War, Politics, and Family Theme Analysis

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.

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?

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.

“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.”

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.

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.