François Jean de Beauvoir, Marquis de Chastellux: Chastellux’s Travels in North-America in the Years 1780-81-82. Translated by “An English Gentleman Who Resided in America During that Period.” Carlisle: Applewood Books, n.d.
A veteran of the Seven Years’ War, where he fought in Germany, the Marquis de Chastellux had distinguished himself in France as the author of De la Félicitie Publique and other works in which he placed himself firmly in the camp of the Enlightenment. These included a well-received eulogy of Helvétius. He won election to the Académie Française in 1775, at the age of forty-one. Five years later, he arrived in the United States, a major general under the command of Jean-Baptiste de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau, serving as the liaison officer between Rochambeau and General Washington, with whom he began a cherished friendship. At the decisive Yorktown siege in 1781 he served as third in command of the French troops, but initially he deployed to Newport, Rhode Island in July of 1780. Newport residents, most of them Loyalists with memories of the French and Indian War, were unhappy to see the French soldiers; the city’s population of 9,000 in the mid-1770s had diminished to fewer than 5,000 (about one-fifth of them slaves) during the British occupation, which had begun in December 1776 and lasted until October 1779. The French had allied with the United States in February 1778 and declared war on Great Britain in March; its fleet went to the Delaware Bay that year but finding that the British troops had withdrawn from Philadelphia, they set off for Newport, arriving in July, where their fleet was heavily damaged by a storm and by the British warships. The French retreat left their American allies in Rhode Island unconfident, and the Catholicism of French soldiers and sailors scarcely endeared them to New Englanders. Fortunately, Rochambeau was not only an able military officer but a man adept at public relations. By imposing strict discipline on his troops and providing them with then-scarce coin to pay for their provision, he began to endear himself and his men to the locals. [1] Although the British fleet showed itself offshore that summer, Chastellux reports that by November things were sufficiently calm to begin his “tour” of the region, “faithful to the principles, which from my youth I had lain down, never to neglect seeing every country in my power.” His travels eventually took him to all three parts of the United States.
The Nature of North America, and of the Americans’ Impact on It
As a philosophe, he duly noted his natural surroundings. When Rochambeau’s army arrived in Virginia, he observed that Americans had cleared the woods for agriculture but warned that “nothing is more essential than the manner in which we proceed in the clearing of a country, for the salubrity of the air, nay even the order of the seasons, may depend on the access which we allow the winds, and the direction we may give them.” In Spain, for example, droughts had followed excessive clearing in Castille. At the same time, swampland “can be dried only by the cutting down a great quantity of wood.” It being “equally dangerous either to cut down or to preserve a great quantity of wood,” the middle course is to disperse human settlements “as much as possible, and to leave some groves of trees between them.” On other occasions, he took the time to relish the American blue jay (“really a most beautiful creature”); the mockingbird (he was told it “has no song, and consequently no sentiment peculiar to himself,” instead “counterfeit[ing] in the evening what he has heard in the day”—a claim he later corrects, when he sees and hears one, writing, “nothing can be more varied than its song,” which it sings in addition to its mockeries); and the hummingbirds (“I never tired of beholding” these “charming little animals,” which “are so fond of motion that it is impossible for them to live without the enjoyment of the most unrestrained liberty”). These observations hint that American nature may partake somewhat of the nature of Americans.
But not simply. “While I was meditating on the great process of nature, which,” according to then-current scientific estimates, “employed fifty thousand years in rendering the earth habitable,” Chastellux encountered “a new spectacle, well calculated as a contrast to those which I had been contemplating”: the American’s successful attempt to conquer nature for the relief of his estate. After amassing the modest revenues needed to purchase between 150 and 200 acres of woodland, an American will bring some livestock and “a provision of flour and cider” to it, fell the smaller trees and fence off some of his property. The huge oaks and pines, “which one would take for the ancient lords of the territory he is usurping,” die after he girdles the trunk, which he burns a year later. The soil, now exposed to the sun, consists of rich loam; “the grass grows rapidly,” making “pasturage for the cattle the very first year.” Eventually, he can till the soil, “which yields the enormous increase of twenty- or thirty-fold.” In two years, he has surplus crops to sell and in five years, having paid off the mortgage, “he finds himself a comfortable planter,” with “a handsome wooden house.” “I shall be asked, perhaps, how one man or one family can be so quickly lodged; I answer, that in America a man is never alone, never an isolated being,” since “the neighbors, for they are everywhere to be found, make it a point of hospitality to aid the new farmers.” This is how North America, “which one hundred years ago was nothing but a vast forest, is peopled with three millions of inhabitants”; “such is the immense, and certain benefit of agriculture, that notwithstanding the war, it not only maintains itself wherever it has been established, but it extends to places which seem the least favorable to its introduction.” Agriculture can even provide a form of currency. In Petersburgh, Virginia, he visits a tobacco warehouse where he learns that the crop has become “current coin,” hearing the residents say, “This watch cost me ten hogsheads of tobacco.” He judges this “a very useful establishment,” as “it gives to commodities value and circulation, as soon as they are manufactured, and, in some measure, renders the planter independent of the merchant.” Such noted agrarians and critics of commerce as Thomas Jefferson, whom he befriended, and many other contemporary and subsequent Southerners, understood this means of avoiding what they regarded as the anti-republican tendencies of commerce, without no need to fear the establishment of an American empire, which could indeed be “an empire of liberty,” as Jefferson called it.
