• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 31767 0

moment, Lafayette’s adolescent son materialized in America, confronting Washington with an excruciating dilemma. Escorted by his tutor, Félix Frestel, George Washington Lafayette came armed with a letter to his godfather, hoping to involve the president more deeply in efforts to liberate his father. The once-dashing Lafayette père had grown gaunt and deathly pale from years in hellish dungeons, suffering from swollen limbs, oozing sores, and agonizing blisters. He was to remain persona non grata for the five-man Directory that governed France after the end of the Reign of Terror. However strongly he felt, Washington was reluctant to receive young Lafayette for fear of offending the French government, especially after the Jay Treaty furor. Beyond his official duty to safeguard American interests, Washington dreaded that any move might worsen the precarious plight of Lafayette’s wife in France, and he was openly stumped about what to do. “On one side, I may be charged with countenancing those who have been denounced the enemies of France,” Washington confided to Hamilton. “On the other, with not countenancing the son of a man who is dear to America.”42

When Washington received a letter from Senator George Cabot, announcing young Lafayette’s arrival in Boston, he reassured the boy that he would be like a “father, friend, protector, and supporter” to him privately but would have to remain steadfastly discreet in public. Many French émigrés having congregated in Philadelphia, Washington could not afford to invite young Lafayette to the capital, where he might be spotted on the streets, so he asked Cabot to enroll his godson temporarily at Harvard College, “the expense of which, as also of every other mean for his support, I will pay,” Washington emphasized.43 Anxious to gauge the political response to the boy’s presence, Washington adopted a watchful posture. His fondness for Lafayette had not lessened one jot. “My friendship for his father,” he insisted to Cabot, “so far from being diminished, has increased in the ratio of his misfortune.”44

That fall young Lafayette traveled incognito to New York to visit Alexander Hamilton. Washington told the boy that Hamilton was “warmly attached” to his father because of their wartime camaraderie and that he could rely on his friendship. 45 Paralyzed by indecision, Washington took the extraordinary step of telling Hamilton that he should converse with the boy about what to do. Washington was plainly tortured by his predicament. When young Lafayette failed to reply to his letter, Washington concluded glumly that he must be furious. “Have you seen or heard more of young Fayette since you last wrote to me on that subject?” Washington wrote dolefully to Hamilton. “ . . . His case gives me pain and I do not know how to get relieved from it.”46 Washington’s response shows both his ardent devotion to Lafayette and his rigorous self-discipline as a politician when U.S. interests were at stake.

In replying to Washington, Hamilton informed him that Lafayette junior was staying with him and would remain there through the spring; nevertheless he thought Washington should invite the boy to visit him. This advice threw Washington into a painful quandary. In response, he made a shrewd political move—for the first time in a long while, he consulted James Madison: “I wish to know what you think (considering my public character) I had best do to fulfill the obligations of friendship and my own wishes without involving consequences.”47 In this manner Washington not only previewed Republican reactions but also forced Republicans to share responsibility in the matter. Until mid-February Washington wrestled with the issue, then asked Hamilton to send the boy and his tutor to see him in Philadelphia, “without avowing or making a mystery of the object.”48 He stalled in the exact timing, however, suggesting that the two young Frenchmen should come in early April, when “the weather will be settled, the roads good, and the traveling pleasant.”49 In the meantime the boy’s presence in America had a galvanizing effect