Lafayette in the Somewhat United States Read online

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  Copyright © 2015 by Sarah Vowell

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vowell, Sarah, date.

  Lafayette in the somewhat United States / Sarah Vowell.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-62401-2

  1. Lafayette, Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert Du Motier, marquis de, 1757–1834. 2. Lafayette, Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert Du Motier, marquis de, 1757–1834—Influence. 3. United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Participation, French. 4. Generals—France—Biography. 5. Statesmen—France—Biography. 6. Generals—United States—Biography. 7. France—Politics and government—1789–1900. I. Title.

  E207.L2V69 2015 2015024639

  355.0092—dc23

  [B]

  Illustrations by Teddy Newton

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Version_1

  ALSO BY SARAH VOWELL

  Unfamiliar Fishes

  The Wordy Shipmates

  Assassination Vacation

  The Partly Cloudy Patriot

  Take the Cannoli

  Radio On

  TO STEVEN BARCLAY, ALLY AND FRIEND

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Also by Sarah Vowell

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  LAFAYETTE IN THE SOMEWHAT UNITED STATES

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  This continent is a vast, unwieldy machine.

  —JOHN ADAMS, 1775

  We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather-bed.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON TO LAFAYETTE, 1790

  The country is behind you, fifty percent.

  —BOB HOPE, TO UNITED STATES TROOPS IN VIETNAM, 1966

  How did the Marquis de Lafayette win over the stingiest, crankiest tax protesters in the history of the world? He trudged from France to Philadelphia, hung around the building where they signed the Declaration of Independence, and volunteered to work for free. The Continental Congress had its doubts about saddling General George Washington with a teenage French aristocrat, but Ben Franklin wrote from Paris that the kid might be of use and, what the hell, the price was right.

  So, on July 31, 1777, Congress passed a resolution appointing Lafayette a major general in the army of the United States, recognizing “his great zeal to the cause of liberty.” That and the penniless rebels, in their as yet unsuccessful campaign to shake down the king of France, hoped to milk Lafayette’s “illustrious family and connections” back home.

  The Founding Fathers, while sticklers about taxation without representation in general, were magnanimously open-minded about the French crown overtaxing French subjects to pay for the French navy to cross the Atlantic to lend a hand. Les insurgents, as the French referred to the Americans, wanted what all self-respecting, financially strapped terrorists want: to become state-sponsored terrorists. Without an alliance with the French government, the patriot rebels could not have won the war and President Thomas Jefferson could not have written an inaugural address warning against the evils of “entangling alliances.”

  The newly dubbed General Lafayette was only nineteen years old. Considering Independence Hall was also where the founders calculated that a slave equals three-fifths of a person and cooked up an electoral college that lets Florida and Ohio pick our presidents, making an adolescent who barely spoke English a major general at the age I got hired to run the cash register at a Portland pizza joint was not the worst decision ever made there.

  On the one hand, the French rookie got himself shot in the calf in his very first battle. On the other hand, he was so gung ho that he cut short his recuperation and returned to duty with one leg in a boot and the other wrapped in a blanket. Which might be the first and last time in history a Frenchman shirked rest and relaxation to get back to work.

  The redcoat general Lord Cornwallis sneeringly referred to Lafayette as “the boy.” This put-down became all the more delightful once said boy helped cream Cornwallis at Yorktown.

  In 1824, the boy came back to the United States as an old man, the Continental Army’s last living general. President James Monroe invited him to return to the United States as “the nation’s guest” on the eve of the golden anniversary of American independence. This seemingly simple reunion morphed into a euphoric thirteen-month victory lap in which Lafayette toured all of the then twenty-four states.

  News of Lafayette’s return to these shores whipped up so much collective glee that when his ship docked in New York Harbor, eighty thousand fans turned out to welcome him—in a city whose population was one hundred and twenty-three thousand. (As opposed to the measly four thousand out of a population of seven million screaming when the Beatles landed there in ’64.)

  On September 28, 1824, Lafayette arrived in Philadelphia to revisit the building he referred to as the Hall of Independence. Twenty thousand locals gathered there to hear what he had to say. He proclaimed, “Within these sacred walls, by a council of wise and devoted patriots, and in a style worthy of the deed itself, was boldly declared the independence of these vast United States.” That event, he continued, “has begun, for the civilized world, the era of a new and of the only true social order founded on the unalienable rights of man.”

  That one word “only” tells the story of his life. After partaking in our revolution, Lafayette returned home and helped the French with theirs. This went well—with Jefferson’s help he wrote the first draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen—until it didn’t. When the Reign of Terror came, Lafayette, hoping to keep his head attached to his neck, made haste to the border, only to be captured by Austrians who were at war with France. So he spent five years in Austrian prisons, and not the nice ones either. Then came the restoration of the French king, the dictatorship of Napoleon, and the restoration of yet another French king. More than anyone on earth, Lafayette was mournfully aware of the uniqueness of the American republic he had fought to build.

