Biographies & Memoirs

CHAPTER 9

1784

When Lafayette set foot on Manhattan Island on August 4, 1784, the city’s scars from the Revolutionary War were just beginning to heal. Captured in 1776, New York had remained a British stronghold throughout the conflict, serving as a base of military operations, a refuge for Loyalists, and a haven for thousands of escaped slaves promised freedom in exchange for service in the British Army. For seven long years, the city had hosted a sprawling network of overcrowded jails, including pestilential prison ships that held as many as 11,000 captured soldiers at a time. A similar number of prisoners died from disease and starvation over the course of the war. By the time General Howe evacuated Britain’s troops from Manhattan, on November 25, 1783, a third of the island’s buildings had been lost in two major fires. Other structures had escaped the conflagrations only to be battered by hard use as makeshift stables, hospitals, and mess halls for the occupying army. Docks had fallen into disrepair, and streets had been rendered impassable by a labyrinthine system of trenches.

An observant visitor strolling the streets of Manhattan in 1784 would have seen the city springing back to life around the ruins. The burned-out façade of Trinity Church loomed above Wall Street, and on Bowling Green, an empty pedestal that had once supported an equestrian statue of King George III stood forlorn amid the stubbly grass—but the docks and markets were once again bustling with the exchange of goods. Having reopened after the winter thaw, the port was regularly welcoming shipments of foodstuffs and manufactured wares. In February, the Empress of China had sailed through the ice floes dotting New York Harbor, marking America’s entrance into the China trade; on board were piles of animal pelts, thirty tons of American ginseng, which grew wild in the mid-Atlantic region, and stores of other goods that were plentiful in the New World but precious in Canton. New York’s chamber of commerce had been revived. And representatives of the Bank of New York, recently founded by Alexander Hamilton, were greasing the wheels of trade by providing commercial financing at interest from temporary offices in a yellow brick house on Pearl Street.

With so much going on, Lafayette’s arrival initially attracted scant notice. He had sailed on the Courier de New York, one of a fleet of five French packet ships that had begun making monthly crossings in September 1783. The landing of the ship, which was carrying the June mail from Europe, was widely announced, but several papers neglected to mention its most famous passenger. It did not, however, take long for the news to spread. Approaching Philadelphia on the evening of August 9, Lafayette was escorted into the city by a ceremonial detachment of the local militia and welcomed by the sound of tolling church bells. On September 7, James Madison observed that “wherever [Lafayette] passes he receives the most flattering tokens of sincere affection from all ranks.” And on September 14, during Lafayette’s next trip through New York, Mayor James Duane and the city’s Common Council presented Lafayette with a gold box containing a certificate that declared him to be “admitted and received a Freeman and Citizen of the City of New York.”

For the next five months Lafayette and his aide, the eighteen-year-old Chevalier de Caraman, captain in the Noailles Dragoons, traced and retraced routes up and down the eastern seaboard, traveling by carriage, ship, barge, horseback, and, at times, on foot. The pair visited nine states from Virginia to New Hampshire; Lafayette was feted every step along the way with banquets, balls, and toasts that fixed in American minds the image of the marquis as a hero. But Lafayette, who had turned twenty-seven in Philadelphia that September, was still a young man, and he had come to America not only to celebrate his past but also to shape his future. Since Yorktown, he had begun to see himself as more than a soldier, and his first peacetime visit to the United States gave him an opportunity to try out new roles and explore emerging interests. In America, the expectations of family, court, and tradition weighed less heavily on Lafayette than they did in France. Here, he could experiment with newfound concerns; some proved to be passing fancies, but others became lifelong passions.

In the 1780s, Lafayette became a citizen of two republics: one was the United States; the other was the imagined community known as the Republic of Letters. A loosely knit international society with no geographic boundaries, the Republic of Letters was populated by educated men and women committed to the Enlightenment ideal of disseminating thought and knowledge with no restrictions based on nationality, social status, or other distinctions. Its citizens might reside anywhere and could adhere to a range of political and intellectual views, but they were bound together by the belief, articulated by the historian Dena Goodman in 1994, that “the search for knowledge was now subordinated to the higher good of society, even of humanity as a whole.” To enter, one had only to support the free and open exchange of ideas. This could mean joining an academy, subscribing to a periodical, maintaining an international correspondence, or attending one of the salons—regularly scheduled gatherings of writers, artists, political figures, and other social and intellectual luminaries—that were often hosted by prominent women and were especially influential in eighteenth-century Paris. Lafayette, who was never entirely at ease with the rigid protocols of life at court, had a greater affinity for the more open-minded and outward-looking sensibility of the Republic of Letters. It offered him an alternative path to reputation and esteem.

In one of the first organized events of his 1784 visit, Lafayette proclaimed his citizenship in this ideal realm. The occasion was a meeting of the American Philosophical Society—or, as it was officially known, the “American Philosophical Society, Held at Philadelphia, for the Promoting of Useful Knowledge.” Founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743, the society spelled out its goals and by-laws in a 1769 act of incorporation that laid out the founding principle that “the cultivation of useful knowledge, and the advancement of the liberal arts and sciences in any country, have the most direct tendency towards the improvement of agriculture, the enlargement of trade, the ease and comfort of life, the ornament of society, and the increase and happiness of mankind.” To promote such endeavors, the society would maintain a collection containing “all specimens of natural Productions, whether of the Animal, Vegetable, or Fossil kingdom; all models of machines and instruments”—in short, any objects whose study might explain the laws of nature or further the progress of mankind. It would publish papers chosen for “the importance or singularity of their subjects, or the advantageous manner of treating them, without pretending to answer, or to make the society answerable, for the certainty of the facts, or propriety of the reasonings.” Its members, who were to meet twice a month, would be divided into six committees, investigating topics ranging from “Geography, Mathematics, Natural Philosophy and Astronomy” to “Husbandry and American Improvements.”