Washington himself looked forward to expansion into the continent. In a letter to Chastellux written a couple of years after his friend had returned to France, Washington remarked “the vast inland navigation of these United States”—indeed, the finest on any continent in the world, centered on the Mississippi River—the “immense diffusion and importance of it,” and “the goodness of that Providence which has dealt her favors to us with so profuse a hand.” “Would to God we may have wisdom enough to make a good use of them. I shall not rest contented till I have explored the western part of this country,” which he, like Jefferson, considers “a new empire.”
The Revolutionary War
Chastellux’s primary task remained military, and in the course of it he took care to visit the places where battles had been fought between the Americans and the British before the French arrived. By ‘reading’ the terrain and considering the stories of those battles, he formed a sense of the character of his allies—officers and soldiers alike. The earliest battle, at Bunker Hill, proved revealing. “I could find nothing formidable” in the hill itself or in what remained of the breastworks. The Americans’ “obstinate resistance…and the prodigious loss sustained by the English [some 1,100 casualties] on this occasion, must be attributed solely to their valor.” He is less impressed by the Americans’ prudence: “Was it necessary to expose themselves to the destruction of their own houses, and the slaughter of their fellow-citizens, only that they might harass the English in an asylum which sooner or later they must abandon?” Because Americans had not yet declared their independence, negotiation could have prevented further “animosities.” In failing to negotiate, however, the British were, if not imprudent, decidedly mistaken, considering the outcome of “this long quarrel” and indeed the outcome of their occupation of Boston. In the event, the British government, “not expecting to find the Americans so bold and obstinate,” hurried to reinforce their “little army at Boston.” Their ships were impeded by north Atlantic storms, one of several hazards owed to their long supply lines. “The Americans, on the contrary, who had the whole continent at their disposal, and had neither exhausted their resources, nor their credit, lived happy and tranquil in their barracks, awaiting the succors promised them in the spring”—namely, reinforcements from Virginia, “who, for the first time, visited these northern countries.” “Who could foresee, in short, that the English would be compelled to evacuate Boston, and to abandon their whole artillery and all their ammunition, without costing the life of a single soldier?” This early success tempted the New Englanders to continue to dream of what would have been a greater act of imprudence, the invasion of Canada, even after the disastrous foray by the Continental Army under the command of General Richard Montgomery into Quebec in 1775-76. During a visit with General Philip Schuyler, Chastellux was permitted to read the correspondence between his host and General Washington, who agreed that the project should not be undertaken a second time. “I contented myself…with remarking that every partial expedition against Canada, and which did not tend to the total conquest, or rather the deliverance of that country, would be dangerous and ineffectual; as it would not be strengthened by the concurrence of the inhabitants, they having been already deceived in their expectations in Montgomery’s expedition and dreading the resentment of the English, should they a second time show themselves favorable to the Americans.”
