Though Sarah Vowell’s Lafayette in the Somewhat United States is largely a military history of the American Revolution, Vowell also tracks the personal evolution of her titular character, the general Marquis de Lafayette. When the French-born Lafayette began his involvement with the American army, he was reckless and irresponsible, putting himself—and the tenuous Franco-American alliance he helped forge—in danger. As a teenager, Lafayette prioritized person glory over all else: his first trip across the Atlantic was done in secret, against the French nobility’s wishes, and he was so eager to fight in his first battle that he led his troops into danger and got himself shot in the leg. Gradually, however, as Lafayette became more invested and entangled in building the new nation, he learned to set aside his own desire for notoriety in favor of the country’s larger needs; in one particularly telling anecdote, he was able to ignore the French naval officer Count De Grasse’s offer of everlasting fame in order to best serve his beloved George Washington. And just as Lafayette grew up, beginning to balance communal needs against his own interests, the various American politicians he worked alongside similarly learned to compromise. Lafayette’s coming of age thus parallels the United States’ growth from a collection of sparring individual states—each one determined to assert its own interests—to a more mature country, concerned with its own permanence.
Youthful Glory vs. Mature Leadership ThemeTracker
Youthful Glory vs. Mature Leadership Quotes in Lafayette in the Somewhat United States
Said Lafayette, “I did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence.” Spoken like every only child ever.
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.
“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.”
“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.’”
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.
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.”