Lafayette had been admitted on January 19, 1781, but he remained a silent member for the better part of three years. The Marquis de Chastellux, Lafayette’s countryman and comrade-in-arms who was then serving as a major general in the French army under Rochambeau, was elected at the same time. In light of his established intellectual credentials, Chastellux was probably the more viable candidate. A well-known figure in Enlightenment circles, Chastellux had written a two-volume book titled On Public Happiness(1772) that won high praise from Voltaire and earned its author admission to the French Academy in 1775. Lafayette could boast of no such learned accomplishments. In fact, as Chastelllux recalled, Lafayette’s nomination had initially been rejected; embarrassed by this ungenerous treatment of a beloved hero, the society later let it be known that the blackballing was “thought to be a mistake.”

Although Lafayette had exhibited little interest in the world of letters before joining the society, he soon entered wholeheartedly into the craze for things scientific that was captivating the imagination of Paris. On July 12, 1782, he paid the 96 livres required to become a “protector” of the “Establishment for the Correspondence of the Sciences and the Arts,” or the “Salon de la Correspondance,” as the enterprise was often called. It had been founded in 1779 by a young man who called himself Pahin de la Blancherie, who’d conceived of it as a for-profit version of the American Philosophical Society. To facilitate the dissemination of knowledge, La Blancherie published a weekly newsletter and invited “men of letters and artists” to gather in rented rooms near the Sorbonne and discuss the diverse objects exhibited there on a rotating basis. Jean-Baptiste Le Paon, the painter who had reimagined Lafayette’s portrait of Washington as an exotic battlefield scene, was among the artists who exhibited at the Salon de la Correspondance, where his works appeared alongside “books, paintings, mechanical devices, specimens of natural history, sculptural models and, finally, all types of ancient or modern works with which one would want to be acquainted, or to learn … the value, the existence, or the author,” as La Blancherie put it in his self-published newsletter. Not incidentally, all items on view were for sale unless otherwise indicated.

The American Philosophical Society was pursuing a similar range of interests, albeit without La Blancherie’s eye to financial gain. Meetings held in 1783 and 1784 witnessed discussions of topics including the aurora borealis (May 2, 1783), “a serpent in a horse’s eye” (September 26, 1783), an “improved method of quilling a harpsichord” (November 21, 1783), and “the preserving of parsnips for drying” (April 16, 1784). Cutting-edge scientific instruments were also presented and analyzed, including five thermometers (February 20, 1784), a microscope “framed in a mahogany trunked cone and stand” (March 5, 1784), and an orrery— a model of the solar system—commissioned by the society, at the suggestion of Thomas Jefferson, to be produced by David Rittenhouse as a gift to Louis XVI (January 13 and March 6, 1783).

In the spirit of transatlantic conversation, Lafayette wrote to the society on December 10, 1783, about a marvelous invention that was then the talk of Paris: the hot air balloon. On September 19, the brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier had astonished the French nation when they’d launched from the grounds of Versailles a balloon, made of toile, measuring fifty-seven feet high by forty-one feet in diameter and carrying a sheep, a duck, and a rooster in its basket. According to Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, the assistant director of the Jardin du Roi and the author of the first full account of the Montgolfiers’ experiments, all of “the grandest, most illustrious, and wisest” men in France gathered as witnesses, “as if for a concert, to render a solemn homage to the sciences.” French newspapers fed the balloon-mania with articles celebrating the possibilities of flight, while gossip sheets touted stories of inventors claiming to have gotten there first. Soon, fashionable women took to wearing their tresses in the coiffure à la montgolfière—piled high on the head with a small hot air balloon embedded in the mound—and lighthearted vignettes involving the airborne marvels appeared on curtains made from printed fabrics known as toiles de Jouy. The influential furniture makerGeorges Jacob even supplied Marie Antoinette with a pair of side chairs, now housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that feature gilded walnut finials carved into the shape of balloons. For his part, Lafayette sent a letter “enclosing an authentic narrative of the Experiments lately made in France with air Balloons, drawn up by Mr. Sage, an able Cheymist in the Academy of Sciences, with two Copper Plates Prints of those machines.” Although the learned organization had already received news of the discovery fromBenjamin Franklin, Lafayette’s letter was presented at the group’s meeting of April 2, 1784, and “duplicated by one of the secretaries.”

Frontispiece to Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond’s de- scription of the hot air balloon flight launched from Versailles in 1783. (illustration credit 9.1)

When it came to matters scientific, Lafayette’s enthusiasm sometimes trumped his good sense. The curious marquis was taken in by an attention-seeking ploy perpetrated in December 1783 when the daily Journal de Paris announced that it was collecting funds to be awarded to a man who claimed to have invented a pair of elastic shoes that made it possible to walk on water. As the renowned scholar of eighteenth-century “underground” literature Robert Darnton has discussed, the inventor, identified only as “D,” pledged to cross the Seine on foot on New Year’s Day and to pick up the proceeds when he reached the other side. Lafayette made one of the largest contributions to the pot, which was ultimately donated to charity.