Schuyler, the father-in-law of Washington’s impressive aide, Alexander Hamilton, and future United States Senator from New York, saw the British attempt to sever New England from the Middle and Southern states by taking forces from Canada under the command of General John Burgoyne down the Hudson River in 1777. To prevent this, Americans had established a major encampment and supply depot at Fishkill, “a post of great importance,” being a key point through which commerce on the river passed between Albany and New York City. Chastellux visited Fishkill and its military complement, West Point, where he received the honor of thirteen-gun salute. “We recollected that two years ago West Point was a desert, almost inaccessible, that this desert has been covered with fortresses and artillery, by a people who six years before had scarcely ever seen cannon.” “The fate of the United States depended in great measure on this important post,” and in one of the ironies of history, the courageous American officer Benedict Arnold—a “hero, always intrepid, always victorious, but always purchasing victory at the price of his blood,” nonetheless “sold, and expected to deliver this Palladium of American liberty to the English.” After the failure of Arnold’s treasonous scheme in 1780, General William Heath, a rich farmer from Massachusetts, a careful reader of the French military writer, Guibert, [2] and commander of American forces in the 1775 battles of Lexington and Concord, took charge of West Point. “I cannot but congratulate myself on the friendship, and thorough good understanding which subsisted between us.” Built by American soldiers who were seldom paid, West Point cost the U. S. government nothing, yet “the defeat of Burgoyne,” in part made possible by that outpost, along with “the alliance of France has changed the face of affairs in America.”
While in New York, Chastellux also visited “Bream’s Heights”—actually Bemis Heights—site of an important earlier battle between the Americans and Burgoyne’s army, best known as the Second Battle of Saratoga. After the first day’s exchange of fire, “General Burgoyne purchased dearly the frivolous honor of sleeping on the field of battle,” as he was so close to the American camp that “it was impossible to maneuver, so that he found himself in the situation of a chess player, who suffers himself to be stalemated.” “Being too near the enemy to retreat without danger, he tried a second attack,” and his men were routed by forces commanded by, among others, Benedict Arnold, whose leg was broken by a musket ball but got on his horse and escaped by leaping his horse “over the entrenchment of the enemy.” A hero, in fact—then.
New York State had been the center of the Iroquois Confederation, allied with the British. Chastellux, who invariably calls the Iroquois “the savages,” and does not find them noble. Visiting one Iroquois household in the Albany area, he finds “the squaw” to be “hideous, as they all are, and her husband almost stupid.” By then, this settlement had come under American rule, although crimes among the Indians were adjudicated by their own chiefs. “The State gives them rations of meat, and sometimes of flour; they possess also some land, where they sow Indian corn and go hunting for skins, which they exchange for rum.” Conquered, they switched sides, and when “employed for war [they] are commended for their bravery and fidelity.” As for those still fighting with the British, “I do not believe that these five nations can produce four thousand men in arms,” and so were “not much to be dreaded, were they not supported the English and the American Tories”; “as an advanced guard, they are formidable, as an army they are nothing.” Nonetheless “their cruelty seems to augment in proportion as their numbers diminish,” making it “impossible for the Americans to consent to have them long for neighbors.” Chastellux predicts that Congress will expel them, except for those who fought with them, who “will ultimately become civilized and be confounded” with the Americans, presumably by intermarriage. As an example of the savagery of some Iroquois, Chastellux tells the story of a Miss MacRea, who had fallen in love with a British officer. In her attempt to join him, she was captured by the Iroquois vanguard of the British army, who were “not much accustomed to distinguish friend from foes.” They “carried her off” and fell to disputing “to whom she would belong,” a debate they settled by “kill[ing] her with a tomahawk.” [3]
Upon arriving in Philadelphia, still under Rochambeau’s command (having marched through New Jersey, “called the garden of America”), Chastellux again visited some important battlegrounds. In the winter of 1776, Washington had famously crossed the Delaware, having been driven from New York by General William Howe’s army. On the day after Christmas, he recrossed the river, surprised Great Britain’s Hessian mercenaries, and surrounded Trenton. The Hessians soon surrendered, and “this is almost all that can be said of this affair, which has been amplified by the Gazettes on one side and the other.” Given their surprise, the defeat was “neither honorable nor dishonorable for the Hessians.” During his stay, Chastellux notes a sign on an inn, a “political emblem” depicting “a beaver at work, with his little teeth, to bring down a large tree, and underneath is written, perseverando.” After this raid, Washington retreated across the Delaware, then returned to Trenton after adding to his troops. Britain’s General Charles Cornwallis gathered his troops, marched against the Americans, who retreated across the Assunpink River, which divides the city. Without provisions or lines of communications with any possible reinforcements, Washington ordered a retreat, but a retreat through Princeton, where the British had taken over the college. Although today’s accounts have the British soldiers occupying Nassau Hall, which was pounded by the Americans’ artillery and soon surrendered, Chastellux contends that the soldiers in fact took their stand in a nearby street, “where they were surrounded and obliged to lay down their arms.” Having stolen a march on his enemy, Washington recrossed the Delaware once again, Cornwallis withdrew to the northeastern New Jersey towns of New Brunswick and Amboy, where they were contained by the local American militiamen, prevented from foraging. “Thus we see that the great events of war are not always great battles, and humanity may receive some consolation from this sole reflection, that the art of war is not necessarily a sanguinary art, that the talents of the commanders spare the lives of the soldiers, and that ignorance alone is prodigal of blood”—that last aphorism an ‘Enlightenment’ thought, if ever there was one.
