Lafayette (35 page)

With negotiations stalled, the young knights of France again appeared at Franklin’s house to enlist in the American army. “Our young lords all want to become Lafayettes,” one newspaper commented.
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His friend the comte de Ségur, who had just married into the Noailles family, at last got the chance to sail to America as Lafayette and the vicomte de Noailles had done. “Tell Lafayette,” he wrote his wife after arriving in America, “that I am in a country where his name is everywhere and where everyone adores him.”
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In addition to serving Franklin, Lafayette also served as liaison to the French court for John Adams, who was attempting to negotiate a loan from Holland, and for John Jay, who was in Spain trying in vain to win recognition of United States independence. Although allied with France against England, Spain had refused to help or even recognize the Americans, fearing the contagion of colonist rebellion would spread to its own colonies in the Americas. Spain also feared that an independent United States would inevitably expand westward into Spanish territory and demanded, as a price for recognition, American abandonment of all claims and navigation rights in the Mississippi Valley—terms that Jay vehemently rejected.

“I have a letter from Mr. Jay, whose negotiations are not advancing,” Lafayette wrote to Livingston, “and it is the Spaniards’ fault.”
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He complained to Vergennes that Spain’s treatment of Jay was insulting. “When Mr. Jay addresses himself to the minister,” Lafayette reported, “he is either much occupied or ill. . . . This want of health, time, or instructions has hitherto occasioned the neglect of all the memorials which have been presented by the Americans.”
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When he was not tending to American interests, Lafayette attended a succession of court functions, dinners, and balls with Adrienne—many of them for visiting dignitaries who invariably insisted on meeting the legendary Lafayette—the Friend of Washington and Conqueror of Cornwallis. The king and queen named Adrienne one of the court’s official escorts for the visiting heir to the Russian throne, the czarevitch Paul of Russia, and his wife. Marie-Antoinette crowned their visit to Versailles with a gala ball in the spectacular Hall of Mirrors. Enswathed in the sparkle of five thousand candles, the czarevitch honored Adrienne with his hand, while the queen honored Lafayette with hers, and the two couples stepped out onto the huge floor to dance the queen’s favorite quadrille before the magnificent assembly. Lafayette was awkward no longer, and the queen no longer laughed. The evening was a triumph for both Lafayettes.

In May, Adams won Dutch recognition of American independence; Lafayette congratulated him and urged him to come to Paris to help break the impasse in the peace negotiations with Britain. “Mr Franklin is very desirous you would come here,” Lafayette wrote to Adams, “and I am the more anxious
for it.”
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Adams agreed to come after he finished negotiating a loan to the United States from the Dutch government. A few weeks later, however, the British ravaged the French fleet in the Caribbean and captured de Grasse. With unchallenged British control of American coastal waters, Oswald grew less enthusiastic about American independence, while Spain all but rejected the idea rather than risk the English fleet’s disrupting her trade with her South and Central American colonies. With his mission to Spain all but ended, Jay decided he could be more useful in Paris helping Franklin further the peace talks with England.

During the summer recess that followed, Lafayette was able to attend to his personal affairs for the first time in years. With a third child on its way— “your God son will have a brother,”
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he wrote to Washington gleefully—he decided it was time for him and Adrienne to have a home of their own. He bought a magnificent property at 183 rue de Bourbon (now the rue de Lille) for 200,000 livres—about $2 million in today’s currency. Perched on the Left Bank of the river Seine near the Palais Bourbon,
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it had a breathtaking view of the floral tapestries in the gardens of the Tuileries Palace across the river. From the upstairs windows, Adrienne could see the facade of the Hôtel de Noailles, the only home she had ever known until then. Lafayette spent another 100,000 livres to restore and remodel the house and 50,000 more to furnish and decorate with a curious mélange of ornate Louis XV pieces for the reception rooms and spartan American rustic furnishings in his office and several other rooms. American souvenirs and objets d’art sprouted incongruously—and conspicuously—amidst the gilded furnishings of the salons and corridors.

