Democracy, Disagreement, and Compromise Theme Analysis

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”