The following year saw several important engagements in and around Philadelphia. Chastellux observes that the same continental vastness that saved Washington and his army more than once also caused difficulties for himself as well as for the British. “Let us figure to ourselves the situation in which a general must find himself, when obliged to comprehend in his plan of defense, and immense country, and a vast extent of coast, he is at a loss to know, within one hundred and fifty miles, where the enemy is likely to appear.” At this early stage of the war, Washington’s army wasn’t really an army, since “a number of soldiers, however considerable, does not always form an army”; “the greatest part of them” were “new levies” with little training and less experience in battle. Political support was questionable, inasmuch as “Congress were giving him orders to fight, yet removing their archives and public papers into the interior parts of the country, a sinister presage of the success which must follow their council.” This excuses Washington’s several defeats during the 1777 campaign in Pennsylvania.
The first of these was at Brandywine Creek in September. The British, commanded by General William Howe, defeated the outnumbered Americans and General Cornwallis seized Philadelphia. Howe had originally intended then to march north and join up with Burgoyne along the Hudson, but he delayed this march in order to kill more of Washington’s soldiers in the region. Dividing his troops once more between a camp along the Schuylkill River, four miles outside of Philadelphia, and Germantown, eight miles to the north, he also “sent a considerable detachment to Billingsport, to favor the passage of their fleet, which was making fruitless endeavors to get up the Delaware.” At this point, “General Washington thought it was time to remind the English that there still existed an American army.” On October 4, Washington attacked the forces stationed at Germantown, hoping to surprise them. Modern commentators agree that his battle plan was too complex for his raw troops to execute, a point that the ever-discreet Chastellux only hints at. He prefers to emphasize the British reinforcements that arrived from the Schuylkill encampment and Philadelphia, forcing the Americans to retreat.
Soon after, the British opened the Delaware River for their ships, but they were blocked from reaching Philadelphia to resupply the British troops because the Americans had built two forts, Fort Mifflin on an island in the river and Fort Mercer in Red Bank on the New Jersey side (and not to be confused with today’s Red Bank, New Jersey, located well north and east of the Delaware, near the Atlantic Ocean). General Howe pulled his troops out of Germantown, regrouped in Philadelphia, then sent his soldiers against the forts. On October 22, Hessian troops under the command of their Colonel Carl von Dunop, attacked Fort Mercer but failed, Dunop mortally wounded in the battle. Chastellux recounts care he received from Thomas-Antoine du Plessis Mauduit, a French engineer and artillery officer. When menaced by American soldiers, Dunop said, “I am in your hands, you may revenge yourselves.” but Mauduit intervened and silenced them. “Sir, who are you?” “A French officer.” “I am content; I die in the hands of honor itself, a victim of my ambition, and of the avarice of my sovereign,” who had loaned the Hessians to the Brits for money. “Perhaps I have dwelt too long on this event,” Chastellux admits, “but I shall not have to apologize to those who will partake of the pleasing satisfaction I experience, in fixing my eyes upon the triumphs of America, and in discovering my countrymen among those who have reaped her laurels.” More materially, he recalls that on the day he arrived in Philadelphia to return Hessian captives to Howe, Mauduit could confirm that Burgoyne had surrendered, frustrating Howe’s plan to link his forces with invaders from Canada. A few weeks later, Howe sent Cornwallis with 2,000 men to take the fort. The Americans evacuated it; the British returned to Philadelphia, and Washington spent a brutal winter in Valley Forge.
