With Americans of Past and Present Days Part 15

[162] November 14, 1778.

[163] To Washington, June 15, 1777. Same impression later (1785) on Lafayette, who saw the Prussian grand manuvres, and sent an account of them to Washington: "The Prussian army is a perfectly regular piece of machinery.... All the situations which may be imagined in war, all the movements which they may cause, have been by constant habit so well inculcated in their heads that all those operations are performed almost mechanically." February 8, 1786. _Memoires, correspondance et ma.n.u.scrits du General Lafayette_, Bruxelles, 1838, I, 204.

[164] Pp. 10 ff.

[165] To General Sullivan, September, 1778.

[166] December 12, 1779.

[167] To President Reed, May 28, 1780.

[168] "Before York," October 12, 1781.

[169] To Lafayette, October 20, 1782.

[170] February 6, 1783.

[171] Sending him a farewell letter in which he said: "You may rest a.s.sured that your abilities and dispositions to serve this country were so well understood, and your service so properly appreciated that the residence of no public minister will ever be longer remembered or his absence more sincerely regretted. It will not be forgotten that you were a witness to the dangers, the sufferings, the exertions and the successes of the United States from the most perilous crises to the hour of triumph." February 7, 1788.

[172] They merely sanctioned some territorial exchanges and rest.i.tutions on both sides in the colonies, and stipulated that the British agent in Dunkirk, who had been expelled at the beginning of the war, would not return.

[173] March 29, 1783.

[174] Princeton, October 12, 1783. He started for that journey the following autumn.

[175] September 10, 1791.

[176] Mount Vernon, April 4, 1784.

[177] December 8, 1784. Bayard Tuckerman, _Lafayette_, 1889, I, 165.

[178] July 25, 1785.

[179] "Excellence, Vos vertus civiles et vos talents militaires ont donne a votre patrie la liberte et le bonheur; mais leur influence sur celui du globe entier est encore preferable a mes yeux. C'est a ce grand but que tend tout homme qui se sent digne d'arriver a l'immortalite,"

etc. May 28, 1789. Papers of the Continental Congress, LXXVIII, 759, Library of Congress.

[180] June 22, 1784. _Jean Antoine Houdon_, by C.H. Hart and Ed. Biddle, Philadelphia, 1911, p. 182.

[181] _Ibid._, p. 189. Peale's full-length portrait, with "a perspective view of York and Gloucester, and the surrender of the British army,"

price thirty guineas, reached Paris in April, 1785, and has since disappeared.

[182] July 10, 1785. _Ibid._, p. 191.

[183] Above, p. 12.

[184] Amsterdam, 1783. The author is strongly anti-English and is indignant at the "guilty Anglomania" still existing in France.

[185] In the _Mercure de France_, 1785, prefacing a review of Crevecur's _Letters from an American Farmer_, and reproduced at the beginning of the French edition of the _Letters_, 1787.

[186] _Observations sur le gouvernement et les loix des Etats Unis d'Amerique_, Amsterdam, 1784, 12mo; in the form of letters to John Adams. The Const.i.tutions under discussion are those of the original States. "Tandis," says Mably, "que presque toutes les nations de l'Europe ignorent les principes const.i.tutifs de la societe et ne regardent les citoyens que comme les bestiaux d'une ferme qu'on gouverne pour l'avantage particulier du proprietaire, on est etonne, on est edifie que vos treize Republiques ayent connu a la fois la dignite de l'homme et soient alle puiser dans les sources de la plus sage philosophie les principes humains par lesquels elles veulent se gouverner." (P. 2.)

[187] Wanting, on his return to America, to make Washington's acquaintance, Franklin's own grandson called similarly provided.

Lafayette to Washington, warmly praising the young man, July 14, 1785.

_Memoires, correspondance et ma.n.u.scrits du General Lafayette, publies par sa Famille_, Brussels, 1837, I, 201.

[188] May 25, 1788. J.P. Brissot, _Correspondance et Papiers_, ed.

Perroud, Paris, 1912, p. 192.

[189] 1787. Text of the reports of the sittings. _Ibid._, pp. 105 ff.

[190] _Ibid._, pp. 114, 116, 126, 127, 136.

[191] "Under that name of liberty the Romans, as well as the Greeks, pictured to themselves a state where no one was subject save to the law, and where law was more powerful than men." (Bossuet.)

[192] _Nouveau Voyage dans les Etats Unis de l'Amerique Septentrionale_, Paris, 3 vols., April, 1791, but begun to be printed, as shown by a note to the preface, in the spring of 1790. The work greatly helped to make America better and very favorably known in Europe, for it was translated into English, German, and Dutch. While Brissot was returning to France (January, 1789), his brother-in-law, Francois Dupont, was sailing for the United States, to settle there among free men and, scarcely landed, was writing to a Swiss friend of his, Jeanneret, who lived in Berlin, of his delight at having left "a small continent like that of Europe, part.i.tioned among a quant.i.ty of petty sovereigns bent upon capturing each other's possessions, causing their subjects to slaughter one another, in ceaseless mutual fear, busy tightening their peoples' chains and impoverishing them--and I am now on a continent which reaches from pole to pole, with every kind of climate and of productions, among an independent nation which is now devising for itself, in the midst of peace, the wisest of governments. We are not governed here by a foolish or despotic sovereign.... Farmers, craftsmen, merchants, and manufacturers are encouraged and honored; they are the true n.o.bles....

Between the man who sells his labor and the one who buys it the agreement is between equals. The French are, however, very popular in this country." Brissot, _Correspondance_ ed. Perroud, pp. 218, 219.

[193] _Memoires du [Chevalier de Pontgibaud] Comte de More_, 1827, pp.

105, 132. Writing at that date, Lafayette's former companion thought that monarchy had been re-established in France forever.

[194] January 1, 1788.

[195] New York, April 29, 1790.

[196] June 18, 1788.

[197] March 17, 1790; August 11, 1790. The key is the one which gave access to the main entrance; those at the Carnavalet Museum in Paris opened the several towers.

[198] To this remarkable forecast of the Terror, and of the ruin of such great hopes, Jared Sparks, in his edition of the _Writings_, caused Washington to add a prophecy of Napoleon's rule, described as a "higher-toned despotism than the one which existed before." But this is one of the embellishments which Sparks, who prophesied _a coup sr_, since he wrote after the events, thought he was free to introduce in the great man's letters.

[199] Paris, May 12, 1787. Washington papers, Library of Congress.

[200] Calais, April 3, 1789.

[201] Paris, July 31, 1789.

[202] "Rochambeau near Vendome," April 11, 1790.

[203] Paris, May 12, 1787.

[204] Ternant to Montmorin, Philadelphia, March 13, 1792.

_Correspondence of the French Ministers_, ed. Turner, Washington, 1904.

[205] July 28, 1792.

[206] Philadelphia, May 18, 1793. _Correspondence of the French Ministers in the United States_, ed. Turner, Washington, 1904, p. 214.

[207] May 31, June 19, 1793. _Ibid._, pp. 216, 217.