Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette - Wikipedia

Thank you, my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that September 6 is the anniversary of the birth of French aristocrat and military officer Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roche Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette who arrived in the British North American colonies which had declared independence from the Crown of England. He commanded American troops in several battles, including the Siege of Yorktown.

Washington's Generals Marquis de Lafayette
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN1jrr_CMzM

Images:
1. Lieutenant General Marquis de Lafayette, 1791.
2. Portrait of Marie Adrienne Francoise de Noailles.
3. 1952 3¢ Arrival of Lafayette in America (Scott Number 1010).
4. Marquis de Lafayette, 1825. National Portrait Gallery.

Biographies
1. thoughtco.com/marquis-de-lafayette-2360623]
2. battlefields.org/learn/biographies/marquis-de-lafayette

1. Background from {[https://www.thoughtco.com/marquis-de-lafayette-2360623]}
"American Revolution: Marquis de Lafayette by Kennedy Hickman
Updated July 01, 2019
Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (September 6, 1757–May 20, 1834) was a French aristocrat who gained fame as an officer in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. Arriving in North America in 1777, he quickly formed a bond with General George Washington and initially served as an aide to the American leader. Proving a skilled and dependable commander, Lafayette earned greater responsibility as the conflict progressed and played a key part in obtaining aid from France for the American cause.

Fast Facts: Marquis de Lafayette
Known For: French aristocrat who fought as an officer for the Continental Army in the American Revolution, and later, the French Revolution
Born: September 6, 1757 in Chavaniac, France
Parents: Michel du Motier and Marie de La Rivière
Died: May 20, 1834 in Paris, France
Education: Collège du Plessis and the Versailles Academy
Spouse: Marie Adrienne Françoise de Noailles (m. 1774)
Children: Henriette du Motier, Anastasie Louise Pauline du Motier, Georges Washington Louis Gilbert du Motier, Marie Antoinette Virginie du Motier
Returning home after the war, Lafayette served in a central role during the early years of the French Revolution and helped write the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Falling from favor, he was jailed for five years before being released in 1797. With the Bourbon Restoration in 1814, Lafayette began a long career as a member of the Chamber of Deputies.

Early Life
Born September 6, 1757, at Chavaniac, France, Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette was the son of Michel du Motier and Marie de La Rivière. A long-established military family, an ancestor had served with Joan of Arc at the Siege of Orleans during the Hundred Years' War. A colonel in the French Army, Michel fought in the Seven Years' War and was killed by a cannonball at the Battle of Minden in August 1759.

Raised by his mother and grandparents, the young marquis was sent to Paris for education at the Collège du Plessis and the Versailles Academy. While in Paris, Lafayette's mother died. Gaining military training, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Musketeers of the Guard on April 9, 1771. Three years later, he married Marie Adrienne Françoise de Noailles on April 11, 1774.

In the Army
Through Adrienne's dowry he received a promotion to captain in the Noailles Dragoons Regiment. After their marriage, the young couple lived near Versailles while Lafayette completed his schooling at the Académie de Versailles. While training at Metz in 1775, Lafayette met the Comte de Broglie, commander of the Army of the East. Taking a liking to the young man, de Broglie invited him to join the Freemasons.
Through his affiliation in this group, Lafayette learned of the tensions between Britain and its American colonies. By participating in the Freemasons and other "thinking groups" in Paris, Lafayette became an advocate for the rights of man and the abolition of slavery. As the conflict in the colonies evolved into open warfare, he came to believe that the ideals of the American cause closely reflected his own.

Coming to America
In December 1776, with the American Revolution raging, Lafayette lobbied to go to America. Meeting with American agent Silas Deane, he accepted an offer to enter American service as a major general. Learning of this, his father-in-law, Jean de Noailles, had Lafayette assigned to Britain as he did not approve of Lafayette's American interests. During a brief posting in London, he was received by King George III and met several future antagonists, including Major General Sir Henry Clinton.
Returning to France, he obtained aid from de Broglie and Johann de Kalb to advance his American ambitions. Learning of this, de Noailles sought aid from King Louis XVI who issued a decree banning French officers from serving in America. Though forbidden by King Louis XVI to go, Lafayette purchased a ship, Victoire, and evaded efforts to detain him. Reaching Bordeaux, he boarded Victoire and put to sea on April 20, 1777. Landing near Georgetown, South Carolina, on June 13, Lafayette briefly stayed with Major Benjamin Huger before proceeding to Philadelphia.
Arriving, Congress initially rebuffed him as they were tired of Deane sending "French glory seekers." After offering to serve without pay, and aided by his Masonic connections, Lafayette received his commission but it was dated July 31, 1777, rather than the date of his agreement with Deane and he was not assigned a unit. For these reasons, he nearly returned home; however, Benjamin Franklin dispatched a letter to General George Washington asking the American commander to accept the young Frenchman as an aide-de-camp. The two first met on August 5, 1777, at a dinner in Philadelphia and immediately formed a lasting rapport.

