Washington [205]
Notwithstanding his fervent devotion to the cause, Lafayette sensed that Washington didn’t trust him. “This thought was an obsession,” he recalled almost fifty years later, “and it made me very unhappy.”71 Fortunately, the young man possessed a superb sense of Washington’s psychology and behaved in a becomingly modest fashion. A week after their first meeting, Washington asked him to review the Continental Army with him, which Lafayette described as “eleven thousand men, poorly armed and even more poorly clothed.”72 Watching these threadbare men, Washington confessed to Lafayette that “we should be embarrassed to show ourselves to an officer who has just left the French army.”73 Lafayette’s response was inspired: “It is not to teach but to learn that I come hither.”74 Such modesty won Washington’s affection, and he grew closer to this young French acolyte. Nothing pleased Washington more than unconditional loyalty, and Lafayette served it up in abundance. The marquis told his wife that the general, “surrounded by flatterers or secret enemies,” had found in him “a sincere friend, in whose bosom he may always confide his most secret thoughts, and who will always speak the truth.”75
Lafayette’s modesty was especially beguiling considering that many French officers preened and jockeyed for positions. It had become fashionable in Paris for bumptious young officers and prodigal sons to seek commissions from American diplomats Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane. “The noise of every coach now that enters my court terrifies me,” Franklin admitted. “I am afraid to accept an invitation to dine abroad, being almost sure of meeting with some officer or officer’s friend.”76 Unlike with Lafayette, these cynical officers were motivated less by idealism than by pure vanity. America simply represented a handy battlefield for winning honors. Washington bristled at the parade of pretentious French officers who strutted into his presence, demanding high appointments. He didn’t speak French and delegated correspondence in that language to the bilingual Hamilton, whose mother came from a French Huguenot family, and to John Laurens, who had studied in Geneva. Swamped by foreign officers, Washington complained to John Hancock that they were “coming in swarms from old France and the islands . . . Their ignorance of our language and their inability to recruit men are insurmountable obstacles to their being ingrafted into our Continental battalions.”77 He pleaded with Franklin to stanch the flow of military frauds and pretenders. “Our corps being already formed and fully officered,” he wrote, “every new arrival is only a source of embarrassment to congress and myself and of disappointment and chagrin to the gentlemen who come over.”78 Compared with the persistent French officers who clamored noisily for commissions, the Marquis de Lafayette seemed the soul of humility.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Darkness Visible
FROM THE LATE SPRING through early summer of 1777, George Washington anxiously tracked British movements in New York, attempting to divine their hidden meaning. General Howe commanded an army double or treble the size of his own, keeping him in an agony of suspense. Would the British general suddenly lunge north to hook up with General Burgoyne, who was then marching south from Canada? Or would he head for Philadelphia by sea or land to exploit the propaganda triumph of expelling the Continental