Early Life
Lafayette was born on September 6, 1757, to Michel du Motier and Marie Louise Jolie de La Rivière on the family’s estate in Auvergne in central France. Lafayette’s ancestors had fought for France since the Crusades, and he was especially proud of his father, who was killed in the Seven Years’ War when the boy was just two years old. He was trained at the best military academies, including the Collège du Plessis and Académie de Versailles. By sixteen, Lafayette was a member of the Black Musketeers, the king’s personal guard, which took its name from the unit’s black horses. Also at sixteen, he married fourteen-year-old heiress Adrienne d’Ayen-Noailles, becoming one of France’s wealthiest men.
Lafayette’s life changed forever after a chance meeting with Prince William Henry, the duke of Gloucester and younger brother of Britain’s King George III, in the fortress at Metz in 1775. From the duke, Lafayette heard about the rebellion in the American colonies. As he later recalled, when he learned that Americans were fighting a revolution based on the principles of liberty and equality, “My heart was enrolled.”
Lafayette subsequently met Silas Deane, an American agent in Paris, and was promised a commission in General George Washington’s army. When the French king, Louis XVI, forbade Lafayette from leaving the country, he bought a merchant ship, renamed it La Victoire, and set sail for the United States, arriving in South Carolina on June 13, 1777.
Major General Lafayette
Lafayette was commissioned a major general in the Continental Army on July 31, 1777. While the commission was intended to be honorary, he was determined to lead troops into battle. On August 5, the tall, red-headed nineteen-year-old met Washington in Philadelphia. The American general was impressed with Lafayette’s dedication to the ideals of the American Revolution and his promise to serve without pay, welcoming the marquis into the military family.
Lafayette first saw combat at the September 11, 1777, Battle of Brandywine, where he directed his soldiers on horseback at the front line. Though wounded by a sniper, he led his men away from the oncoming British. After recovering from his injuries, he again showed his daring by attacking Hessian mercenaries at the Battle of Gloucester on November 25. Lafayette subsequently agreed with Washington that a winter campaign against the British was impossible and followed the Continental Army to Valley Forge, where he became Washington’s staunchest defender.
Lafayette returned to combat on May 20, 1778, at the Battle of Barren Hill, outside of Philadelphia. After British forces surrounded his troops, he led what Washington termed a “brilliant retreat,” saving himself and 2,200 Continentals from capture and foiling British plans to take control of several major roads to Philadelphia.
At the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse on June 28, 1778, plans called for Lafayette to engage the British, who were now marching from Philadelphia to New York City, until Washington could bring up reinforcements. But when General Charles Lee sounded the retreat, Lafayette followed him. They ran into a furious Washington, who dismissed Lee, sent Lafayette to the rear, and directed the battle himself.
Though Washington did not blame Lafayette for the retreat, the Frenchman felt honor bound to prove himself. He returned to Paris in 1779 to help strengthen France’s alliance with the United States. Working with American ambassador Benjamin Franklin, Lafayette secured ships, money, and 6,000 soldiers. He hoped to command these men, but that assignment went to the more experienced Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau.
In May 1780, Lafayette rejoined the Continental Army at Morristown, New Jersey, and in September he traveled with Washington to Hartford, Connecticut, to meet with Rochambeau, who had just arrived from France. Lafayette then accompanied Washington to West Point, where they discovered that General Benedict Arnold had defected to the British. Lafayette participated in the court-martial of Major John André, Arnold’s accomplice, and witnessed André’s execution.
The Fight in Virginia
In the winter of 1781, Washington sent Lafayette to Virginia to fight Arnold, now a British general, who was raiding towns and tobacco plantations. Lafayette pursued Arnold’s men and harassed General Cornwallis’s army. On June 26, 1781, Lafayette’s soldiers skirmished with the Queen’s Rangers near a tavern outside Williamsburg in the Battle of Spencer’s Ordinary. He then ordered his second-in-command, General Anthony Wayne, to attack what Lafayette thought was only the rear guard of Cornwallis’s army at Green Spring Plantation on the James River. At the July 6 Battle of Green Spring, Wayne discovered he was facing the entire British army and attacked boldly, momentarily stunning the enemy, before retreating with heavy losses.
Weeks after the defeat at Green Spring, Lafayette bottled up Cornwallis’s forces at Yorktown. At the Battle of the Chesapeake on September 5, Admiral François Joseph Paul, comte de Grasse, turned back a British fleet sent to rescue Cornwallis. Nine days later, Washington and Rochambeau arrived with their combined armies. Their soldiers dug trenches for cannon around Yorktown and bombarded the British in the siege of Yorktown. On October 14, Lafayette helped capture the last enemy redoubts, thus ensuring the encirclement of Yorktown.