Into the Fight
Accepted onto Washington's staff, Lafayette first saw action at the Battle of Brandywine on September 11, 1777. Outflanked by the British, Washington allowed Lafayette to join Major General John Sullivan's men. While attempting to rally Brigadier General Thomas Conway's Third Pennsylvania Brigade, Lafayette was wounded in the leg but did not seek treatment until an orderly retreat was organized. For his actions, Washington cited him for "bravery and military ardour" and recommended him for divisional command. Briefly leaving the army, Lafayette traveled to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to recuperate from his wound.

Recovering, he assumed command of Major General Adam Stephen's division after that general was relieved following the Battle of Germantown. With this force, Lafayette saw action in New Jersey while serving under Major General Nathanael Greene. This included winning a victory at the Battle of Gloucester on November 25 which saw his troops defeat British forces under Major General Lord Charles Cornwallis. Rejoining the army at Valley Forge, Lafayette was asked by Major General Horatio Gates and the Board of War to proceed to Albany to organize an invasion of Canada.

Before leaving, Lafayette alerted Washington about his suspicions regarding Conway's efforts to have him removed from command of the army. Arriving at Albany, he found that there were too few men present for an invasion and after negotiating an alliance with the Oneidas he returned to Valley Forge. Rejoining Washington's army, Lafayette was critical of the board's decision to attempt an invasion of Canada during the winter. In May 1778, Washington dispatched Lafayette with 2,200 men to ascertain British intentions outside Philadelphia.

Further Campaigns
Aware of Lafayette's presence, the British marched out of the city with 5,000 men in an effort to capture him. In the resulting Battle of Barren Hill, Lafayette was skillfully able to extract his command and rejoin Washington. The following month, he saw action at the Battle of Monmouth as Washington attempted to attack Clinton as he withdrew to New York. In July, Greene and Lafayette were dispatched to Rhode Island to aid Sullivan with his efforts to expel the British from the colony. The operation centered on cooperation with a French fleet led Admiral Comte de d'Estaing.
This was not forthcoming as d'Estaing departed for Boston to repair his ships after they were damaged in a storm. This action angered the Americans as they felt that they had been abandoned by their ally. Racing to Boston, Lafayette worked to smooth things over after a riot resulting from d'Estaing's actions erupted. Concerned about the alliance, Lafayette asked for leave to return to France to ensure its continuance. Granted, he arrived in February 1779 and was briefly detained for his earlier disobedience to the king.

Virginia & Yorktown
Working with Franklin, Lafayette lobbied for additional troops and supplies. Granted 6,000 men under General Jean-Baptiste de Rochambeau, he returned to America in May 1781. Sent to Virginia by Washington, he conducted operations against the traitor Benedict Arnold and shadowed Cornwallis' army as it moved north. Nearly trapped at the Battle of Green Spring in July, Lafayette monitored British activities until the arrival of Washington's army in September. Taking part in the Siege of Yorktown, Lafayette was present at the British surrender.

Return to France
Sailing home to France in December 1781, Lafayette was received at Versailles and promoted to field marshal. After aiding in planning an aborted expedition to the West Indies, he worked with Thomas Jefferson to develop trade agreements. Returning to America in 1782, he toured the country and received several honors. Remaining active in American affairs, he routinely met with the new country's representatives in France.

French Revolution
On December 29, 1786, King Louis XVI appointed Lafayette to the Assembly of Notables which was convened to address the nation's worsening finances. Arguing for spending cuts, he was one who called for the convening of the Estates General. Elected to represent the nobility from Riom, he was present when the Estates General opened on May 5, 1789. Following the Oath of the Tennis Court and the creation of the National Assembly, Lafayette joined the new body and on July 11, 1789, he presented a draft of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen."
Appointed to lead the new National Guard on July 15, Lafayette worked to maintain order. Protecting the king during the March on Versailles in October, he diffused the situation—although the crowd demanded that Louis move to the Tuileries Palace in Paris. He was again called to the Tuileries on February 28, 1791, when several hundred armed aristocrats surrounded the palace in an effort to defend the king. Dubbed the "Day of Daggers," Lafayette's men disarmed the group and arrested many of them.

