Page 17 - The Hunt - Fall 2024

Lafayette couldn’t understand why these American imbeciles
in Philadelphia didn’t realize that he was a rich aristocrat willing to donate his soldierly services for free—if they would only grant him the appropriate military title and the troops to go with it.
Beginning this year and continuing into 2025, commemorative celebrations will take place in the Brandywine region and across the eastern half of the United States to celebrate the French hero. But like so many love affairs, the one between Lafayette and America got off to a very rocky start.
In the fall of 1776, Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, had just arrived in
the U.S. after sneaking out of France at a time when the monarchy forbade the young nobleman from getting involved in the American rebellion. Lafayette was just shy of 20 years old, fresh from military training and with a young man’s impatience to get things done, as was to be documented in his diaries.
He couldn’t understand why these American imbeciles in Philadelphia, the Congress of
this new nation, didn’t realize that he was a rich aristocrat willing to donate his soldierly services for free—if they would only grant
him the appropriate military title and the troops to go with it. And after Congress agreed to commission him and attach him to Gen. George Washington just as the British were sailing up the Chesapeake Bay to attack, why was this older Virginia soldier so cautious? Why hadn’t he surprised Gen. William
Howe and his British forces while they were disorganized and disembarking in Maryland at the head of the bay, rather than waiting to encounter them on open ground?
Washington wasn’t any happier. Who was this Lafayette—this pushy and ambitious young man he’d never heard of or asked for? What in God’s name did Congress expect Washington, the head of the new American army, to do with him?
“Washington had had enough of Congress sending him European generals who couldn’t produce,” says Bruce E. Mowday, author of
the recently published history Lafayette at Brandywine: The Making of an American Hero. “And you have to understand that Lafayette was coming from a French army of professional soldiers joining a poorly trained one.”
As Mowday notes, the near disastrous Battle of Brandywine on Sept. 11, 1777,
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