In view of the French alliance signed late that winter, and Howe replaced by General Henry Clinton, the British abandoned Philadelphia and returned to New York. Having strengthened his army over the winter, Washington left Valley Forge, in pursuit. The one major battle, at Monmouth Courthouse, delayed but did not prevent the British from reaching Sandy Hook, New Jersey, from which they were ferried over to New York City. The war stalemated throughout 1779 and 1780, with Washington spending the winter in Morristown, New Jersey. The real warfare shifted to the south, where the French fleet drove the British out of Chesapeake Bay in September 1781 and the combined American and French forces defeating Cornwallis’s troops in the final major battle at Yorktown in October. Chastellux says nothing of that. At the beginning of the following year, Washington wrote to Chastellux, now back in Paris, hoping for further monetary and naval support for the next campaign, but by November the two sides had settled on preliminary articles of peace, to be solemnized by the 1783 Treaty of Paris.
In his letter to Chastellux after the war, Washington worried about French militarism. “Your young military men, who want to reap the harvest of laurels, don’t care, I suppose, how many seeds of war are sown; but, for the sake of humanity, it is devoutly to be wished, that the manly employment of agriculture, and the humanizing benefits of commerce, should supersede the waste of war and the rage of conquest.” As it happened, the young bloods prevailed, culminating in the career of Napoleon. But we Americans, Washington continued (anticipating the well-remembered theme of his Farewell Address, a decade later), we “who live in these ends of the earth only hear of the rumors of war, like the roar of distant thundering,” hoping that “our remote local situation will prevent us from being swept into its vortex.” But he doubted that the “halcyon days” of peace on earth would ever come. “A wise Providence, I presume, has decreed it otherwise; and we shall be obliged to go on in the old way, disputing, and now and then fighting, until the great globe itself dissolves.” Chastellux may not have been so sure of the peaceful character of Americans, whether agrarian or commercial. “Among the men I have met with, above twenty years of age, of whatsoever condition, I have not found two who have not borne arms, heard the whistling of balls, and even received some wounds; so that it may be asserted, that North America is entirely military, and inured to war, and that new levies may continually be made without making new soldiers.” [4] It may perhaps be suggested that the commercial republic, after the first years of its Revolutionary War, continued to foster a degree of esteem for military prowess that would give it otherwise unexpected military heft, even as its main enemies—from the British and Indians, to its own Confederates considering the supposedly unwarlike Yankees, to the Germans in both world wars, the Japanese in the Second World War—have inclined to underestimate American battle-readiness.
Manners and Morals
Recalling his stay in Providence, Rhode Island, Chastellux introduces his readers to Miss Pearce. “This young person had, like all the American women, a very decent, nay even serious carriage; she had no objection to being looked at, nor to have her beauty commended, nor even to receive a few caresses, provided it was done without an air of familiarity or libertinism.” In all this she is typical, he will have us know: “Licentious manners, in fact, are so foreign in America, that the communication with young women leads to nothing bad, and that freedom itself there bears a character of modest far beyond our [French] affected bashfulness and false reserve.” Nor are these manners restricted to Puritan-derived New Englanders. Recounting a dinner in New Jersey, he remarks “the extreme liberty that prevails between the two sexes, as long as they are unmarried.” While “it is no crime for a girl to embrace a young man, it would be a very heinous one for a married woman event to show a desire of pleasing.” In America, “the youth of both sexes are more forward, and more ripe…than with us,” although he hastens to insist that French women “retain their beauty longer than in any other country”; “if they are not always those we most admire, they are certainly those we must love the most and the longest.” The American training, as it were, for marriage consists of dancing, “at once the emblem of gaiety and of love” but also “the emblem of legislation,” inasmuch as places are marked out, the dances named, and every proceeding provided for, calculated and submitted to regulation,” and “of marriage, as it furnishes each lady with a partner, with whom she dances the whole evening, without being allowed to take another.” [5] Newly married American couples live well, as exemplified by a household in Newport. “This little establishment, where comfort and simplicity reign, gave an idea of that sweet and serene state of happiness, which appears to have taken refuge in the New World, after compounding it with pleasure, to which it has left the Old.” As to the children consequent to American marriages, Chastellux finds them rude—as, for example, the seven-year-old son of a prominent New Yorker, “very forward and arch, as all American children are, but very amiable,” who, while “running about the house, according to custom, and opening the door of the salon,” where some defeated British officers were staying. “He burst out laughing on seeing all the English collected, and shutting it after him, crying, Ye are all my prisoners.” Such parents, “indulgent to children in their tender age,” “form them into petty domestic tyrants”; “negligent of them when the attain to adolescence, they convert them into strangers.” Parents should instead follow the educational practice commended by John Locke. “Do you wish your children to remain long attached to you? Be yourselves their teachers.” Seeing that their parents “know more than them,” children will respect them more.
