Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

by

Sarah Vowell

Themes and Colors
Democracy, Disagreement, and Compromise Theme Icon
Landscape and Historical Memory Theme Icon
Youthful Glory vs. Mature Leadership Theme Icon
Freedom and Protest Theme Icon
War, Politics, and Family Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Freedom and Protest Theme Icon

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States traces the arc of the American Revolutionary War, in which a ragtag band of British colonial subjects theorized about—and fought violently for—their independence. But Sarah Vowell, a historian and the book’s author, suggests that this call for independence was not quite as simple as the revolutionaries made it seem. On the one hand, the newly democratic nation was dependent on monarchist, hierarchical France, a diplomatic relationship personified in the Patriot army’s reliance on the French volunteer soldier the Marquis de Lafayette. On the other hand, many of the white American men who were most forcefully against the British were themselves slaveholders—slaveholders who refused to acknowledge the clash between their cries for freedom and their everyday practice of bondage.

By pointing to these contradictions, Vowell suggests that rather than merely accepting the Founders’ own language of freedom and independence, it is important to question the real meaning of this revolutionary rhetoric. In fact, Vowell ends her book with a focus on the protests in Lafayette Square, the plaza in front of the White House conveniently named for her titular hero. For decades, the people who have protested here—whether it was anti-imperialist Vietnam activists or women advocating for the right to vote—have tried to expand American democratic principles to new geographic regions and types of people. By concluding with a focus on these protestors, many of whom called out to the memory of Lafayette in their advocacy, Vowell calls for a freer United States, one that truly lives up to the principles it claims to represent—namely, liberty and equal rights for all.

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Freedom and Protest Quotes in Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

Below you will find the important quotes in Lafayette in the Somewhat United States related to the theme of Freedom and Protest.
Pages 1-59 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Sarah Vowell (speaker), Benjamin Franklin (speaker), Marquis de Lafayette
Page Number: 34
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Sarah Vowell (speaker), Thomas Jefferson , King Louis XVI , Count de Vergennes
Page Number: 50
Explanation and Analysis:
Pages 60-125 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Sarah Vowell (speaker), Marquis de Lafayette, Adrienne de Lafayette
Page Number: 71
Explanation and Analysis:
Pages 126-190 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Sarah Vowell (speaker)
Page Number: 155
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Sarah Vowell (speaker), Marquis de Lafayette, George Washington, Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben
Page Number: 167
Explanation and Analysis:

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.”

Related Characters: Sarah Vowell (speaker), Frederick Douglass (speaker), Thomas Jefferson
Page Number: 178
Explanation and Analysis:
Pages 190-268 Quotes

“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.’”

Related Characters: Sherm (speaker), Marquis de Lafayette, Sarah Vowell
Page Number: 190
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Sarah Vowell (speaker), John Adams (speaker)
Page Number: 258
Explanation and Analysis:

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.”

Related Characters: Sarah Vowell (speaker), Marquis de Lafayette
Page Number: 265
Explanation and Analysis: