned by hundreds of deserters. When the sun rose the next morning—to produce another savagely hot, suffocating day with temperatures in the upper nineties—the Continental Army would hold the field. According to the customs of war, that made the Americans the winners.
The last cannonade ended at about five in the afternoon. The major generals ordered their brigade commanders to round up stragglers, reorganize their troops, and place them in defensive positions. Men fanned out to plunder the dead and to retrieve American and British wounded and take them to the rear. That night everyone who had fought collapsed on the ground. Soldiers and officers alike were exhausted, not so much by the fighting as by the brutal heat—many of the casualties on both sides had fallen to sunstroke and thirst rather than gunfire.
The division commanders trudged toward headquarters, which meant wherever the commander in chief happened to be. He was atop a steep rise overlooking the scene of the last stages of the action. One of them was Nathanael Greene, a sturdy, fighting Quaker and the army’s most dependable major general.
Greene found the commander in chief as dusk was turning into dark. General George Washington was asleep on a cloak spread on the ground. The boy, Major General Lafayette, lay curled up beside him, also asleep on the general’s cloak.
The middle-aged man and the teenage boy had met less than a year before, at the end of another hot, stifling day—Philadelphia in August. In the months since, they had drawn together like two orphans in a storm, which had first blown over them in different places—one in the Old World, the other in the New—in 1775.
The Quaker soldier shared the opinion of the American commanders that this day would have gone better if the original plan had been followed. The young, aggressive Lafayette should have remained in command of the advance force rather than being superseded by Lee. Washington should not have been forced to charge onto the scene and take personal command. Instead, Lafayette’s energies had been wasted. Washington had found a disaster in the making and turned it into, at best, a tactical draw.
But any regrets about what might have been were banished by the touching scene before him, Washington and Lafayette asleep together. Having watched the attachment grow between these two over the months, Greene also found the youngster endearing. He had once told his wife that the boy was irresistible, owing to “an inexplicable charm.” Nothing could be more charming, in these grisly, stinking surroundings, than this affectionate, familial picture—not so much two exhausted soldiers as a father and son sharing the innocent comfort of sleep.
Greene spread his own cloak under a nearby tree, vowing to drive off anyone who might dis
turb the slumbering pair. But the day and battle just past proved to be too much even for his iron constitution. Sleep soon settled over him, as it already had over Washington and Lafayette, together in peace amid the madness of war.
George Washington at Princeton, by C.W. Peale. This is perhaps the best painting ever done of the commander in chief, showing the easy confidence of a general who has just won two important victories. (U.S. SENATE COLLECTION)
ONE
I Was All on Fire to Have a Uniform
(SEPTEMBER 1757–DECEMBER 1775)
Of all the animals in the world, the most unmanageable is the boy.
—PLATO
Auvergne was a region of ancient lava flows and eroded volcanic necks, an eerie landscape, rugged and heavily forested, where ghosts and monsters and strange beasts lurked. In its level spaces it supported farming on its rich volcanic soil. Sheep grazed on the gentler slopes surrounding the fields, and hogs rooted on the edges of the woodlands. Around them, the tortured, wooded mountains inspired fears. It was a land of ignorance, superstition, hard labor, and poverty.
A journey to Paris, about 200 miles north, took more than two weeks in 1757. The area had always been isolated, owing to the rugged landscape and bad roads. Those same qualities had given the province a tragic place in history. In 52 BC, the town of Alesia in Auvergne was the last stronghold of the Celtic Gauls (called the Avernii by the Romans). Under Vercingetorix, they had fought the conquering Roman armies through years of brutal combat. The mighty power of the Roman Empire told on the Gauls, however, until the last resisters, about 80,000 of them, were surrounded by Julius Caesar’s troops and earthworks.
An army of Belgii, another Celtic nation, marched to their relief, but the Romans slaughtered them to the last man. Vercingetorix offered to surrender Alesia and offer himself as a hostage to spare the lives of his people. Caesar accepted, then ordered his troops to massacre the Gaulish soldiers and sold the people into slavery, scattering them across the Empire. He sent Vercingetorix to Rome, where he was beheaded as an insurgentus.
Gaul ceased to exist except as a province of the Roman Empire. Celtic was no longer spoken and was replaced by the Low Latin of the Roman soldiers. Over the centuries, that Latin became French, and what once was Gaul became France.
THE FAMILY’S MISFORTUNES IN WAR BECAME A KIND OF PROVERB
Lafayette was born on September 6, 1757, in the same room of the Château de Chavaniac as his father before him, the top-floor chamber of one of the building’s corner towers. The house—built in the pseudo-castle “château style” on the foundations of a real castle that had burned down in the 1690s—was a Normanesque pile of stone with twenty large rooms and a slate roof. It was as cold as a barn in the winter despite its many large fireplaces. The château was separated from the neighboring village of Chavaniac by a moat, just as its neighborhood was separated from the rest of France by the forbidding landscape of Auvergne.1
The hereditary title of marquis, for a nobleman of middling rank, had been in the family for three generations, a reward for military service to the king. The clan could be traced back as far as the year 1000, and members had served in France’s wars ever since. But Lafayette was descended from a line of younger sons (eldest sons inherited properties and titles), most of them Champetières who traced back to the thirteenth century. The history of Lafayette’s forebears was a litany of younger sons who started out in poverty, married well, sired offspring, and went off to war to die young. They were close enough to Paris and Versailles to answer the call to arms but not near enough to be influential at court. They were provincial nobility, country bumpkins compared to the courtiers, glittering peacocks who surrounded the throne.2
Château de Chavaniac, Lafayette’s birthplace. He was born in the top room of the near tower. (LILLY LIBRARY, INDIANA UNIVERSITY)
Nearly all Lafayette’s ancestors had been warriors of greater or lesser repute. His great-grandfather Charles, a veteran soldier with a sterling reputation, began the family’s rise out of recurrent poverty, founding its permanent fortune and receiving the title marquis de La Fayette. Charles’ son Edouard married very well, acquiring Chavaniac along with his bride, and expanded his land holdings. His most notable military accomplishment was to fall off his horse and crack his head in front of the king. He survived long enough to produce two sons, Jacques-Roch and Gilbert, Lafayette’s father. He left behind a domain that stretched thirty-five miles across Auvergne and seventy-five miles north to south, which Jacques-Roch would inherit.