  At every stop on his itinerary Lafayette was serenaded by music composed in his honor: “Hail! Lafayette!,” “Lafayette’s March,” “The Lafayette Waltz,” “The Lafayette Rondo,” “Lafayette’s Welcome to North America,” “Lafayette’s Welcome to the United States,” “Lafayette’s Welcome to New York,” and “Lafayette’s Welcome to Philadelphia.”

  Cashing in on the hoopla, the souvenir trade cranked out an unprecedented pile of Lafayette-themed merch. Considering he attended a party in his honor just about every night for over a year, how many times must he have reached for a cookie and seen his own eyes staring back at him from a
commemorative plate?

  At the Smithsonian, I saw a lady’s silk glove manufactured in honor of Lafayette’s tour. His head is stamped on it right above the knuckles. Included in “Souvenir Nation,” an exhibit of world historical knickknacks, the glove was displayed among glass cases containing a fence rail split by Abraham Lincoln, a “wood chip from the building in which Andrew Jackson studied law,” and, my fave, Napoleon’s enormous, monogrammed napkin. (What they say is true: small man, big napkin.) According to the Smithsonian’s description of the Lafayette souvenir glove, when he was offered the hand of a woman wearing one at a ball in Philadelphia, he said “a few graceful words to the effect that he did not care to kiss himself.”

  Passing through Albany, New York, Lafayette dropped in on the widow and son of an old acquaintance, Colonel Peter Gansevoort. A descendant of Dutch pioneers who settled New York back when it was still New Netherland, Gansevoort commanded the Continental Army troops who holed up in Fort Stanwix in the Mohawk Valley, withstanding a British siege for three weeks in August 1777. The diversion of redcoat forces needed to sustain that siege contributed to the American victory at nearby Saratoga, a turning point that helped clinch the French government’s decision to officially enter the war as the rebels’ ally.

  After he and his mother waved goodbye to Lafayette, a star-struck Peter Gansevoort Jr. wrote to his young nephews in New York City, “Posterity will be disposed to place the history of Lafayette’s year in America among the legends of romance and fiction.” One of those nephews would come to know a thing or two about fiction. For that boy was Herman Melville. Uncle Peter noted that Lafayette admired Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of Colonel Gansevoort hanging in the house and “bore testimony to [its] accuracy.” Thereafter, according to Melville biographer Hershel Parker, whenever Herman and his brother visited their grandmother’s house, they made a point to park themselves in front of their grandfather’s picture, partly to pay their respects to him but mostly to stand where Lafayette had stood. Parker writes, “That their own uncle and grandmother had entertained Lafayette meant that the children were in the presence, every visit, of blood kin freshly linked to the nation’s earliest and most glorious epoch.”

  A Connecticut newspaper declared that Lafayette’s pilgrimage stirred in Americans “a delirium of feeling, a tumult of the soul, from which one never wished to be awakened to the dull, sober realities of common life.”

  Sober reality circa 1824 included the most rancorous presidential election in American history. And that is saying something, considering that a few cases down from that Lafayette souvenir glove, the Smithsonian displayed a memento from the also iffy 2000 election: a magnifying glass used to examine Florida’s hanging chads.

  Though Andrew Jackson bested his three opponents, including John Quincy Adams, in the popular vote, he failed to achieve the required majority in the Electoral College, and so, per the Twelfth Amendment, the House of Representatives would choose the president the following February. In the meantime, Lafayette encountered some infuriated Jackson supporters in York, Pennsylvania, who bellowed, “If trickery and corruption make the pretentions of Adams prevail, well then, our bayonets will do justice!”

  The bitter presidential campaign and the Lafayette hoopla were both amplified by the awareness of the passing of what was left of the Revolutionary generation. Lafayette’s tour gave Americans one last chance to wave goodbye, not just to him, but also to the dwindling original patriots.

  A crowd followed Lafayette to Quincy, Massachusetts, where he visited the ailing John Adams at his farm. “That was not the John Adams I knew,” bemoaned Lafayette, though Adams reportedly said the same thing of him. After stopping at Mount Vernon, where Lafayette wept at his friend Washington’s tomb, he proceeded to Charlottesville to visit the elderly Jefferson at Monticello. According to the Charlottesville Central Gazette, “As soon as the General drove up, Mr. Jefferson advanced to meet him, with feeble steps; but as he approached, his feelings seemed to triumph over the infirmities of age, and as the General descended they hastened into each other’s arms. They embraced, again and again; tears were shed by both, and the broken expression of ‘God bless you General’ ‘Bless you my dear Jefferson’ was all that interrupted the impressive silence of the scene, except the audible sobs of many whose emotion could not be suppressed.”