Later Life
After a failed escape attempt by the king that summer, Lafayette's political capital began to erode. Accused of being a royalist, he sunk further after the Champ de Mars Massacre when National Guardsmen fired into a crowd. Returning home in 1792, he was soon appointed to lead one of the French armies during the War of the First Coalition. Working for peace, he sought to shut down the radical clubs in Paris. Branded a traitor, he attempted to flee to the Dutch Republic but was captured by the Austrians.
Held in prison, he was finally released by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797. Largely retiring from public life, he accepted a seat in the Chamber of Deputies in 1815. In 1824, he made one final tour of America and was hailed as a hero. Six years later, he declined the dictatorship of France during the July Revolution and Louis-Phillipe was crowned king. The first person granted honorary United States citizenship, Lafayette died on May 20, 1834, at the age of 76.

Sources
Unger, Harlow Giles. "Lafayette." New York: Wiley, 2003.
Levasseur, A. "Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825; or, Journal of a Voyage to the United States. Trans. Godman, John D. Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1829.
Kramer, Lloyd S. "Lafayette and the Historians: Changing Symbol, Changing Needs, 1834–1984." Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 11.3 (1984): 373–401. Print.
"Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions." Raleigh: University of North Carolina Press, 1996."


2. Background from battlefields.org/learn/biographies/marquis-de-lafayette
Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette
TITLE Major General, Marquis de Lafayette
WAR & AFFILIATION Revolutionary War Patriot
DATE OF BIRTH - DEATH
September 6, 1757 - May 20, 1834
Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, better known simply as the Marquis de Lafayette, was born into an extremely noble family in Chavaniac, France in 1757. By 1770, he had amassed a large inheritance after the deaths of his mother, father, and grandfather. His wealth and prestige afforded him many opportunities in life, including a commission to the rank of sous-lieutenant in the Musketeers at age 14 and a captaincy in the Dragoons at age 18; the latter he received as a wedding present.

In his youth, Lafayette developed a fascination with the colonial conflict brewing in the Americas. In April of 1777, Lafayette embarked on the Victoire—a ship paid for with his personal funds—for North America desperate to serve as a military leader in the Revolution, despite a royal decree prohibiting French officers from serving in America. Shortly after arriving, the Continental Congress commissioned him a major general and he became a member of George Washington’s staff.

Lafayette participated in his first military engagement at the Battle of Brandywine in September of 1777. He suffered a wound in one of his legs early in the battle but managed to calmly lead a Patriot retreat. Because of his composure and courage at this moment, Washington commended him for “bravery and military ardour” in the battle and recommended him to Congress for the command of a division.

Washington and Lafayette shared a close companionship over the course of the entire war. In fact, Lafayette spent the harsh winter of 1777-78 with Washington and his men at Valley Forge, suffering along with the other Continental soldiers in the frigid, disease-ridden encampment. He helped Washington at his darkest hour when he faced an internal threat from the Conway Cabal, a plot to drive Washington from his command.

Over the course of the next year, Lafayette more intensely pursued the glory he so desperately wanted. The Continental Congress charged him with leading an invasion of Canada. However, Lafayette met with much disappointment upon reaching the launch point at Albany, New York. Continental forces there amounted to less than half the number Congress promised. Disappointed, he returned south, nearly escaping capture by the British that summer at Barren Hill, Pennsylvania and Delaware Bay.

For his skillful retreat from Newport, Rhode Island, Lafayette earned another commendation but this time for “gallantry, skill, and prudence” from the Continental Congress. Lafayette managed to secure leave and returned home to France at the beginning of 1779. Despite receiving a hero’s welcome from the people, King Louis XVI tried and failed to secure his arrest, charging him with disobeying his orders prohibiting French soldiers in America. During Lafayette’s time in France, he played an extremely crucial role in securing 6,000 French troops for the American cause.

Returning to the colonies in 1780, Lafayette’s news of French aid greatly improved American moral. Since his departure, the crucial field of battle had moved to the south. Former Patriot and infamous turncoat, Benedict Arnold, had committed treason and now wreaked havoc on the Virginia countryside as a British commander. Lafayette, in coordination with Baron von Stueben, hunted Arnold, who Washington had condemned to death if captured. By the fall of 1781, the Frenchman found himself at the center of the action and the culmination of a successful war of independence. From the heights of Malvern Hill, Lafayette and his men surrounded the British force at Yorktown, holding them until reinforced by Washington. Together, they initiated the siege that eventually led to the British surrender and an end to the conflict.