Three days later, the British called for a parley, with Cornwallis officially surrendering on October 19. At the surrender ceremony, when the British allegedly played “The World Turned Upside Down,” Lafayette ordered his men to play “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
A Hero in Two Worlds
In January 1782, Lafayette returned to France as a national hero. He reunited with his wife, daughter, and son, who was named for George Washington; another daughter, Virginie, was born the following September. Lafayette dedicated himself to promoting democratic causes, including the abolition of slavery. He supported the French Revolution, serving in the National Assembly, which adopted his Declaration of the Rights of Man, and as the commander of the new National Guard. But he was a moderate who supported replacing the absolutist monarchy with a constitutional monarchy, angering both the royalists and the radicals.
After the radical Jacobins came to power, Lafayette fled the country to avoid the guillotine, seeking refuge in the Austrian Netherlands (now Belgium). In 1792, he was arrested by the Austrians, who blamed him for the downfall of the French monarchy. He was imprisoned in Prussia and later in Austria at Olmütz. He was released in 1797 and settled at La Grange, a small estate outside Paris. He refused to support Napoleon Bonaparte, hoping that France would become a democracy.
A Triumphant Return
In 1824, President James Monroe invited Lafayette to visit the United States. Traveling with his son, Georges Washington Lafayette, the marquis arrived in New York City on August 15. Everywhere he went, people crowded the streets to catch a glimpse of him, and he was honored with ceremonies, parades, and monuments. At daytime receptions and nighttime fetes, he listened politely to the speeches of dignitaries, made a few gracious remarks, and then shook hands with every person waiting to meet him.
From New York, Lafayette headed to Boston, where he visited Bunker Hill and went to Quincy to meet a frail John Adams, who gave him a letter from Thomas Jefferson inviting him to Monticello. After traveling to New Hampshire, Lafayette returned to New York City to celebrate his sixty-seventh birthday. Later, in Philadelphia, tens of thousands of people greeted him at Independence Hall.
Lafayette’s 1824 Tour of the United States
By early October, he was in Washington, D.C. President Monroe wanted him to stay at the White House, but local residents demanded that he board at a hotel so everyone in the city could meet him. He stayed at the Franklin House, where an elaborate banquet was held in his honor. Lafayette then proceeded down the Potomac River to Mount Vernon. He walked alone to Washington’s tomb, entered, and eventually came out in tears. Prints of his visit to the grave of his beloved commander became cherished mementos of his trip.
Lafayette next traveled to the Tidewater to commemorate the forty-third anniversary of the Battle of Yorktown, arriving on October 18 and receiving an enthusiastic greeting from a crowd of 15,000. Over the next week, he visited Williamsburg, where he attended a banquet at the Raleigh Tavern; Jamestown; the unfinished Fort Monroe at Old Point Comfort; Norfolk; and Richmond. In Richmond, he stopped to greet another old comrade, Revolutionary War spy James Lafayette, during a procession to the Capitol. The marquis then proceeded to Monticello, where he visited Thomas Jefferson from November 4 to 15 and attended a banquet in his honor at the unfinished Rotunda at the University of Virginia.
Traveling through Virginia, Lafayette was visibly upset by the enslaved people he saw. At Monticello, he told Jefferson that a plantation run with free workers would be more profitable. Lafayette’s opposition to slavery was so well known that a Fredericksburg newspaper warned residents to keep their enslaved laborers away from the town’s main thoroughfare when Lafayette rode through.
In December 1824, Lafayette returned to Washington, D.C., where Congress awarded him $200,000 and a land grant in Florida in recognition of his service to the country. He left the capital in February 1825 for a tour of the South, arriving in New Orleans on April 8 before proceeding to St. Louis, Missouri, where, to his amazement, a ball was held for him in the wilderness. He then traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, and was received by Andrew Jackson at the Hermitage before proceeding to Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, where he traveled along the soon-to-be opened Erie Canal. Determined to return to Boston for the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, he arrived in time to lay the foundation of the obelisk commemorating the event.
After traveling through parts of New England and the mid-Atlantic states, Lafayette made a final visit to the Virginia Piedmont to bid farewell to Monroe and Jefferson before sailing back to France on September 7, 1825. Lafayette died on May 20, 1834, following a short illness. He was buried in Paris in soil he had brought back from Bunker Hill.
