Washington first met Lafayette at the City Tavern in Philadelphia on the evening of July 31, 1777. On the spot the young man, already decked out in a major general’s sash, was awestruck. “Although [Washington] was surrounded by officers and citizens,” Lafayette wrote home, “the majesty of his figure and his height were unmistakable.”⁶⁹ Aware of Lafayette’s diplomatic value, Washington befriended the young man and invited him to tour Delaware River fortifications with him the next day. Despite immediate cordiality between the two, an unspoken tension lurked as well. Lafayette didn’t accept that his rank was merely for show and asked for two aides and command of a division, thereby presenting Washington with an excruciating dilemma. “If Congress meant that this rank should be unaccompanied by command,” Washington complained to one congressman, “I wish it had been sufficiently explained to him.”⁷⁰ He decided to invite the young Frenchman into his military family as an honorary aide.

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 Congress from the city?

To guard against any action along the Hudson River, Washington kept forces in the Hudson Highlands; to protect Philadelphia, he kept another portion of his army stationed at Middlebrook, New Jersey, ready to rebuff thrusts into the state. As usual, Howe proved diabolically clever at deception, making several feints into New Jersey. When he had tried to draw the Americans camped in Morristown into open combat, Washington had refused to rise to the bait. “We have such contradictory accounts from different quarters,” a confounded Washington reflected, “that I find it impossible to form any satisfactory judgment of the real motions and intentions of the enemy.”¹ Reports that Howe was recruiting pilots acquainted with the Delaware River strengthened Washington’s hunch that the British planned to invade Philadelphia by water. Howe’s reconnaissance of American defenses on the Delaware would persuade him to try a novel approach to the city.

During this period, as he drilled his men, Washington had to sacrifice the comforts of his winter camp. At Middlebrook he slept for five weeks in one of his official tents, or “sleeping marquees.” At one point he led his troops to a “very difficult and rugged gorge” called the Clove in the Hudson Highlands, where he found only a tumbledown log cabin for shelter. He occupied the sole bed, while aides dozed on the floor around him. “We had plenty of sepawn [boiled cornmeal] and milk and all were contented,” said Timothy Pickering.²

While at the Clove, Washington was blindsided by shocking news: Fort Ticonderoga, in upstate New York, had fallen. In an ignominious defeat, the American garrison had surrendered without a shot. Simply staggered, Washington spluttered to General Schuyler that it was “an event of chagrin and surprise not apprehended, nor within the compass of my reasoning.”³ Washington feared that Ticonderoga’s downfall was merely the prelude to a British attempt to slice the country in half along the Hudson River; Howe would move up the river from New York to rendezvous with Burgoyne. Then on July 23 Howe’s New York-based fleet—the biggest armada ever to cruise North American waters—set sail from Sandy Hook, its mysterious movements keeping Washington suspended “in a state of constant perplexity.” ⁴ Guessing correctly that Howe was bound for Philadelphia, Washington began deploying his men southward. After breakfast on July 31, a messenger came to him with fresh tidings: the British fleet of 228 ships had surfaced off the capes of the Delaware River. By occupying Philadelphia, Howe hoped to tap latent Tory sentiment in the mid-Atlantic states and break American morale.

In his maddening way, Howe then disappeared again with his fleet, unnerving Washington anew. “I confess the conduct of the enemy is distressing beyond measure and past our comprehension,” he said.⁵ His army wilted in oppressive heat during exhausting marches intended to counter British moves. In late August the wily Howe showed up in the Chesapeake Bay with an unorthodox strategy for taking Philadelphia. Instead of trying to capture it from the river, he planned to land his troops at Head of Elk, in the northern bay, then march north to Philadelphia. Frankly flummoxed, Washington surmised that Howe “must mean to reach Philadelphia by that route, though to be sure it is a very strange one.”⁶ The truth was that Howe aimed to lure his foe into a major confrontation. Washington now professed eagerness for such an engagement: “One bold stroke will free the land from rapine, devastations and burnings, and female innocence from brutal lust and violence.”⁷