Marquis de Lafayette

In the summer of 1777, a nineteen-year-old French aristocrat arrived in Philadelphia with a commission as major general in the Continental Army. He had no combat experience. He had disobeyed his king to get there. He paid for his own ship. The Treaty of Alliance he helped bring about, signed February 6, 1778, committed France to the American cause until independence was formally recognized. The documents that follow are in institutional archives and record the full sequence in their own words.

Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, was nineteen years old when he departed for America in April 1777. Louis XVI had expressly forbidden him to leave France. Lafayette went anyway. He purchased his own vessel, the Victoire, and sailed from Los Pasajes, Spain, on April 20. He wrote to his wife Adrienne from the ship on May 30.

Lafayette landed at Georgetown, South Carolina, on June 13, 1777, and made his way to Philadelphia. Congress had grown wary of French officers seeking commissions and pay. Lafayette offered to serve without salary, at his own expense, and to enter as a volunteer. Congress commissioned him major general on July 31, 1777. He met Washington for the first time that same week at a dinner in Philadelphia. Washington gave him command of a division of Virginia Continentals.

His first combat came at Brandywine on September 11, 1777, where he was wounded in the left leg while leading an orderly retreat. Washington later noted in correspondence that Lafayette had displayed a courage that exceeded his years. By December both men were at Valley Forge.

Valley Forge is documented extensively across the Washington correspondence at Founders Online. The conditions that winter are recorded in dozens of letters. Lafayette's letter to Washington on December 31, 1777 is among the clearest primary statements of his commitment to the American cause.

In February 1778, Congress dispatched Lafayette north to Albany to lead a proposed winter invasion of Canada. The mission was undersupplied and ultimately abandoned. He found fewer than 1,200 men where 2,500 had been promised, no provisions, and troops who had not been paid in months. He wrote to Washington from Albany repeatedly through March before the project was cancelled entirely.

On February 6, 1778, while Lafayette was traveling through frozen New Jersey toward Albany, Benjamin Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee signed two treaties in Paris on behalf of the United States. The first was a Treaty of Amity and Commerce. The second was the Treaty of Alliance. The text of the Treaty of Alliance is at the Yale Avalon Project in full.

The treaty bound both parties to continue the war until British recognition of American independence was formally secured. Neither nation could negotiate a separate peace without the other's consent. The Battle of Saratoga, where General Burgoyne surrendered in October 1777, had persuaded the French court that the Americans could sustain a war. The treaty was the result. Congress ratified it on May 4, 1778. Washington received word from Henry Laurens, President of Congress, on May 1. His letter to Congress the same day is at the Library of Congress.

Washington issued General Orders to the Continental Army on May 5, 1778, marking the alliance with a formal ceremony. The order is in the Washington Papers at the Library of Congress.

Lafayette returned to France in January 1779. Despite his earlier defiance of the king, he was received back into court and used his position to lobby the French government for additional support for the American war effort. He returned to America in April 1780. Washington gave him command of a light infantry division. In early 1781, Washington sent him south to Virginia to counter British forces under General Cornwallis and the defector Benedict Arnold.

Lafayette commanded a force numerically inferior to Cornwallis through the spring and summer of 1781. He declined pitched battle, maneuvered to hold Virginia, and kept British forces from consolidating their position. His letters to Washington from this period are in the Founders Online archive and document the campaign in operational detail. By September 1781, Cornwallis had retreated to Yorktown on the Chesapeake. Washington and the French General Rochambeau moved their combined force south from New York. The French fleet under Admiral de Grasse engaged the British at the Battle of the Chesapeake on September 5, cutting off British naval relief. Lafayette's troops formed part of the siege lines.

On October 19, 1781, Cornwallis surrendered. The formal articles of capitulation were signed at Yorktown. The British band, by most accounts, played "The World Turned Upside Down." Lafayette wrote to the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Comte de Vergennes, from the camp before York on October 20, 1781. That letter is in his Memoirs.

Lafayette left America for the last time in December 1781. He returned for a final visit in 1784, touring all thirteen states. He was received in every state legislature. He returned again in 1824 as the nation's guest, at age sixty-six, for a fourteen-month farewell tour. Congress voted him $200,000 and a township of land. He died on May 20, 1834, in Paris. American soil was placed in his grave at Picpus Cemetery, where it remains.

His June 1779 letter to Washington, written from France while lobbying for additional support, stated his view of the alliance plainly. The letter is at Founders Online.