A similar triumph of wishful thinking was on exhibit in Philadelphia on August 12, 1784, when Lafayette gave a presentation to the American Philosophical Society in front of twenty-two members gathered in Carpenters’ Hall—in the same room where, some nine years earlier, Louis XVI’s undercover agent Bonvouloir had first met with Franklin to discuss covert Franco-American cooperation in the fight against England. Lafayette’s visit was of a far more public nature, but he, too, had come to share a European secret with American friends. Lafayette’s topic was mesmerism—more commonly known at the time as “Animal Magnetism.” The theory, developed by the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer, posited the existence of an invisible but manipulable fluid contained within and around every object in the universe.

Mesmer had taken Paris by storm when, in February 1778, he’d arrived claiming to have discovered a means of curing various ailments by using magnetic currents to rechannel the flow of the mysterious fluid within a person’s body. More grandly, Mesmer held that universal harmony—a worldwide state of perfect physical and moral health in which man and nature would coexist in ideal balance—could be achieved through similar means. It did not take long for the sick and the curious to begin flocking to Mesmer’s music-filled rooms at the Place Vendôme. There, supplicants encountered an apparatus involving a large tub surrounded by several ropes, iron rods, and human chains. When activated, the eccentric machine would send mixed groups of men and women into spasms that sometimes required the afflicted to be carried off to an adjacent “crisis room,” where they could recover on the mattress-lined floor.

Some deemed Mesmer a common charlatan who lined his pockets by bilking the desperate and the credulous. The academies of Paris were among the skeptics, as were Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and scores of satirists who produced poems and caricatures that played up the orgiastic undertones of Mesmer’s convulsive groups. But those who were willing to suspend disbelief saw a promise of earthly salvation in Mesmer’s omnipresent fluid, and the specter of tyranny in any attempts to squelch such a well-intentioned philosophy.

Lafayette, who was always looking for new ways to ameliorate both individual and societal ills, saw mesmerism in the best possible light. Spreading liberty was one means of bettering the world; Lafayette hoped that mesmerism might be another. He joinedMesmer’s Society of Harmony (which counted Benjamin Franklin’s grandson among its notable members), and shortly before departing for America, he wrote to Washington that Mesmer has “made the greatest discovery upon animal magnetism.… He has instructed scholars, among whom your humble servant is called one of the most enthusiastic.” Perhaps acknowledging the boastful overtones of that statement, Lafayette added, with self-deprecating humor, “I know as much as any conjurer ever did.” Still, he took mesmerism seriously enough to promise to let Washington in on “the secret of Mesmer, which you may depend upon is a grand philosophical discovery.” Lafayette went so far as to chide Benjamin Franklin for agreeing to serve on a French royal commission investigating Mesmer’s claims: writing to Franklin on May 20, Lafayette observed that “Sciences and letters are frighted a way By the Hand of despotism.”

Caricature of Mesmer’s tub in Paris. (illustration credit 9.2)

Franklin was not swayed. In fact, at the very moment that Lafayette was regaling the American Philosophical Society with tales of animal magnetism, Franklin’s scientific commission was drafting its devastating assessment of Mesmer’s claims. By the late autumn of 1784, news of the debunking reached American shores. In the months that followed, newspapers from Massachusetts to South Carolina gradually relayed to their readers the disappointing verdict that animal magnetism was no more than a “chimera.” Lafayette never renounced the discredited theory, which continued to win adherents into the twentieth century, but neither was he tainted by association with it. One American author seems to have had Lafayette in mind when he excused the credulity of “characters distinguished for their good sense and benevolence—men, who were willing to believe almost anything that had even a shadow of probability of doing good to mankind.” Incapable of knowingly perpetrating such a deception, men of good faith might simply “think it impossible that any one should be so devoid of honesty as to attempt an imposition” in a matter of such grave concern.

For Lafayette, the highlight of his American sojourn came at his next destination, Mount Vernon, the Virginia estate of George Washington. Having relinquished his military commission on December 23, 1783, Washington was enjoying the tranquil existence of a “private citizen … under the shadow of my own vine and my own Fig tree, free from the bustle of a camp and the busy scenes of public life,” as he wrote to Lafayette on February 1, 1784. “Come … and view me in my domestic walks,” Washington proposed. “No man could receive you in them with more friendship and affection that I should do.” Lafayette happily accepted the invitation.

Lafayette and the Chevalier de Caraman, his traveling companion, reached Mount Vernon on August 17, 1784, and stayed as Washington’s guests for ten days. In that time, Lafayette left the grounds only once, to dine with local gentry at Lomax’s Tavern, the Alexandria, Virginia, terminus of the Baltimore stagecoach route. The other days were spent in the vicinity of the house in a state of uninterrupted serenity that Lafayette had not experienced since leaving Chavaniac, and his letters to Adrienne wax lyrical about the casual atmosphere of sociable retirement that he found at “the retreat of General Washington.” Each day, Lafayette observed, was given over to a pleasurable sequence of “lunching, talking, writing, dining, talking, writing, and supping.” He fretted only that the young Caraman—“poor Maurice,” as Lafayette called him—might “find it a bit monotonous.”

At Mount Vernon, Lafayette reflected on the full meaning of the Cincinnatus analogy, observing how Washington had turned his retirement into an expression of personal values by following the prescription offered by Horace in his epodes: “Beatus ille qui procul negotiis / ut prisca gens mortalium / paterna rura bubus exercet suis” (“Blessed is he who, leaving business behind him, works his life out on his ancestral land among the cattle”). Taking this as a model for his own behavior, Lafayette articulated in his letter to Adrienne an ideal vision for their new house in Paris, which was still undergoing renovations. “Since I am surrounded by domestic details, I will yield to the example of the true Cincinnatus, and although I may be a less retired Cincinnatus, I will also speak of the arrangements for the house.” Lafayette directed Adrienne’s “attention to my cabinet”—roughly the equivalent of his study or office—which he wanted to fill with objects that were emblematic of his interests in scientific progress and the young United States. He wrote that “there should be placed a barometer, a Declaration of Independence, and a smoke machine” (presumably a device intended to cut down on the smoke emanating from fireplaces) acquired during this tour of America. He added thatMonsieur Pilon, one of his servants, “knows what must be done with my busts and monuments.” Almost as an aside, Lafayette noted that “a rug wouldn’t harm anything.”

