Fields and Hills Symbol Analysis

In Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, rolling fields and hills represent how the United States idealizes its complicated, often violent past. As Vowell retraces Lafayette’s steps through the peaceful hills that were once the sites of bloody Revolutionary War battles (like Brandywine and Yorktown), she is struck by the lack of landmarks or monuments memorializing this history of conflict. While there are plenty of monuments commemorating important moments in American politics, from the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the First Inaugural Ball, there are very few physical markers of the death and pain that were necessary to guarantee American freedoms. Vowell sees this absence as proof of Americans’ tendency 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.”

Fascinatingly, this desire to celebrate the pastoral American landscape—while ignoring the violence that takes place in it—stretches back to the nation’s inception. When Lafayette himself first arrived in South Carolina (a colony where slavery was legal), he wrote home to his wife Adrienne not to express his horror at human bondage but to tell her about the “vast forests and immense rivers” he encountered on his journey. In other words, Lafayette was too awed by the impressive vistas of the new United States to notice the brutality that defined them.