In September, Adrienne gave birth two months prematurely to her third surviving child—a little girl, whom the Lafayettes promptly named Marie-Antoinette-Virginie—a compromise name carefully—and gently—reached during Adrienne’s difficult pregnancy. Both agreed to recognize her good friend the French queen. As for the name by which they would call their daughter, Adrienne was a devout Catholic, who favored a proper saint’s name—Marie. Her husband, the staunch American patriot and Freemason, overruled his wife, insisting on an American name—Virginie. He explained his choice in a letter to Benjamin Franklin moments after her birth:

Every child of mine that comes to light is a small addition to the number of American citizens. I have the pleasure to inform you that, tho’ she was but seven months advanced, Mde. de Lafayette has this morning become mother of a daughter who however delicate in its beginning enjoys a perfect health, and I hope will soon grow equal to the heartiest children.

This reminds me of our Noble Revolution, into which we were forced sooner than it ought to have been begun. But our strength came on very fast, and upon the whole I think we did
at least
as well as any other people.
They asked me what name my daughter is to have. I want to present her as an offering to my western country. And as their is’nt [
sic]
a good
Sainte
by the name of Virginie, I was thinking if it was not presuming too much to let her bear a name similar to that of one of the United States.

Never at a loss for a bon mot, Franklin apologized that “this cruel gout [arthritis]” had prevented his coming to Paris to visit. He assured Lafayette that

in the midst of my pain, the news of Madm. de la Fayette’s safe delivery, and your acquisition of a daughter gives me pleasure. In naming your Children I think you do well to begin with the most antient State. And as we cannot have too many of so good a Race, I hope you & Mde. de la Fayette will go thro’ the Thirteen. But as that may be in the common way too severe a Task for her delicate Frame, and Children of Seven Months may become as Strong as those of Nine, I concent to the Abridgement of Two Months for each; and I wish her to spend the Twenty-six Months so gained in perfect Ease, Health & Pleasure.

While you are proceeding, I hope our States will some of them new-name themselves. Miss Virginia, Miss Carolina, & Miss Georgiana will sound prettily enough for the Girls, but Massachusetts & Connecticut, are too harsh even for the Boys, unless they were to be Savages. That God may bless you in the Event of this Day as in every other, prays your affectionate Friend & Servant

B. Franklin

With peace still a distant dream in America, Lafayette pressed Vergennes to send another major naval and military force to America to force the British to grant American independence. France was financially unable and unwilling to mount such a force by itself, however, and the wily French minister coaxed Spain to join a huge joint expedition to further Spanish interests with a plan to dislodge the British from Gibraltar and then sail to the West Indies to capture Jamaica from the British for Spain. Only then would the armada sail to the United States to dislodge the British from Charleston and, ultimately, the rest of North America. The Spanish agreed, and the two Bourbon monarchies began assembling the greatest armada and invasion force in history—greater even than the Spanish Armada that faced Sir Francis Drake in 1588. The armada of 1782 would boast sixty-six ships of the line (the earlier Spanish Armada had forty) and transports for nearly 25,000 troops (the Spanish Armada carried 19,000).

Undeterred by the Admiral’s previous defeats in American waters, Vergennes named d’Estaing commander in chief, and he, in turn, requested as his second in command and commander in chief of all land forces the marquis de Lafayette, Conqueror of Cornwallis, American major general, and
maréchal de camp in the French king’s armies. Vergennes agreed enthusiastically, and Lafayette, not yet twenty-six years old, immediately expanded the expedition’s mission to include massive sea and land assaults against all of British North America. After sweeping the British from Jamaica and the United States, Lafayette would realize his long-standing ambition to avenge the 1763 loss of New France by seizing Canada from the English and delivering it to the United States as the “fourteenth state.”