Lafayette’s letters paint a picture of his visit to Mount Vernon as he wished to see it and as the reunion of the former comrades-in-arms has been commemorated since. An enormous 1859 painting by the American artists Thomas Prichard Rossiter and Louis Remy Mignot rendered the scene much as Lafayette described it. The painting—destined to be reproduced in prints, on postcards, and as decorations on collectible plates for years to come—was created to support and to capitalize on the drive to restore the deteriorating Mount Vernon in the middle of the nineteenth century. It portrays the two generals standing on the neoclassical portico of the main house engaged in leisurely conversation. Behind Washington, a young girl clings to the lap of her mother, who sits at a small tea table enjoying a hot beverage and the company of a second woman. Behind Lafayette, in the shadows of a late-afternoon summer light, a young white boy and a black woman sit together on the grass, their playful gestures echoed by the pair of scampering dogs—one white, one brown—who frolic beside them. The manicured lawn stretches into the background until it yields to the gentle flow of the distant Potomac River.

A more complete picture of Mount Vernon at the time of Lafayette’s visit might be less idyllic. Looking beyond the majestic house and landscaped park, we would see five working farms, spread across eight thousand acres, where more than two hundred slaves lived and toiled. Mount Vernon was a fully functional plantation, growing wheat, corn, oats, and other grains. Washington, who firmly believed that a nation’s economic worth and moral value could be measured by its management of its land, surveyed his fields every day he could. He experimented constantly, trying new agricultural tools and techniques, and became a pioneer of modern farming systems through his advocacy of crop rotation, fertilization with manure, and other techniques that are now commonplace. Of course, while much of the intellectual work was his, most of the physical labor was performed by slaves.

Lafayette’s 1784 visit to Mount Vernon as imagined by Thomas Prichard Rossiter and Louis Rémy Mignot in 1859. (illustration credit 9.3)

Lafayette seems not to have mentioned slavery in any letters he sent to France in 1784, but he did not fail to notice the inhumane institution that enabled his adopted nation to flourish. Lafayette evidently saw himself as part of a great American experiment whose long-term success had not yet been fully ensured, and a sense of protective loyalty kept him from airing in Europe his criticisms of the United States. He had stated as much in a letter chiding John Adams, not so much for speaking ill of the Society of the Cincinnati but for letting his grievances be known abroad. Writing on March 8, 1784, Lafayette explained to Adams that “it Has Ever Been My duty and inclination to Set up in the Best light Every thing that is done By a Body of Americans.… Had I Amendments to Propose [to the society’s by-laws], it Should Be in America, and Not in Europe.” Lafayette implied that Adams should adopt the same policy of discretion.

On the matter of slavery, Lafayette followed his own advice. More than a year before visiting Mount Vernon he had written to Washington on the subject, proposing “a plan … Which Might Become Greatly Beneficial to the Black Part of Mankind.” Lafayette asked Washington to join him “in Purchasing a Small Estate Where We May try the Experiment to free the Negroes, and use them only as tenants.” The theory that slavery could be gradually abolished through such a program had been proposed by a handful of writers, mostly in Britain, but with little effect. Lafayette wrote to Washington that “such an example as yours, might render it a general practice. And, if we succeed in America, I will cheerfully devote a part of my time to render the method fashionable in the West Indies.” Lafayette concluded by declaring that “if it be a wild scheme, I had rather be mad that way, than to be thought wise on the other tack.”

Keenly aware that the issue of slavery was a political and economic powder keg threatening to explode the nascent union, Washington crafted a judicious reply. Lafayette’s proposal, Washington wrote, offered “striking evidence of the benevolence of your Heart.” Giving Lafayette just enough encouragement to buoy his hopes, Washington added, “I shall be happy to join you in so laudable a work; but will defer going into a detail of the business, till I have the pleasure of seeing you.” We do not know whether Lafayette and Washington did discuss slavery at Mount Vernon; if they did, their conversation has not come down to us.

Nonetheless, we do know that Lafayette addressed the matter at least twice during his 1784 American visit—both times in Virginia, where arguments on the subject had grown particularly heated. On November 16, Lafayette appeared before the Virginia House of Delegates in Richmond to receive its members’ official thanks for his “prudent, calm, and intrepid conduct during the campaign of 1781.” As the legislators put it, they wished that Lafayette might become the “model” for those seeking “glory” and praised the work he had done on behalf of “the interests of humanity.” Lafayette responded graciously, thanking the men of the chamber for the honor and voicing his appreciation for their constant affection and confidence. Yet before he concluded, he issued a plea that the state of Virginia might provide the world with “proofs of its love for the rights of all of humanity, in its entirety.”

At the time, Lafayette had reason to be hopeful that slavery might soon be abolished in Virginia. Now that America had won independence, a wave of abolition and emancipation had been sweeping through many of the northern states, where influential individuals and organizations were successfully arguing that the new nation must extend its promise of liberty to all people. Although slavery had been declared illegal by just two states—Vermont in 1777 and Massachusetts in 1783—systems of gradual emancipation had been introduced in Connecticut, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island and were under consideration elsewhere. Of the southern states that relied on slave labor to perpetuate their plantation economies, Virginia had exhibited the greatest inclination to permit occasional emancipation when, in May 1782, its state legislature had passed an “Act to Authorize the Manumission of Slaves.” This controversial law authorized any slaveholder to free his or her own slaves as long as the emancipation papers were written in “his or her hand and sealed, attested and proved in the county court by two witnesses, or acknowledged by the party in the court of the county where he or she resides.”