While American women are faithful wives, Chastellux finds them a bit boring. They “are very little accustomed to give themselves trouble, either of mind or body; the care of their children, that of making tea, and seeing the house kept clean, constitutes the whole of their domestic province.” He did not choose to marry one, but later on did choose to marry one of those perdurably beautiful French women, as the ever-observant General Washington duly noticed. In a letter dated April 1788, Washington describes himself “not less delighted than surprised” to learn that his friend has married, having returned to France. “Well my dear Marquis, I can hardly refrain from smiling to find that you are caught at last.” Having praised “the happiness of domestic life in America,” you have indeed “swallowed the bait,” as (Washington professes) he knew he would, “as surely as you are a philosopher and a soldier.”
As to American manners generally, Americans celebrate the New Year by getting drunk and firing guns. At their more formal occasions, “there is more ceremony than compliment.” Americans’ politeness “is mere form, such as drinking healths to the company, observing ranks, giving up the right hand, etc. But they do nothing of this but what has been taught them, no particle of it is the result of sentiment; in a word, politeness here is like religion in Italy, everything in practice, but without any principle.” Such toasts function only “as a sort of check in the conversation, to remind each individual that he forms part of the company, and that the whole form only one society.” This formality contrasts with the warmth of his countrymen. On a trip to see battlefields around Philadelphia, Chastellux, Lafayette, and their companions talked about war at first, but then “suddenly changed the subject, and got on that of Paris, and all sorts of discussions relative to our private societies. This transition was truly French, but it does not prove that we are less fond of war than other nations, only that we like our friends better.” [6]
American unsentimentality characterizes their religion, as well. Chastellux was especially unimpressed with the Quakers. “Inflamed with an ardent love of humanity,” they nonetheless “assume a smooth and wheedling tone, which is altogether jesuitical,” in their address to individuals. They are politically useless, too, “concealing their indifference for the public welfare under the cloak of religion, they are sparing of blood, it is true, especially of their own people, but they trick both parties [i.e., Whigs and Loyalists] out of their money, and that without either shame or decency.” He draws the ‘enlightened’ conclusion: “In fact, nothing can be worse than enthusiasm in its downfall; for what can be its substitute, but hypocrisy? That monster so well known in Europe, finds but too easy an access to all religions.” The Quaker women are preferable to the men, as the women are “well dressed, seemed desirous of pleasing, and it is fair to conclude that their private sentiments were in unison with their appearance.” He finds Quaker religious services absurd, listening as “one of the elderly makes an ex tempore prayer, of whatever comes to his mind; silence is then observed until some man or woman feels inspired, and arise to speak.” “I arrived at the moment a woman was done holding forth; she was followed by a man who talked a great deal of nonsense about internal grace, the illumination of the spirit, and the other dogmas of this sect, which he bandied about, but took special care not to explain them,” as “the brethren, and the sisterhood” assumed “all of them a very inattentive and listless air.” “After seven or eight minutes silence, an old man went on his knees, dealt us out a very unmeaning prayer, and dismissed the audience”—a “melancholy, homespun assembly, indeed.” The Episcopalians exhibited the other extreme. “The service of the English church appeared to me a sort of opera, as well for the music as the decorations: a handsome pulpit placed before a handsome organ; a handsome minister in that pulpit, reading, speaking, and singing with a grace entirely theatrical, a number of young women answering melodiously from the pit and boxes.” “All this, compared to the quakers, the anabaptists, the presbyterians, etc. appeared to me rather like a little paradise itself, than as the road to it.” Ah, well, when it comes to religion, it “is better to leave [ man] in his error than to cut throats with him.”
Other than the Quakers, American Christians are, at least, often patriotic. He tells of a “young preacher” he heard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who “spoke with a great deal of grace, and reasonably enough for a preacher.” “I could not help admiring the address with which he introduced politics into his sermon, by comparing the christians redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ, but still compelled to fight against the flesh and sin, to the thirteen United States, who, notwithstanding they have acquired liberty and independence, are under the necessity of employing all their force to combat a formidable power, and to preserve those invaluable treasures.” In all, he finds Americans’ morality more impressive than their religion. Having met a woman who took in an unmarried girl and her child, he considers it proof, “more than any other thing, [of] the pure and respectable manners of the Americans,” for whom “vice is so strange, and so rare that the danger of example has almost no effect.” Among them, “a fault of this nature is regarded only as an accidental error, of which the individual, attacked with it, must be cured, without taking any measures to escape the contagion.” And more, “a girl, by bringing up her child, seems to expiate the weakness which brought it into existence.” He concludes with a rather Aristotelian observation on the moral importance of situation: “Thus morality, which can never differ from the real interest of society, appears sometimes to be local and modified by times and circumstances.”