In explaining the expedition and his role in it to Washington, Lafayette wrote, “My personal opinion is that a victory is needed before any treaty can be concluded. . . . I will, however, keep my American uniform, and the outside as well as the inside of an American soldier. I will conduct matters and take commands as an officer borrowed from the United States . . . and will watch for the happy moment when I may join our beloved colours.”
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When, according to Lafayette, d’Estaing explained the enterprise to Spanish King Charles III and said that Lafayette would seize Jamaica for Spain, the old monarch cried out, “No! No! I do not want him there. He will turn it into a republic.”
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As French troops streamed westward to the port of Brest, the prospects of a costly and possibly disastrous confrontation with the French and Spanish forced the British to negotiate peace with the United States in earnest. In the United States, the British withdrew their troops from South Carolina, but not before a series of nasty skirmishes claimed the life of young John Laurens. “Poor Laurens is no more,” Washington wrote to Lafayette. “He fell in a trifling skirmish in South Carolina, attempting to prevent the Enemy from plundering the Country . . . offer a blessing in my name to your son, & my Godson. . . . Adieu my dear Marq. Believe me to be, what I really am, your sincere friend & most affectionate Humble Servt.”
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By late November, the French armada was set to sail for Cadiz to join the Spanish fleet, and the British now pressed for reconciliation with the Americans, warning John Adams and John Jay that the French would seize control of the United States if they succeeded in dislodging the British. They pointed out that Rochambeau’s 4,000-man army remained on the American mainland, and war-weary American soldiers were abandoning the Continental army in droves. If Lafayette’s 25,000 troops dislodged the British in New York, the French would control the east coast from New York to Newport, Rhode Island, where Rochambeau’s army was encamped. Neither Adams nor Jay had liked or trusted the French since their discovery of the de Broglie plot to become American generalissimo. “They are interested in separating us from Great Britain, and on that point we may, I believe, depend upon them,” Jay concluded in a letter to Secretary Livingston, “but it is not in their interest that we should become a great and formidable people, and therefore they will not help us to become so.”
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Adams agreed that “they are not a moral people.”
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As Lafayette boarded his ship for Cadiz, Adams and Jay signed preliminary articles of peace after Oswald convinced them that America and England shared a common heritage and interests and pledged on behalf of “His Britannic majesty” that the United States were “free, sovereign and independent States.” Further, he pledged that the king, his heirs, and his successors would relinquish “all claims to the government, property, and territorial rights of the same, and every part thereof.” It was a complete capitulation, provoked by the threat of the enormous French-Spanish armada.

On December 23, Lafayette arrived in Cadiz and, a week later, learned of the peace agreement between the United States and Britain. The agreement not only shattered his hopes of leading the greatest armada in western history, it ended his career as a major general in the American army. A month later, France and Spain signed preliminary articles of a general peace with England and disbanded the armada, bringing the French knight’s American quest to an end.

Eager, nonetheless, to be first to deliver the news of peace to the United States, he induced d’Estaing to provide him with a swift cutter, appropriately named
Triomphe
, to take him to Philadelphia. Before he could board her, however, an urgent appeal for help arrived from William Carmichael, who had been Silas Deane’s aide in Paris and was now John Jay’s chargé d’affaires in Madrid. The Spanish court continued to refuse to see him or give any sign of recognizing American independence. Without such recognition, the withdrawal of British troops from the United States would open the way for Spanish forces in Florida to march northward into Georgia and the Carolinas. Remembering Carmichael as “the first American I ever knew,”
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Lafayette canceled his American trip and went to Madrid for what he believed was a more urgent obligation on behalf of his adopted nation: to use his formidable personal influence to obtain Spanish recognition of United States independence and sovereignty—and establish precise boundaries with Spanish-held Florida and Louisiana.

Lafayette sent an aide to America on the
Triomphe
, with letters to Congress, to the president of Congress, to Secretary Livingston, to his friends Hamilton and Nathanael Greene, and, of course, to Washington. The letters mixed the expressions of his own joy with the congratulations of a former soldier and the maturing political thoughts of a young statesman.

“My dear General,” he wrote to Washington:

I rejoice at the blessings of a peace where our noble ends have been secured. Remember our Valley Forge times, and from a recollection of past dangers and labours, we still will be more pleased at our present comfortable situation. What a sense of pride and satisfaction I feel when I think of the times that have determined my engaging in the American cause! You,
my dear general, who truly can say you have done all this, what must your virtuous and good heart feel on the happy instant where the revolution you have made is now firmly established. I cannot but envy the happiness of my grand children when they will be about celebrating and worshipping your name—to have had one of their ancestors among your soldiers, to know he had the good fortune to be the friend of your heart will be the eternal honour in which they shall glory. . . . At the prospect of a peace, I had prepared to go to America. Had the Spaniards got common sense I could have dispensed with that cursed trip to Madrid. But I am called upon by a sense of my duty to America. I must go. . . . In the month of June, I will embark for America. Happy, ten times happy will I be in embracing my dear General, My father, My best friend.
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