But Lafayette arrived at a moment of backlash: on the same day that he addressed the Virginia legislators, two counties submitted pro-slavery petitions, signed by a total of 257 citizens, to the Virginia General Assembly (as the House of Delegates and Senate were collectively known). These petitions were only the beginning; six more counties submitted remonstrances supporting slavery in the next twelve months, bringing the total number of signatories to 1,244. The eight counties mounted a variety of arguments and sought a range of outcomes, but they all had one goal in common: the repeal of the law permitting manumission. According to the petitions of November 16, 1784, “many Evils have Arisen from” partial emancipation, and “many of the same Free Negroes are Agents, Factors, and Carriers to the neighboring towns” of slaves who were stolen from their owners and freed under false pretenses by unwitting county courts.

Yet Lafayette remained hopeful that the law would not be repealed, and he acted accordingly. Still in Richmond on November 21, he wrote a testimonial supporting the application for freedom submitted by a slave named James Armistead, owned by William Armistead, who sought manumission on the basis of his contributions to the success of Lafayette’s 1781 campaign. As Lafayette confirmed, Armistead had “done Essential Service to Me” when he’d “Industriously Collected” intelligence “from the enemy’s camp.” He had, Lafayette wrote, “perfectly acquitted himself with some important commissions I gave him and appears to me entitled to every reward his situation can admit of.” Although it took more than two years, Armistead was freed on January 9, 1787, at which time he adopted the surname Lafayette. Thanks, in large part, to Lafayette’s efforts to publicize his commitment to manumission, his role in securing Armistead’s liberation became widely known on both sides of the Atlantic. While in Paris in 1783, Lafayette had commissioned a painting and engraving depicting himself and Armistead at the Siege of Yorktown. Envisioned as pendants to Lafayette’s 1780 portraits of Washington with a turbaned African servant, the 1783 pictures depict Armistead in a fanciful costume topped by a plumed chapeau—an unlikely uniform for a black man hoping to pass unnoticed in 1781 Virginia. When Lafayette returned to the United States in 1824, a widely circulated broadside that reproduced Lafayette’s handwritten letter beneath a more plausible portrait of Armistead helped secure Lafayette’s reputation as a friend of the abolitionist cause.

The reputation was well earned. Throughout the 1780s and 1790s, Lafayette became increasingly active in various strains of the international abolitionist movement. His archives include correspondence on the subject with the English abolitionists Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp, as well as with the Marquis de Condorcet, who thanked him in 1785 for reading his Reflections on Negro Slavery, and Benjamin Franklin, who, as president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, sent Lafayette several copies of the society’s constitution on May 27, 1788. In 1788, Lafayette joined France’s Society of the Friends of the Blacks, an organization spearheaded by the writer and humanitarian Jacques-Pierre Brissot (also known as Brissot de Warville). In the same year, Lafayette became a corresponding member of the New York Manumission Society and the British Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. And he continued to keep abreast of developments in abolitionism even amid the tumult of the French Revolution, acquiring, for example, a handwritten French translation of James Phillips’s anti-slavery broadside Description of a Slave Ship, published in London in 1789.

It would, however, be a mistake to understand Lafayette’s views on slavery as being any more clear-cut than those of his abolitionist contemporaries. Although Lafayette championed liberty as an inalienable right, he never proposed the sudden or universal emancipation of slaves. Instead, his goals were similar to those articulated by Franklin, who spoke for many members of anti-slavery movements in describing the “final purposes” of the Pennsylvania Society as “the suppression of the slave trade and the gradual abolition of slavery itself.” Like Franklin and like Jefferson, who wrote frequently of his efforts to improve the lives of the roughly two hundred slaves on his plantation and devised plans to repatriate slaves to Africa, Lafayette advocated ameliorating the conditions of enslaved men, women, and children. He first broached the idea of improving the lot of slaves in the French colonies (the only territories in which France permitted slavery) in his 1783 memo on Franco-American commerce. By way of arguing that France’s colonies in the Americas should be allowed to import foodstuffs from the United States, Lafayette appealed to “the double voice of self-interest and humanity.” He observed that “as long as feeding the slaves depends on laws prohibiting the importation of foreign produce into the colonies the slaves will be few and poorly nourished, will work little and die sooner.” It was a cold calculus to be sure, and an unusually pragmatic position for Lafayette—a man who usually traded in absolutes.

Marie-Joseph-Yves-Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette at Yorktown. Engraving after Jean-Baptiste Le Paon by Noël Le Mire. 1782. (illustration credit 9.4)

An 1824 broadside reproducing Lafayette’s 1784 testimonial in support of the manumission of James Armistead, who spied for Lafayette during the 1781 Virginia campaign, beneath a portrait of Armistead. (illustration credit 9.5)

