Lafayette in the Somewhat United States Quotes

In other words, Lafayette mania circa 1824 was specific to him and cannot be written off as the product of a simpler, more agreeable time. In the United States of America, there was no simpler, more agreeable time.

Who knows what happened to that particular chair. It could have been burned during the British occupation of Philadelphia in the winter of 1777-78, when firewood was scarce. But it might have been a more helpful, sobering symbolic object than that chair with the rising sun. Then perhaps citizens making pilgrimages to Independence Hall could file pass the chair Jefferson walked across an aisle to sit in, and we could all ponder the amount of respect, affection, and wishy-washy give-and-take needed to keep a house divided in reasonable repair.

Said Lafayette, “I did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence.” Spoken like every only child ever.

As for Lafayette becoming a Freemason: one did not have to be an orphaned only child to be predisposed to joining a mysterious brotherhood with snazzy secret handshakes, but it didn’t hurt. Famous Freemason Benjamin Franklin set of the group, “While each lodge is created from individual members and while individuality is treasured, lodges are designed to be sociable and to encourage mutual works.” What a perfect arrangement for Lafayette, who harbored contradictory ambitions to both fit in and stick out.

Because these words convinced Louis XVI to open his heart and, more important, his wallet to the patriots, Vergennes’s memo arguably had as much practical effect on the establishment of American independence as the Declaration of Independence itself. Jefferson’s pretty phrases were incomplete without the punctuation of French gunpowder.

To establish such a forthright dreamland of decency, who wouldn’t sign up to shoot at a few thousand Englishmen, just as long as Mr. Bean wasn’t one of them? Alas, from my end of history there’s a big file cabinet blocking the view of the sweet natured Republic Lafayette foretold, and it’s where the guvment keeps the folders full of Indian treaties, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and NSA-monitored electronic messages pertinent to national security.

The place looks wrong. I’m not bothered that the present intrudes on the past, what would the combination Pizza Hut-Taco Bell looming near a road once crammed with redcoats; or that Fuzzy Butts Dog Daycare is situated a stone’s throw from the old Quaker house where Lafayette reportedly spent the night before the battle. No, my problem is springtime. The Brandywine countryside is in bloom—too green, too chirpy, too full of life.

Just as Densmore’s religious ethics seemed to filter through his nonfiction, my background bubbles up into mine. Having studied art history, as opposed to political history, I tend to incorporate found objects into my books. Just as Pablo Picasso glued a fragment of furniture onto the canvas of Still Life with Chair Caning, I like to use whatever’s lying around to paint pictures of the past—traditional pigment like archival documents but also the added texture of whatever bits and bobs I learn from looking out bus windows or chatting up the people I bump into on the road.”

While the melodrama of hucking crates of tea into Boston Harbor continues to inspire civic-minded hotheads to this day, it’s worth remembering the hordes of stoic colonial women who simply swore off tea and steeped basil leaves in boiling water to make the same point. What’s more valiant: littering from a wharf or years of doing chores and looking after children from dawn to dark without caffeine?

As for Washington, how could he not envy Gates? Saratoga was the turning point of the war, the most spectacular patriot victory to date. And when it went down, His Excellency was more than 200 miles away, licking his wounds from his recent setbacks.

When Lafayette wrote his letter to Washington worrying that America could lose the war not at the hands of the redcoats but rather “by herself and her own sons,” he might not have been referring solely to the Conway cabal. He may have also had in mind the observable fact that the military, congressional, and state bureaucracies responsible for supplying the common soldiers with luxuries like food, water, and shoes word, to use an acronym coined by the grunts of Ike’s war, FUBAR.

It’s possible that the origin of what kept our forefathers from feeding the troops at Valley Forge is the same flaw that keeps the federal government from making sure a vet with renal failure can get a checkup, and that impedes my teachers friend’s local government from keeping her in chalk, and that causes a decrepit, ninety-three-year old exploding water main to spit eight million gallons of water down Sunset Boulevard during one of the worst droughts in California history. Is it just me, or does this foible hark back to the root of the revolution itself? Which is to say, a hypersensitivity about taxes—and honest disagreement over how they’re levied, how they’re calculated, how that money is spent, and by whom.

“Do not underestimate my ignorance about a war we were not really taught in England,” [my British friend] continued. “We concentrated on the wars we won—the First World War, the Second, the Tudors. Nobody taught me American history. Well, maybe a bit when we study the Georges—there was always trouble off stage in America. To us it was just the loss of a colony.”

Washington had also been ruminating on a deeper, less obvious stumbling block than the fact that summer—and summer battle season—was coming all too soon. Namely, that the rebels under his command were not fighting to become free; they were cornered into fighting because the government of Great Britain had failed to understand that they already were. […] Yet the self-respect and self-possession that incited said people to revolt was hindering the revolution goal, independence, because functional armies required hierarchy and self-denial, orders barked and orders followed.

“The loss of our poor child is almost constantly in my thoughts,” [Lafayette] wrote to Adrienne. “This sad news followed immediately that of the treaty; and while my heart was torn by grief, I was obliged to receive and take part in expressions of public joy.”

Anyone who accepts the patriot’s premise that all men are created equal must come to terms with the fact that the most obvious threat to equality in eighteenth-century North America was not taxation without representation but slavery. Parliament would abolish slavery in the British Empire in 1833, thirty years before President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. A return to the British fold in 1778 might have freed American slaves three decades sooner, which is what, an entire generation and a half? Was independence for some of us more valuable than freedom for all of us? As the former slave Frederick Douglass put it in an Independence Day speech in 1852, “This is your 4th of July, not mine.”

“Not only was stopping at one of Springsteen’s childhood homes appropriate,” Sherm replies, “it was an important part of the day for me as a Jersey boy, since it served as a great reminder that not all important fights take place on battlefields. Some take place in tiny houses, or half-houses, whether with family members or within oneself, and involve changing your course, convincing your mother to rent you a guitar (or my father to buy me a typewriter,) and getting the hell out of that house, that town, that state. It’s a different kind of independence, personal instead of political, but one of the many things we won in that war fought over two centuries ago turned out to be the freedom of expression that led a dude from Jersey write a song like ‘Thunder Road.’”

The Americans, who had been British for centuries and not British for only three years, were quick to turn on the French after Newport—too quick. Most of that ire can be explained by the current events in Rhode Island, but some of the patriot disdain was older, in their blood.

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.

Washington repeated this performance as president, leaving office after two terms rather than staying on his president for life, because he honestly wanted to live out his days, as Voltaire put it, cultivating his own garden—and painting his dining room the world’s most alarming shade of green. Washington’s homebody side tempered his ambition, staving off the lure of power.

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.

Following the lead of John Adams, Americans prefer to think of the American Revolution not as an eight-year war but rather as a revolution “effected before the War commenced.” We like to believe, as Adams did, that the revolution was “in the minds and hearts of the people,” as opposed to the amputated limbs and bayoneted torsos of Continental and French casualties.

Appeals upheld a ruling against discrimination in the issuing of permits and chastised the National Park Service’s periodic attempts to curb demonstrations in Lafayette Square “because use of parks for public assembly and airing of opinions is historic in our democratic society, and one of its cardinal values.”