Lafayette Read Free Page B

his motives—is on paper, in writing, on hundreds of thousands of pages. An early (1930) bibliography listing all the works written by and about Lafayette at that time runs more than 225 pages. There is no need for guesswork—only legwork, objectivity, and a willingness to let Lafayette tell his own story and let those who knew him speak for themselves—without cynical interruptions and specious interpretations. The man
was
what he and those who knew him best say he was. Everything he wrote about himself and the events in which he participated is consistent with what Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Morris, and many others wrote about him and those same events; together, his own writings and those of his contemporaries paint a clear, unambiguous portrait of Lafayette that needs no interpretation by later biographers who never knew the man.
    John Stuart Mill, the English philosopher and economist who began a close friendship with Lafayette in 1820, characterized him this way:
    His was not the influence of genius, nor even of talents; it was the influence of a heroic character: it was the influence of one who, in every situation,and throughout a long life, had done and suffered everything which opportunity had presented itself of doing and suffering for the right. . . .
    Honour be to his name, while the records of human worth shall be preserved among us! It will be long ere we see his equal, long ere there shall rise such a union of character and circumstances as shall enable any other human being to live such a life. 4
    As Professor Kramer points out, some nineteenth-century historians may well have been too romantic, but too many twentieth-century historians were so cynical that they not only distorted history, they so discolored the portraits of historic figures as to make them unrecognizable. Lafayette was a splendid man—brimming with passions and compassion, but tempered with a marvelous, self-deprecating sense of humor. He was, for example, balding noticeably when he reached an Indian outpost in the wilds of upper New York in 1784, and he calmed his wife’s anxieties by noting that “I cannot lose what I do not have.” His passions included a love of adventure, liberty, and the rights of man; loyalty to friends and devotion to his wife and family. The compassionate Lafayette reached out to the oppressed, the downtrodden, the helpless—even buying an entire plantation in French Guyana for one purpose: to educate and free its slaves. Recent biographers, in my opinion, have deprived Americans and, indeed, the world, of essential knowledge about our nation by diminishing his importance and relegating him to the shadows of history—with, I might add, too many of our nation’s many other heroes. I hope this biography will help restore him to his rightful place as one of the great leaders in American history. It was he who assured our independence and justifiably earned the title of “hero” in the hearts and minds of America’s leaders and, indeed, all Americans—during the Revolutionary War and for more than a half-century thereafter—and they were not wrong in their beliefs. He was a giant among the Founding Fathers of our nation. He was “Our Marquis.”
    At the end of Lafayette’s visit to America in 1824, President John Quincy Adams told him, “We shall look upon you always as belonging to us, during the whole of our life, as belonging to our children after us. You are ours by more than patriotic self-devotion with which you flew to the aid of our fathers at the crisis of our fate; ours by that unshaken gratitude for your services which is a precious portion of our inheritance; ours by that tie of love, stronger than death, which has linked your name for endless ages of time with the name of Washington. . . . Speaking in thename of the whole people of the United States, and at a loss only for language to give utterance to that feeling of attachment with which the heart of the nation beats as