The American Character
Chastellux presents brief character sketches which, taken together, amount to a ‘pointillist’ outline of the American ethos. For contrast, one may begin with his portrait of Thomas Paine, the English polemicist then residing in Philadelphia, hoping to catch on with a government job. “I discovered, at his apartments, all the attributes of a man of letters; a room pretty much in disorder, dusty furniture, and a large table covered with books lying open, and manuscripts begun.” His dress was correspondingly slovenly, and while his conversation was “agreeable and animated,” he exemplified what we now call an ‘intellectual’; “it is easier for them to decry other men’s opinions than to establish their own.” Unlike the Americans, “the vivacity of [Paine’s] imagination, and the independence of his character, render him more calculated for reasoning on affairs, than for conducting them.”
Americans are better exemplified by Captain Muller, a Virginian who extended his hospitality to Chastellux shortly before the Battle of Yorktown and would accept only modest payment in return: “You come from France to my country to support and defend it; I ought to receive you better and take nothing, but I am only a poor countryman, and not in a condition to demonstrate my gratitude. If I were not ill, I would mount my horse and attend you to the field of battle.”
It is true that American democracy inclines American souls to commercial life and practical politics. “All ranks here being equal, men follow their natural bent, by giving the preference to riches.” Governor Jonathan Trumbull of Connecticut’s “whole life is consecrated to business, which he passionately loves, whether important or not.” He reminds Chastellux of the old burgomasters of Holland, with “all the simplicity in his dress, all the importance, and even pedantry becoming the great magistrate of a small republic.” Pennsylvania’s Robert Morris was “a very rich merchant, and consequently a man of every country, for commerce bears everywhere the same character,” excluding both “the virtues and the prejudices that stand in the way of its interest.” In church, Morris’s demeanor varies with the fortunes of his privateers during the week preceding. In the management of his household, he lives “without ostentation, but not without expense, for he spares nothing which can contribute to his happiness, and that of Mrs. Morris, to whom he is much attached.” In all, “a zealous republican, and an epicurean philosopher, he has always played a distinguished part at table and in business.”
Zealous republicanism and epicurean philosophy make an uneasy alliance, but the Americans of the Revolutionary War leaned toward the republican virtues, as exemplified by General William Nelson of Virginia, briefly the state’s colonial government in the early 1770s. At the time the British army was ravaging the state, Nelson “was compelled to exert every means, and to call forth every possible resource, to assist Monsieur de la Fayette to make some resistance; and furnish General Washington with horses, carriages, and provisions.” Although “the only recompense of his labors was the hatred of a great part of his citizens”—a fact that “will do but little honor to Virginia”—he persevered in commandeering horses, carriages, and forage. Out of office, he enjoyed pardon for “the momentary injuries he had done the laws, by endeavoring to save the state,” as befits a “good and gallant man, in every possible situation of life.”