After the Revolution, Lafayette returned home to France where he continued to fight for liberty and equality for all mankind, in the midst of the French Revolution. He bore witness to the Tennis Court Oath and the Storming of the Bastille, where he managed to get his hands on a key and send it to Washington's Mount Vernon home as a gift, where it resides to this day, and even helped design the modern French tricolor flag. More importantly, Lafayette authored the Declaration of the Rights of Man with Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès and some input from Thomas Jefferson, one of the most important documents in world history, and a direct influence on modern democratic principles across the world.

Not even Lafayette could escape the tumultuous of the Revolution, however, and though he himself escaped the Reign of Terror, his wife, Adrienne, was arrested, and most of her family was executed. Lafayette instead fled the country, but was captured by France's Austrian adversaries, and languished in Olmütz Prison until 1799, when General Napoleon Bonaparte secured his freedom. Napoleon offered Lafayette membership into his new Légion d'Honneur and might have even offered him a marshalship had he been so inclined, but Lafayette chose instead to retire from politics, and did not participate in Napoleon's future conquests.

In 1824, he returned to the U.S. for a grand tour in which the people of every city he visited greeted him with cheers and exuberant celebrations. He also took time to visit his old friend Jefferson at his home in Monticello. When he finally passed in 1834, he made a final wish to be buried under soil taken from Bunker Hill in Boston. For his involvement in both America and Europe, Lafayette has been remembered as “The Hero of the Two Worlds.”

2. Background from {[https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/marquis-de-lafayette]}
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If there was a rock star of the American Revolution, it was a man who went by an impressively lengthy name: Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette. Born in 1757, Lafayette was a young, handsome, rich and brave French aristocrat who defied his own king to enter the Revolutionary War in America to support the cause of freedom in the New World. After his success as a military leader, he became a renowned statesman whose support for individual rights made him a beloved and respected figure on two continents.

Born into a family with illustrious ancestors on both sides, Lafayette at first appeared destined for a conventional aristocratic, military career. But he had other ideas. He adopted the motto “Cur Non” (“Why Not?”) for his coat of arms and joined the Freemasons in 1775. Two years later, at the age of 20, and lured by the idea of a nation fighting for liberty, he bought a ship and sailed to America to volunteer in General George Washington’s army.

He explained his attraction to the revolutionary cause in a letter to his wife: “The welfare of America is intimately connected with the happiness of all mankind; she will become the respectable and safe asylum of virtue, integrity, tolerance, equality, and a peaceful liberty.”

He first saw action at the Battle of Brandywine in 1777 where he was shot in the leg and spent two months recovering from his wound at the Moravian Settlement in Bethlehem. His heroism in the battle encouraged George Washington to give the young Frenchman command of a division and Lafayette stayed with his troops at Valley Forge. After a brief visit to France in 1779, he returned to the Revolution in 1781 and helped contain British troops at Yorktown in the last major battle of the war.

As principal author of the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” written in 1789 in conjunction with Thomas Jefferson, he also helped propel the French Revolution. As an ardent supporter of emancipation and a member of anti-slavery societies in France and America, Lafayette lobbied for the restoration of civil rights to French Protestants and he was instrumental in ensuring that religious freedom be granted to Protestants, Jews, and other non-Catholics.

He was known as a friend to Native Americans and he endorsed the views of leading women writers and reformers of his day.

His triumphal Farewell Tour of America in 1824, conducted during the new nation’s years-long 50th anniversary celebrations, proved the Marquis had lost none of his rock-star status. His arrival in New York prompted four days and nights of continuous celebration – a response replicated during his visits to each of the other 23 states then in the Union. When Lafayette visited Congress, Speaker of the House Henry Clay delivered an address citing the deep respect and admiration held for him due to his “consistency of character . . . ever true to your old principles, firm and erect, cheering and animating, with your well-known voice, the votaries of liberty, its faithful and fearless champion, ready to shed the last drop of blood, which here, you so freely and nobly spilt in the same holy cause.”

Easton lawyer James Madison Porter was so impressed upon meeting the Marquis in Philadelphia that year that he proposed naming the town’s new college after Lafayette as “a testimony of respect for his talents, virtues, and signal services . . . in the great cause of freedom.”

On June 30, 1832, a month after the first students matriculated at Lafayette College, five of them—members of the Franklin Literary Society—wrote to Lafayette that they had made him an honorary member to pay “a feeble though sincere tribute of regard to a man who has proved his own and our country’s benefactor, and whose enlarged philanthropy as with a mantle of blessedness would cover the whole family of man.”

On August 7, 2002, 178 years later, Congress made him an honorary citizen of the United States. In May 2010, Lafayette College, the only college in America to bear his name, awarded the Marquis the honorary degree of Doctor of Public Service (posthumous) at its 175th Commencement."

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A key player in our Revolutionary War.

Thanks Sir