Washington [336]
While in Richmond, Lafayette had a consequential encounter with James Armistead, the handsome, round-faced slave who had gallantly assisted him during the war. To help him sue for his freedom, Lafayette furnished him with an affidavit that testified to his valor: “His intelligence from the enemy’s camp were industriously collected and most faithfully delivered.”17 Not only did Armistead win his freedom and a pension from the legislature (which also compensated his master), but he changed his name in gratitude to James Armistead Lafayette.
Since Lafayette was slated to return to France in December, Washington, in a loving gesture, volunteered to escort him to his ship in New York—the first time he had ventured out of state since the war. When they reached Annapolis, however, the two men found themselves trapped in such a tedious round of receptions that Washington dreaded the ovations yet to come in Philadelphia and New York. So one day in early December, Washington and Lafayette gave each other an affectionate farewell hug and climbed into their respective carriages. Afterward, in an affecting letter that showed his powerful, if often suppressed, need for intimacy and how he equated Lafayette with his own lost youth, Washington told Lafayette of his turbulent emotions at their parting:
In the moment of our separation upon the road, as I traveled and every hour since, I felt all that love, respect, and attachment for you with which length of years, close connection, and your merits have inspired me. I often asked myself, as our carriages distended, whether that was the last sight I ever should have of you? And tho[ugh] I wished to say no, my fears answered yes. I called to mind the days of my youth and found they had long since fled to return no more; that I was now descending the hill I had been 52 years climbing; and that tho[ugh] I was blessed with a good constitution, I was of a short-lived family and might soon expect to be entombed in the dreary mansions of my father’s. These things darkened the shades and gave a gloom to the picture, consequently to my prospects of seeing you again. But I will not repine—I have had my day.18
One of Washington’s premonitions in these melancholy musings proved correct: he never set eyes on Lafayette again.
Back in France, Lafayette showered Washington with gifts, including seven hounds sent in the custody of John Quincy Adams. He also sent along French pheasants and nightingales, which Washington had never seen before. All the while, Lafayette perfected his manumission scheme and acted on it the next year with breathtaking speed. He bought a large sugar plantation in Cayenne (French Guiana), on the South American coast, which came with nearly seventy slaves. He promptly began to educate and emancipate them, paying wages to those old enough to work, providing schooling for the children, and banning the sale of human beings. To make this scheme self-perpetuating, Lafayette instructed his agent to keep on adding more lands and freeing more slaves.
In congratulating him, Washington displayed enormous admiration while again shrinking from any firm commitment to a comparable project: “The benevolence of your heart, my dear Marquis, is so conspicuous upon all occasions that I never wonder at any fresh proofs of it. But your late purchase of an estate in the colony of Cayenne, with a view of emancipating the slaves on it, is a generous and noble proof of your humanity. Would to God a like spirit would diffuse itself generally into the minds of the people of this country, but I despair of seeing it.”19 To set the slaves “afloat” abruptly, he feared, would “be productive of much inconvenience and mischief, but by degrees it certainly might, and assuredly ought to be effected and that, too, by legislative authority.”20
The news of Lafayette’s feat came as Washington was being prodded to take a public stand on abolishing slavery. Before the war it had required an act of the royal governor and his council to free a slave. Then in 1782 a new law gave masters permission to free their