However, Jacques-Roch died in a fierce battle with the Austrians when Lafayette’s father was two. That left Gilbert holding in his little hands the family name and estates. He married Marie-Louise-Julie de La Rivière, daughter of an ancient line of wealthy nobles. Her dowry extended his real estate into Brittany and gave him, for the first time in the family’s history, connections to the inner circle around the king. Her grandfather, the comte de La Rivière, commanded the Mousquetaires du Roi (King’s Musketeers, later made famous by Alexandre Dumas’ novel The Three Musketeers). Known as the Black and Gray Musketeers, the outfit was the king’s personal horse guard.3
It was a Catholic country, and infant mortality rates were high in 1757, so the newest Lafayette’s prompt baptism was imperative, lest his baby soul end up in Limbo. It took place at the nearby parish church a few days after his birth, delayed to give his mother a chance to recover enough to attend. She did not make it. Neither did his father, who was away at war. His maternal grandfather, the marquis de La Rivière, had been expected, but the journey from Paris took too long. Lafayette’s paternal grandmother, Marie-Catherine de Chavaniac, served as godmother, while his cousin the Abbé de Murat presided. He was baptized “the very high and very mighty lord Monseigneur Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette, legitimate son of the very high and very mighty lord Monseigneur Michel-Louis-Christophe-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, marquis de La Fayette, baron de Vissac, lord of Saint-Romain and other places, and of the very high and very mighty lady Madame Marie-Louise-Julie de La Rivière.”4
As this considerable mouthful of a name reflected, Lafayette’s mother was a devoted Catholic, a habit that did not rub off on him. “I was baptized like a Spaniard,” he said later, “and with no intention to deny myself the protection of Marie, Paul, Joseph, Roch, and Yves, I have most often called upon St. Gilbert,” a wry reference not to the saint but to himself. His name, he told a correspondent, included that of every saint who might protect him in battle. So many Lafayettes had died fighting for France that “the family’s misfortunes in war became a kind of proverb throughout the province.”5
Lafayette descended from a long line of orphans, whose sires achieved fatherhood a few jumps ahead of the Fatal Bullet. He joined their ranks before he was two years old, when his father was killed on August 1, 1759, at the Battle of Minden in Germany, while serving as a colonel of grenadiers in the French army. In one of the biggest battles of the Seven Years’ War, the French lost about 5,000 men killed and wounded and several thousand more captured.6
The elder Lafayette’s commander had been ordered to keep his men below the skyline but rashly exposed them. When his immediate superior was killed, Lafayette stepped up to replace him, and as his son described it a half century later, he “was at once carried off by a ball from an English battery, commanded by a certain General Phillips.”7
William Phillips was at the time a twenty-eight-year-old captain in the British Royal Artillery, mentioned in dispatches for his “superlative practice” at Minden. In his next battle he became the first artillerist in history to bring his guns into action at a gallop. Lafayette would run across him later. “By a strange coincidence,” he said, twenty-two years later two of his cannons opened fire on the English headquarters at Petersburg, Virginia. He claimed that one shot went through a house where Phillips was, killing him outright. This comment says much about Lafayette’s accuracy as a chronicler of his own career, as Phillips died of disease, althou
gh the marquis did lob a cannonball his way.8
FROM THE TIME I WAS EIGHT, I LONGED FOR GLORY
Lafayette’s father died, cut in two by English iron, before he had prepared a will. Young Gilbert succeeded to his feudal titles, while his widow reclaimed her dowry. Lafayette’s grandmother appealed to the king for an allowance to raise him, and he granted a pension of 600 livres. Lafayette was not poor, however, because when his mother and grandmother died he could expect to receive an income of 25,000 livres. By the time he was four, an uncle died and he became future heir to the La Rivière fortune, with an annual income of 120,000 livres.9
The boy marquis would not starve; a board of financial guardians would see to that. His familial support was another matter. News of his father’s death shattered his mother, who, consumed by her grief, abandoned him at Chavaniac and left for her family’s home, the Luxembourg Palace in Paris. On April 5, 1760, barely eight months after the Battle of Minden, she gave birth to Lafayette’s sister, who died less than three months later. Lafayette, growing up at Chavaniac, seldom saw his mother over the next several years.
Children often respond to the death of a parent with feelings of betrayal or abandonment and sometimes the fear that they are somehow to blame. Lafayette was too young to react that way toward his father’s death, but having no fatherly presence left an empty space in his life. How he viewed his mother’s absence—she off amid the splendor of Paris and Versailles, either enjoying social life or indulging in religious observance—will never be known. However much it must have affected him, in later years he was charitable rather than bitter toward her. “My mother,” he said in one of his few references to her, “was a woman of lively temperament who had once had a liking for the frivolous, but after her husband’s death had plunged into religion with all the strength of her character. Though she loved me devotedly it would never have occurred to her to take me away from my La Fayette grandmother, for whom she had a deep reverence.”10