Tying himself into a moral knot that he never managed to untangle, Lafayette opted paradoxically to demonstrate the benefits of gradual emancipation by becoming a slaveholder himself. Although Washington declined to join in the venture, Lafayette put his plan for an ideal plantation into action in 1785, when he acquired two properties in Cayenne, the capital of the South American colony of French Guiana: Saint Régis (which he renamed L’Adrienne, in honor of his wife) and Le Maripa. For the fields planted with clove trees and sugarcane, and forty-eight slaves to work them, Lafayette paid 125,000 livres. A third property, La Gabrielle, worked by twenty-two slaves, was acquired in 1786 in a profit-sharing arrangement with the French government. According to a list compiled on March 1, 1789, seventy slaves were living on the three plantations. They ranged in age from the one-year-old Seraphim, who was brought to Le Maripa from a nearby plantation along with her parents and her four-year-old brother, to the blind sixty-year-old Hosea, who would die at L’Adrienne. As Lafayette wrote to Washington on February 6, 1786, his intention was “to free my negroes in order to make that experiment which you know is my hobby horse.” Washington replied with a lament that captured the contradiction of a slaveholder who had led a nation to freedom: “would to God a like spirit would diffuse itself generally into the minds of the people of this country, but I despair of seeing it.” Neither man could have foreseen that, when faced with the political and financial exigencies of the French Revolution and its aftermath, Lafayette would fail to live up to his own expectations.

On August 28, 1784, Lafayette and Caraman were once again on the road. Setting out from Mount Vernon, they were heading some four hundred miles due north to Fort Stanwix (also called Fort Schuyler), near Lake Ontario in what is now Rome, New York, to witness the signing of a treaty between the government of the United States and the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. With three appointed commissioners representing the interests of Congress, Lafayette had no official role in the proceedings, but he was eager to visit the Oneidas, whose young men had fought alongside him at the Battle of Barren Hill.

As Lafayette made his way through the mid-Atlantic region, his entourage grew. Future president James Madison, who was on a brief hiatus from public service, reported in a letter to Thomas Jefferson that he “fell in with the Marquis” at Baltimore and embraced the voyage as an opportunity to “gratify my curiosity in several respects.” From Baltimore, the men set off by barge to Albany. There, they awaited the arrival of the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois, France’s Philadelphia-based chargé d’affaires, whose diary offers a colorful chronicle of the group’s westward journey from Albany to Fort Stanwix. A fifth man, a certain Demanche, served as an aide. Although neither rank nor position designated Lafayette the leader of his group, he overshadows all others in Barbé-Marbois’s account, as even the weather played second fiddle to Lafayette’s persona in Barbé-Marbois’s telling. While the other members of the party bundled in cloaks and rugs to ward off the autumnal chill of central New York in late September and early October, Lafayette, the diplomat related, “seemed to be impervious to heat, cold, draught, humidity, and the inclemency of the seasons.” His only protection was “an overcoat of gummed taffeta,” in which he must have been a sight to behold. Evidently, the coat had been shipped from France packed “in newspapers that had stuck to the gum. There had been no time to pull them off, and the curious could read on his arm or his back the Courrier de l’Europe or the news from various places.”

Lafayette insisted that the travelers’ first stop be the settlement of Niskayuna, nestled deep in the woods near Albany. There, as Barbé-Marbois explains, Lafayette “wished to examine at firsthand phenomena that seemed very similar to those associated with Mesmer.” Niskayuna had been established in 1779 by the celibate yet rapidly growing Protestant sect known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing—known colloquially as the Shakers. Lafayette was not disappointed. As he described them to Adrienne, the Shakers were “enthusiasts who go through incredible contortions and who claim to perform miracles, in which I have found some of the methods of magnetism.”

According to Barbé-Marbois’s journal, Lafayette and his friends reached Niskayuna on foot on a Sunday, and the sound of “slow, melancholy, but rather melodious music” greeted the approaching visitors, who found the Shakers “in the midst of their religious devotions.” When the dancing and singing drew to a close, Lafayette set about the task he had come to perform: testing the powers of animal magnetism on one of the Shakers. An old man “of extreme simplicity” was selected for the honor, and Lafayette was soon “magnetizing him with all his power,” but to no avail. The community looked on warily as Lafayette continued laying hands on the man, “trying without success the effects of magnetism on all his poles,” until an elderly Shaker, presaging the question put to Dorothy in Oz, asked whether this exercise was being performed “in the name of a good spirit or of an evil spirit.” So convincing was Lafayette in explaining the beneficent goals of mesmerism that the Shaker in question perceived an opportunity and attempted to convert the earnest Frenchman on the spot, hoping that Lafayette might proselytize for the community while spreading the good news about mesmerism. As Barbé-Marbois reports, “We were unable to shake him off until we left Niskayuna.”

The next leg of the trip was an eighty-mile drive “across a superb” but war-torn landscape. Duties were divvied up equally: Lafayette looked after the horses, Caraman arranged lodgings, Madison served as navigator, and Barbé-Marbois “was the cook for the troop.” Expecting provisions to be scarce, they had stocked their carriages with everything from cornmeal to chocolate, but the men wanted for nothing. With Lafayette in their midst, “people gave us butter in abundance,” reported Barbé-Marbois. “If we asked for milk, they brought it to us in great wooden pails.” Children were eager to serve as human candlestick holders or fire screens, and fought for the privilege of turning the wooden spit on which the visitors roasted their meats.

Transportation, however, left much to be desired. After a few days’ journey, Barbé-Marbois found that his phaeton carriage—lightweight, sporty, and prone to overturning—was no match for the treacherous roads and had to be abandoned. The last miles to Fort Stanwix were traversed on horseback, with stacks of blankets serving as makeshift saddles. Still, the company reached the assigned meeting place several days before the government commissioners were expected. Eager “to see the Indians in their villages, and to get acquainted with their customs,” Lafayette and his companions set off once again. Here, they found the roads to be “really barbarous and wild” as they made their way on horseback, guided by Oneida scouts, through a dense forest whose only paths were chiefly intended for travel by foot. As Barbé-Marbois described it, the ground was “a muddy marsh, into which we sank at each step.” They “traveled in dark and rainy weather” and “lost [their] way once” before finally emerging from the wood and crossing a series of “rivers by fording them, and sometimes by swimming our horses.” At last, the company “arrived, very wet and very tired, in the territory of the Oneidas.” Lafayette, as usual, offered a more upbeat version of events, describing his arrival as something of a homecoming. “My companions,” he wrote to Adrienne from Fort Stanwix, “were quite surprised to find me as familiar with this country” as with the Faubourg St.-Germain.

