Lafayette fighting for American Indepedence
For a foreign volunteer,
Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette,
enjoyed extraordinarily rapid advancement in the American military
establishment after arriving in America in June 1777. In mid-August the
commander in chief, George Washington, could neither spell nor correctly
pronounce his aristocratic name. Barely more than a month later, after
Lafayette had performed bravely and resourcefully at Brandywine, an admiring
Washington began drawing him into his inner circle of aides. The wounded
Lafayette rehabilitated his leg in a hospital at Bethlehem and rejoined the
Continental army in December. During the early part of the winter at Valley
Forge in 1777–1778, Lafayette remained staunchly loyal to Washington through
the weeks of institutional intrigue and personal recrimination within the
Continental establishment that some historians have mislabeled the Conway
Cabal.
What Lafayette did not receive from his
commander and now his mentor—and which he wanted very badly both for reasons of
personal honor and to gratify the yearnings of youth—was a field command
leading troops in circumstances of combat or at least the potential for combat.
The limited types of operational assignments available in the late fall and
early winter, after Lafayette returned to camp and later at Valley Forge,
involved small unit patrolling and skirmishing of a nature poorly suited to
whatever military skills the marquis may have possessed. Washington preferred
Lafayette’s presence at headquarters, and for the sake of his diplomatic value,
he could not have afforded to have him killed or captured performing minor
patrol duties.
In January 1778 the new Board of War, an
administrative agency headed by Washington’s rival, General Horatio Gates,
pushed through the Congress a plan for a Continental invasion of Canada.
Perhaps seeking to buffer the plan politically with a nomination from
Washington’s own suite, it recommended Lafayette to lead the expedition.
Despite Lafayette’s hearty distrust of Washington’s adversaries, he could not
resist this opportunity for action and glory, nor could Washington refuse his
prote´ge´ the opportunity. To Lafayette’s great credit, when he reached
Albany—the expedition’s departure point—in mid- February, he recognized the
folly of the very idea of a midwinter invasion, and he was gratified when the
project was abandoned. Then he returned to Valley Forge, where he continued to
champion Washington’s interests and agenda.
DEFENDING THE PHILADELPHIA COUNTRYSIDE
Washington, meanwhile, found his tactical
and strategic intentions for the winter increasingly pressured by events.
Despite a preference of his generals to place the army in inland urban quarters
for the winter, he had personally brokered the compromise decision for the army
to remain in the field, in deference to the political sensibilities of the
Revolutionary political bodies, especially the beleaguered state government of
Pennsylvania. He arranged a division of responsibility for securing the
Philadelphia countryside by which the Continental army assumed control of the
territory west of the Schuylkill River to the Delaware River near Wilmington.
The state government, meanwhile, promised to keep enough militia in the field
to patrol the area east of the Schuylkill to the Delaware at Trenton, New
Jersey. Even when the state’s ability to meet this manpower commitment
faltered, Washington resisted pressures to fill the territorial gap by
expanding the sphere of army responsibility. Only when bold British and
partisan guerilla raiding east of the Schuylkill in February threatened the
army’s supply line to the northern states during a severe provisions crisis did
Washington reluctantly agree to make even modest increases in the small
Continental security patrols already working east of the Schuylkill.
By the late spring, the complete collapse
of American militia resistance and modest improvements in Continental strength and
proficiency levels caused Washington to rethink this approach and to gradually
increase the army’s involvement in Philadelphia and Bucks Counties. General
Howe, meanwhile, took advantage of American tactical disabilities in the field
to send increasingly aggressive patrols of British and partisan raiders into
the area to attack both military and civilian targets. In mid-May 1778, after
the announcement and celebration of the new American alliance with France and
during the transition in command in Philadelphia from the retiring William Howe
to his successor, Henry Clinton, the British sent a party up the Delaware to
attack rebel nautical facilities at Bordentown, New Jersey, and Bristol,
Pennsylvania. Extensive damage was done to civilian property and morale in that
area, and predictable demands emerged from the Pennsylvania government for the
army to respond to the crisis.
LAFAYETTE’S COMMAND
Washington ordered Continental troops
patrolling near the Schuylkill under the command of Brigadier General William
Maxwell to move north toward Trenton to respond to the incursion. This mission
expansion tore the Continental grip loose from the Schuylkill River, leaving a
gap in the army’s immediate security system near Valley Forge that could not be
tolerated. On 18 May, Washington was finally able to gratify the thirst of the
loyal and generally uncomplaining Lafayette for a field command. He ordered his
protégé to lead an expedition of about twenty-two hundred troops across the
Schuylkill to cover Maxwell’s previous positions. He reminded Lafayette of the
large size and importance of his detachment and warned him to move warily and
to avoid being engaged by a major enemy force or being cut off from a retreat
to the west side of the river.
The British quickly discovered the
inexperienced Lafayette’s presence in the area. They increased their routine
patrols and intelligence activity to protect the meschianza, an elaborate
festival that the officers planned to bid farewell to their departing
commander, Howe. Late on the evening of 19 May, Clinton learned that Lafayette
had taken a stationary post at Barren Hill, an elevated plateau just beyond
Chestnut Hill, northwest of Germantown. Clinton sent a party of between five
thousand and six thousand British regulars and Hessians under General James
Grant to try to get beyond Lafayette’s position and between it and Valley
Forge. Early the next morning, the superseded Howe was given the honor of
leading the main body of the army up the Germantown Road with the intention of
trapping Lafayette between Howe’s and Grant’s forces. General Charles Gray was
sent with a party of troops to intercept any retreat to alternate Schuylkill
fords.
Lafayette, who had with him a group of
Indian scouts, was alerted to the maneuver. He notified Washington and quickly
made arrangements to withdraw across the Schuylkill by the one
still-unobstructed road to Matson’s Ford. Washington, mortified that his young
aide had put him into this compromised position, prepared to lead most of the
army to his rescue, risking the general action that he had carefully avoided
for most of the previous year. Lafayette was accused by British sources of
having ‘‘sacrific[ ed] his rear guard’’ in his haste to retreat, and several
soldiers were indeed drowned, otherwise killed, or captured in or near the
river. Most British and Hessian memoirists blamed Grant for moving too slowly
and for hesitating to spring the trap that they believed he had it in his hands
to close. For Howe, the event—supplemented with whispered criticisms for the
excesses of the meschianza—punctuated the overall failure of his strategy to
that point. From a strictly military point of view, Barren Hill was not an
important or even a very memorable event. One would not be able to say that,
however, if Lafayette, with nearly one-fifth of the Continental army, had been
cut off and captured or if Washington had fought and lost an inadvisable
general battle that day to rescue his spirited but headstrong aide.
Official American casualties were six men killed
and about twelve captured. British losses in this action are not reliably
known.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Gottschalk, Louis. Lafayette Joins the American Army. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1937. Lengel, Edward G. General George Washington,
A Military Life. New York: Random House, 2005. Taafe, Stephen. The Philadelphia
Campaign, 1777–1778. Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2003.
When LaFayette visited the US in the 1820s he essentially visited and was feted by every Masonic lodge in the country... and gave pretty much the same speech, verbatim at each stop. The speeches are preserved in their minutes. (I've read the ones of the meeting of the Nashville lodge as well as those preserved by the Wilmington, DE, lodge, and they are identical). In this speech he says that Washington would not entrust him with a major command (he is talking about a division sized force) until he reaffirmed his Freemasonry. Further research revealed this ceremony took place in the King of Prussia tavern in very early May, and within a week Washington entrusted him with the force that went to Barren Hill.
ReplyDelete