Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence (31 page)

BOOK: Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence

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Traveling down the Hudson, the Frenchmen passed Saratoga, where Horatio Gates had achieved his supreme victory. That general’s gratification in the successful conclusion of the war was marred by the 1783 death of Elizabeth, “my Companion of Nine and Twenty years,” at age forty-seven. He later married a wealthy spinster who was happy to listen to the
war stories of the Victor of Saratoga. Gates left his Virginia estate for the social life of New York. He was always willing to lend money to “the poor fellows who have been our faithful companions in the war.”
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Back in New York City, the indefatigable Lafayette found himself troweling mortar for yet another cornerstone, this for the Apprentices’ Library in Brooklyn Heights, not far from the spot where Washington had slipped his defeated army across the East River. A group of children was on hand and Lafayette helped lift each of them to a safe spot to watch the ceremony. One he took in his arms and kissed on the cheek was a six-year-old named Walt Whitman, who would one day write: “I understand the large hearts of heroes, / The courage of present times and all times.”

Large hearts.

On a hot day in June, Lafayette eagerly showed his son George the scene near Brandywine Creek, outside Philadelphia, where he had first experienced the delicious, horrible intensity of battle. His memories still vivid, he pointed to the spot where a British musket ball had pierced his leg. Yes, here was where his blood had soaked American soil.

On September 6, 1825, Lafayette celebrated his sixty-eighth birthday at the White House. He was an old man—few of his comrades had lived so long. The Revolution, the war he had fought, had been an affair of youth. Nathanael Greene was thirty-two when it started, Anthony Wayne thirty, Henry Knox twenty-four, Alexander Hamilton twenty. They had fought with the intensity of youth. They had taken the risks that come easily to the young, had seen with the clarity of youth, had dreamed the dreams of youth. They had beheld the phantasmagoria of possibilities that is visible only to the young. They had persevered. They had won. They were, as Lafayette had long ago marveled, “a band of giants.”

Now Lafayette, the youngest of them all, was about to take his leave. A dazzling sun shone on the crowd that gathered around the president’s mansion and lined the route to a wharf along the Potomac. Under the portico of the house now occupied by John Quincy Adams, the president spoke the nation’s farewell. “You alone survive,” he told the aging warrior. He spoke of a “tie of love, stronger than death.”
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You alone—Lafayette was almost too moved to utter a word. He blessed his adopted country and embraced its president. Both men wept.

Twenty-four cannon fired salutes, signaling the time for departure. Lafayette climbed into a carriage. Children perched on shoulders to watch him pass. The crowd of spectators at the river front “remained in the most profound silence.”

The deep significance of the moment, of the Revolution and those who had fought for it, of the men and women who had accomplished
extraordinary things, of the debt owed, of the fleeting nature of history, of the mortality of heroes, all these ideas clenched throats, watered eyes, and touched with awe the crowd of watchers.

Lafayette climbed aboard a launch that would take him down the river to the
Brandywine.
The warship, commissioned in his honor, would carry him home, never to return.

Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence (31 page)

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