Throughout the eighteenth century, Europeans—especially the French—were fascinated by Native American peoples and cultures. Few of the philosophers or scientists who wrote on the subject had traveled to the New World or encountered its indigenous inhabitants, but a lack of firsthand knowledge did not prevent them from citing the Indians to support their own theories about human nature. The eminent French naturalist the Comte de Buffon believed that Native Americans suffered from the “degeneration” that afflicted everything—plants, animals, people—subjected to the supposedly unhealthful conditions of the New World climate. The Abbé Raynal, who traveled in the circles of the forward-thinking men of letters who wrote and edited the Encyclopédie and is believed to have cowritten his controversial History of the Two Indies with Diderot, espoused an opposing view. Raynal’s description of the native peoples encountered by the French in Canada reads like a catalog of virtues associated with the “noble savage”—a term coined by the seventeenth-century English poet John Dryden. According to the History, native societies were marked by good faith, mutual respect, and selfless benevolence. Unspoiled by the vanity and artifice of Europe, the Canadian Indians were said to understand thatnature created all men equal and to scorn “the respect that we have for titles, dignities, and especially hereditary nobility.” Raynal, like many French authors, referred to these people as sauvages, but the Encyclopedists inflected the word with positive connotations absent from the English term “savage”; as the Chevalier de Jaucourt wrote, “One calls sauvages all the Indian peoples who are not subject to the yoke of the nation and who live apart.… Out of the way in the forests and mountains, they preserve their liberty.”

Lafayette owned the works of Buffon and Raynal, as well as other books on the customs of the Native Americans, but his attitude toward these indigenous peoples was largely free from the judgments, either for or against, that issued from the scholars’ pens. Instead, Lafayette gazed with ingenuous wonder upon people who, in his view, were so deeply connected to the American land he loved yet whose manners seemed so intensely foreign to him. Perhaps he felt a kinship with a people out of place in their own home. In memoirs drafted in 1780, Lafayette vividly described his first glimpse of a Native American assembly. He recalled seeing “five hundred men, women, and children, colored with paints and feathers, their ears pierced, their noses ornamented with jewels, and their nearly naked bodies marked with varied designs.” Although he opined that “drunkenness” seemed to be an obstacle that the society had yet to overcome, he noted with approval that “as the old men smoked, they discoursed very well on politics.” The sincerity with which Lafayette approached his hosts must have communicated across language barriers because, as he put it, the Iroquois “adopted” him “and gave him the name Kayewla, which had formerly been borne by one of their warriors.” With a justifiable measure of pride, he noted that “whenever the army needed Indians or there was any business to be conducted with those tribes,” the American leadership always turned to him for advice, counsel, and assistance.

Barbé-Marbois was less kindly disposed toward the Oneidas, in whom he perceived neither wisdom nor eloquence, yet he was moved by the realization that he was bearing witness to a vanishing way of life. He urged “Europeans who are curious to know” the Indians not to “lose time, for the advance of the European population is extremely rapid in this continent.… In a few centuries,” he foretold, “when civilization will have extended its effects over all the world, people will be tempted to regard the reports of travelers as the ingenious dreams of a philosopher who is seeking the origin of society and is tracing the history of its advances from his imagination.” In a particularly poetic passage, Barbé-Marbois envisioned the inevitable transformation of the landscape in upstate New York:

In a century, and perhaps sooner, agriculture and commerce will give life to this savage desert. This rock will furnish stones to the city which will be built on the banks of that stream. There will be a bridge here and a quay there. Instead of this marsh there will be a public fountain; elegantly dressed ladies will stroll in the very place where I walk carefully for fear of rattlesnakes: it will be a public park, adorned with statues and fountains. A few ancient trees will be exhibited as the precious remains of the forest which to-day covers the mountain. I see already the square where the college, the academy, the house for the legislature, and the other public buildings will be placed.

As Barbé-Marbois predicted, it took far less than a hundred years for the region to be transformed. On July 4, 1817, a shovel thrust into the ground at Rome, New York, marked the beginning of the great construction project that produced the Erie Canal.

The landscape might not have shown it, but the Oneida world had been changing for some time. After decades of trading, negotiating, and warring with Europeans, many of the continent’s native societies had fully incorporated foreign goods and customs into their more traditional ways of life. Barbé-Marbois noticed as much when his group arrived in the Oneida village. Entering the Council Hall, where the nation’s chiefs and warriors were awaiting their guests, Barbé-Marbois recognized one of the “venerable leaders” as Great Grasshopper, who was attired in his finest regalia—“a Bavarian court hunting costume,” received as a gift from the Chevalier de la Luzerne, “which he wears on all important occasions.” When the meeting of the Great Council at Fort Stanwix began the following day, the forty men representing the region’s native nations—Oneidas, Tuscaroras, Mohawks, Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, and more—appeared in costumes ranging from traditional capes made of untanned bearskin to the daintiest of embroidered European waistcoats. During the Revolutionary War, only the Oneidas and the Tuscaroras sided with the rebellious colonists, and many of their men distinguished themselves from members of the other nations by wearing belts, necklaces, and other accoutrements received from the Americans. Items given to them by Lafayette were particularly prized.