  While Lafayette’s trip stirred up citizens’ tender feelings for the venerable inventors of the republic, the flip side was the countrywide angst about having to choose, for the very first time, a chief executive who was not a Founding Father. James Monroe, who had crossed the Delaware with Washington as a young lieutenant back in 1776, would be the fifth and final one.

  Lafayette’s secretary and traveling companion Auguste Levasseur recorded in his diary, “The nation which until the present time had been able to limit its choice to a small number of men to whom the affections of all were attached by the memories of the Revolution, found itself obliged today to start a new category due to the depletion of these men and, consequently, to open the door to the ambitions of all.”

  Levasseur marveled how the local papers in the towns they visited blared partisan bile about the election one day followed by sugary love letters to Lafayette the next.

  Throngs of workers and tradesmen greeted Lafayette as he entered Philadelphia. Levasseur noted, “Among all these corps of artisans, one noticed especially that of the printers. Above a press, set up in the middle of the street, was this inscription: Freedom of the press, the surest guaranty of the rights of man. From this press poured forth abundantly odes to Lafayette and patriotic songs which they threw into our carriage as we passed by, or distributed to the people who followed.”

  Perusing the election coverage from town to town, Levasseur described the newspapers as “arsenals in which one finds weapons of all forms and of all characters, and they all conduct themselves at times in a very discourteous manner.” Levasseur had a Frenchman’s après-Terror jitters about how public displays of outrage can lead to Bastille storming and head chopping. Here in the States, he was relieved that “the exaggeration, the violence of the newspapers stays in the newspapers and never drags the masses beyond the limits of the law.”

  On February 9, 1825, the House elected John Quincy Adams. It was a deal that went down in history as the “corrupt bargain,” even though it was a fairly by-the-book consequence of the inherently distasteful yet legal Electoral College.

  Lafayette, accompanied by Levasseur, attended a party for Adams in which Jackson showed up and clasped Adams’s hands in a show of sportsmanship. “Mr. Adams appeared profoundly moved by it,” wrote Levasseur, who was reassured by this gesture because it signified the stability of the republic, that the United States would outlive its fathers.

  At the exact moment Lafayette’s secretary decided that he could stop worrying about bayonet-toting Jacksonians storming down from Pennsylvania, he spotted a couple of them at the party: “‘Well,’ I said to them, ‘the great question is decided, and in a manner contrary to your wishes. What are you going to do? Will you soon begin the siege of the Capital?’ They began to laugh. ‘You recall our threats then,’ one of them said to me. ‘We were, indeed, very busy shouting . . . Now that the law has spoken, we have only to obey it. We will second Adams with the same zeal as if we had supported him; but at the same time, we will hold a candle near his administration, and according to whether it will be good or bad, we will defend it or attack it.’”

  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.

  The first thing that happened when the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia in September of 1774 was that a delegate from Boston moved to open with a prayer. The second thing that happened, according to John Adams, was that two Episcopalians from New York and South Carolina opposed
the motion “because we were so divided in religious Sentiments, some Episcopalians, some Quakers, some Anabaptists, some Presbyterians and some Congregationalists so that We could not join in the same Act of Worship.”

  The delegates might have spared us all centuries of friction and the body count at Gettysburg if they had just called it quits right there. But then Samuel Adams stood up. His second cousin John reported, “Mr. S. Adams arose and said he was no Bigot, and could hear a Prayer from a Gentleman of Piety and Virtue.” And in a move that would have alarmed his dogmatic Quaker-hanging, Episcopalian-haranguing Puritan forebears, Sam Adams threw out the name of a local Episcopalian clergyman whose prayer the next day was a big hit among the delegates because they could all get behind his reading of the vindictive Thirty-fifth Psalm—“fight against them that fight against me.”

  Though, come to think of it, those fighting words might have worried the Quakers in the room—or at least some of them. Even a seemingly monotone subculture like the Religious Society of Friends was a cacophony of voices, from the neutral and nonviolent to the nonviolent yet Loyalist to the patriot “Free Quakers” and oxymoronic “Fighting Quakers” who joined the Continental Army and militias.

  While it’s an obvious fact that the colonials’ uprising turned into a civil war between Britain and British America, in geometric terms the war cannot be drawn as two parallel lines facing each other in battle. The American side in particular was a squirming polygon of civilians, politicians, and armed forces begging to differ. And once they were done fighting the British, the Americans went back to what they were best at: infighting.

  When I took a tour of Independence Hall, along with three Filipino tourists and a class of high school students from California, the most evocative object our park ranger guide pointed out to us was George Washington’s original wooden armchair from the Constitutional Convention of 1787 on display in the gray-paneled Assembly Room. From that seat Washington presided over the sort of quarrels one might expect from antigovernment government representatives from rival regions of a large landmass with differing religions trying to stitch together a functioning mutual government whilst incorporating harsh checks and balances that kept it from getting too functional and thus oppressive.