Count de Grasse Character Analysis

De Grasse cajoled Lafayette by promising “to further your glory. Lafayette later confessed, “The temptation was great, but even if the attack had succeeded, it would necessarily have cost a great deal of blood.” Therefore he decided not to sacrifice the soldiers “entrusted to me to personal ambition.” Lafayette was growing up. Two days later he turned twenty-four.

For that reason, some scholars consider this somewhat forgotten maritime dust up—referred to as the Battle of the Chesapeake […]—to be the most important altercation of the American Revolution, a take that’s all the more astonishing considering not a single American took part in it. Nor did a single American even witness it.

Over at the battlefield, we drove from the site of the French encampment to the French artillery park to the French Cemetery, where someone had left a single yellow daisy on the plaque commemorating the burial of fifty unknown French soldiers. Then we went for lunch on the York River waterfront at the Water Street Grille, a few yards away from a statue of Admiral de Grasse. There were freedom fries on the menu.

The lesson of Yorktown is the value of cooperation—the lack of it among Britain’s top commanders, and the overwhelming strength of the Franco-American alliance. […] A more interesting aspect of the Franco-American collaboration was the way the French and American officers kept talking each other out of bad ideas.

De Grasse cajoled Lafayette by promising “to further your glory. Lafayette later confessed, “The temptation was great, but even if the attack had succeeded, it would necessarily have cost a great deal of blood.” Therefore he decided not to sacrifice the soldiers “entrusted to me to personal ambition.” Lafayette was growing up. Two days later he turned twenty-four.

For that reason, some scholars consider this somewhat forgotten maritime dust up—referred to as the Battle of the Chesapeake […]—to be the most important altercation of the American Revolution, a take that’s all the more astonishing considering not a single American took part in it. Nor did a single American even witness it.

Over at the battlefield, we drove from the site of the French encampment to the French artillery park to the French Cemetery, where someone had left a single yellow daisy on the plaque commemorating the burial of fifty unknown French soldiers. Then we went for lunch on the York River waterfront at the Water Street Grille, a few yards away from a statue of Admiral de Grasse. There were freedom fries on the menu.

The lesson of Yorktown is the value of cooperation—the lack of it among Britain’s top commanders, and the overwhelming strength of the Franco-American alliance. […] A more interesting aspect of the Franco-American collaboration was the way the French and American officers kept talking each other out of bad ideas.