When the conference opened on October 3—a piercingly cold day—Lafayette was the first to address the assembly. Although he spoke in French, he underscored his respect and affection for local cultures by lacing his talk with references to figures and concepts gleaned from Iroquois lore. He thanked “the Great Manitou who has brought me to this spot of peace, where I find you all smoking the calumet of friendship” and praised the two nations that had joined with the Americans. Reprising the speech he had delivered six years earlier, Lafayette reiterated his promise that, if they allied with the Americans, “the great Onontio [the Indian name for the administrator of New France] like the sun will clear away the clouds which hang over your heads, and the schemes of your enemies will vanish like smoke.”

Although Lafayette played no official role in the proceedings, his address became the centerpiece of the conference—much to the chagrin of his European and American colleagues. Over the course of two days, each of the chiefs replied in turn, referring to Lafayette as “our father,” as the Iroquois had termed the French for at least a century, thanking him for his words and, in the case of the nations that had joined the English, apologizing for failing to heed his advice. Arthur Lee, one of the congressmen, complained to Madison “of the immoderate stress laid on the influence of the M.” Apparently, Lee did not hesitate to tell Lafayette what he thought, but if he hoped to encourage Lafayette’s departure, it was to no avail. Madison reported to Jefferson that Lafayette “was the only conspicuous figure” throughout the entire event, and that he had “eclipsed” the three commissioners from Congress. Trying to make sense of Lafayette’s star turn, Madison offered a measured view of the marquis, writing, “I take him to be as amiable a man as his vanity will admit and as sincere an American as any Frenchman can be.” Madison seems to have misconstrued Lafayette’s enthusiasm as narcissism, but his assessment of Lafayette’s French-American character was spot-on.

For his part, Lafayette was gratified by the warm welcome he received. Writing to Adrienne, he expressed surprise that his “personal credit with the sauvages … has proved to be much greater than I had imagined.” “They made me great promises,” he wrote, “and I love to think that I have contributed to a treaty that will give us a small stream of commerce and will ensure the tranquility of the Americans.” Still, he was glad to be leaving his “little bark hut,” which he found “about as comfortable as a taffeta suit in the month of January.” On October 6, Lafayette and Caraman collected their belongings, bade good-bye to Barbé-Marbois and the others at the fort, and boarded a boat rowed by five men that was heading down the Mohawk River to Albany in weather that Lafayette described as “beautiful.”

Lafayette and Caraman spent the next two months traveling as far north as New Hampshire and as far south as Virginia, visiting old friends, making new ones, and enjoying the banquets, balls, and receptions that sprang up wherever they went. Lafayette’s travels were fueled, in large part, by nostalgia for his days in the army and curiosity about the nation he had helped create.

Interested though he was in the past and the present, Lafayette was also concerned about the future. One of his goals in coming to America had been to ensure the survival of his American reputation, and he attended to the matter with considerable care. Lafayette was well aware that the first histories of the American Revolution were being written even as he was being feted at a string of celebrations that had no precedent in the young country. Abigail Adams’s friend Mercy Otis Warren was collecting the materials that would go into her History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution (1805); David Ramsay, a legislator from South Carolina, was doing the same for his History of the American Revolution (1789); and William Gordon, an irascible Massachusetts parson, was already well along in writing The History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States of America, Including an Account of the Late War; and of the Thirteen Colonies, from Their Origin to That Period (1788).

Lafayette was most concerned about Gordon, and with good reason. Parson Gordon had already made enemies of men as eminent—and as different—as John Hancock and Alexander Hamilton. John Adams described him as “an eternal Talker, and somewhat vain, and not accurate nor judicious.” Hoping to protect his own reputation from Gordon’s injudicious pen, Lafayette asked James McHenry, his former aide-de-camp, to “recollect the train of his military proceedings and commit them to paper” and to forward the resulting text to Washington. Washington, in turn, was asked to send McHenry’s thoughts to Gordon for inclusion in Gordon’s History. Washington and Gordon enjoyed cordial relations of the sort that might facilitate the granting of favors; along with letters on the subject of the marquis, the men exchanged tulips, redbud trees, and other flowering plants, as part of a collective effort undertaken by many of the Founding Fathers to spread the vegetation of their respective regions throughout the new nation.

Yet even the promise of a magnolia tree from Virginia was insufficient to persuade Gordon to accept the memoir handcrafted by McHenry. “In certain places,” complained Gordon, “the colouring is too strong.” For instance, he refused to cast as particularly meritorious Lafayette’s decision to abandon his planned incursion into Canada, observing that “it did not require the bold judgment of a most experienced general to relinquish” the project “when there were not the means of prosecuting it with any reasonable prospect of success.” He was still less kind in his assessment of Lafayette’s retreat at Barren Hill. Revealing, perhaps, a lack of military experience, Gordon insisted that “there was no great maneuvering in his extricating himself from the critical situation into which he had been brought.” To this he added the unfounded assertion that Lafayette was partly to blame for his predicament because he had dropped “the night before the hint of his meaning to remain upon the spot till the next morning, and which was forwarded to the British commander.” In defense of his unflattering words concerning Lafayette’s actions at Barren Hill, Gordon cited General Knox, whose assessment of the retreat was that “here we were saved by pure providence without any interposition of our own.” In the end, Barren Hill was not mentioned in Gordon’s four-volume history. Whether because the author mellowed as he wrote the book or because Lafayette’s fame grew too great to contest, Gordon’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States of America ultimately portrayed Lafayette as the hero he had become.

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