Not a day goes by without his talking to me at length or writing long letters to me.

He finds in me a trustworthy friend in whom he can confide and who will always tell him the truth. “In the place he occupies, he is surrounded by flatterers and secret enemies. Washington’s “trust in me is deeper than I dare say,” Lafayette wrote to his wife on January 6, 1778, from Valley Forge. John Cochran, Peggy’s uncle, operated on the battlefield, told by Washington to care for the young Frenchman as if he were the general’s own son.įrom then on, Washington and Lafayette enjoyed an almost father-son bond. During the Battle of Brandywine, Lafayette fought bravely under General Sullivan, even when he was shot through the calf. But when Congressman James Lovell of MA realized who Lafayette was, and how rich and connected to the French court he was, he appointed Lafayette a Major-General and sent him to George Washington’s headquarters on Brandywine Creek.Īlthough Washington really had no idea what to do with the young nobleman, he was quickly charmed by Lafayette’s modesty and optimism. When he first arrived in Philadelphia, Congress refused to receive him-the legislature was tired of ambitious European officers arriving and announcing they were there to save the Americans. King Louis forbad his leaving the country, but Lafayette, then 19-years-old, purchased a ship and defiantly slipped out of port to cross the Atlantic. Silas Deane, a delegate from the Continental Congress in Paris trying to elicit France’s help, offered him a commission. Hardly the set-up for a Revolutionary.īut hearing an English noble ridicule the colonies and their ideals of freedom inspired Lafayette to join the American cause. Raised mainly by his grandmother in Paris, he married Adrienne de Noailles, a teenager from an even more prominent family, when he was sixteen. After his father was killed in the Seven Years War and his mother died, Lafayette was merely eleven years-old when he inherited one of the largest fortunes in France.

Born into a noble family with strong ties to the French crown, the Marquis could trace his ancestry all the way back to the Crusades and to comrades of Joan of Arc.

The young French idealist, Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, was one of our Revolution’s most important figures. (Lafayette, Spy Moses Harris, Lisbon and Prince, Hamilton’s Fellow Aides-de-Camp, Benedict Arnold, the Oneida Sachem, Poet Ann Bleecker, and a host of generals) Lafayette Hamilton and Peggy: A Revolutionary Friendship

Hamilton and Peggy! by L.M. Elliott