The greatest example of such civic courage and many other virtues besides was set by George Washington. Upon meeting him in his headquarters in New York, “I soon felt myself at my ease ear the greatest and the best of men.” Although animated by “goodness and benevolence,” thereby inspiring “confidence” in all who deal with him, Washington’s demeanor “never occasions improper familiarity” but rather “a profound esteem for his virtues, and a high opinion of his talents.” Even his horses partook of his character; riding one of them, leant by the General, south to Philadelphia, Chastellux found his mount “as good as he is handsome, but above all, perfectly well broke, and well trained, having a good mouth, easy in hand, and stopping short in a gallop without bearing the bit,” all thanks to his owner’s training. Washington “is a very excellent and bold horseman, leaping the highest fences, and going extremely quick, without standing upon his stirrups, bearing on the bridle, or letting his horse run wild.” Indeed, “the strongest characteristic of this respectable man is the perfect union which reigns between the physical and moral qualities which compose the individual; one alone will enable you to judge of all the rest.” Chastellux finds in Washington’s character “the idea of a perfect whole, that cannot be the produce of enthusiasm, which rather would reject it, since the effect of proportion is to diminish the idea of greatness.” (In this, Chastellux anticipates the contrast Chateaubriand would draw between Washington and Bonaparte, a man entirely too enamored of personal greatness.) [7] Washington well understood himself as a “general in a republic,” eschewing “the imposing stateliness of a Marechal de France who gives the order; a hero in a republic, he excites another sort of respect, which seems to spring from the sole idea, that the safety of each individual is attached to his person.” “He has obeyed the Congress; more need not be said, especially in America, where they know how to appreciate all the merit contained in this simple fact.” A republican regime, then, aimed at securing the natural rights of individuals along with the independence of his country, which makes that defense more likely to succeed. “It will be said of him, AT THE END OF A LONG CIVIL WAR, HE HAD NOTHING WITH WHICH HE COULD REPROACH HIMSELF.” Looking at Washington and seeing the more or less universal esteem his fellow citizens feel for him, Chastellux “is tempted to apply to the Americans what Pyrrhus said of the Romans: Truly these people have nothing barbarous in their discipline!“
The American Regime
In considering America’s regime, Chastellux begins with one of those who began the movement to found it: Samuel Adams. “Everybody in Europe knows that he was one of the prime movers of the present revolution.” Chastellux finds his company satisfying because “one rarely has in the world, nay even in the theatre,” the experience of “finding the person of the actor corresponding with the character he performs.” Adams “never spoke but to give a good opinion of his cause, and a high idea of his country,” and “his simple and frugal exterior seemed intended as a contrast with the energy and extent of his ideas.” Adams proved to Chastellux that New England “were not peopled with any view to commerce and aggrandizement, but wholly by individuals who fled from persecution, and sought an asylum at the extremity of the world, where they might be free to live, and follow their opinion,” putting themselves under England’s protection but not thereby granting the Empire a “right of imposing or exacting a revenue of any kind” from them. [8] In a phrase, no taxation without representation. This being so, “we passed to a more interesting” topic, the character of the nascent republic. Chastellux raised an important question: Representative government is all very well, so long as “every citizen is pretty equally at his ease, or may be so in a short time,” but once “riches arise among you” a “combat between the form of government, and its natural tendency,” republicanism and oligarchy, will arise, with the democratic impulses of republicans inclining toward anarchy, the oligarchs toward the rule of themselves—either fatal to the regime. To this, Adams replied that a republic with a modest property qualification for those who are eligible for election to office in one house of the legislature, if combined with a governor and a senate whose members are elected by voters with fairly high property qualifications—who can exercise veto power over the laws the popular assembly passes—can moderate popular passions and be ruled rather by “the permanent and enlightened will of the people which should constitute law.” Since a veto can be overturned by a two-thirds majority vote in the assembly, the veto power “moderates, without destroying the authority of the people,” preventing “the springs [of republicanism] from breaking by too rapid a movement, without stopping them entirely.” “Thus the democracy is pure and entire in the assembly, which represents the sovereign; and the aristocracy, or, if you will, the optimacy, is to be found only in the moderating power.” Further, although the governor of the state will “employ the forces of sea and land according to the necessity,” the land army of each state “will consist only in the militia, which, as it is composed of the people themselves, can never act against the people.” Adams, heretofore “the most extravagant partisan of the democracy,” now advocates what Aristotle calls a politeia or ‘mixed regime’ republic.
Civil society is sound, there. New Englanders “were not adventurers, they were men who wished to live in peace, and who labored for their subsistence,” intentions which in turn “taught them equality, and disposed them to industrious pursuits.” As fishermen and navigators,” they remain “friends to equality and liberty.”
After consulting an eminent New Englander, Chastellux turns to the governor of Virginia, Benjamin Harrison. That is, he discussed the character of the American regime with what eventually would become the two factions leading to civil war, four generations later. With regard to the origins of the revolution, Harrison observed that the founders of his states were planters, not merchants or seekers of religious liberty. Virginians nonetheless rejected taxation without consent just as firmly as New Englanders. “Every man, educated in the principles of the English constitution, shudders, at the idea of a servile submission to a tax to which he has not himself consented.” Nonetheless, Virginians were initially skeptical of their representatives’ claim that the British intended to “invade our rights and privileges.” They came around when Lord North made a speech “in which he could not refrain from avowing, in the clearest manner, the plan of the British government.” “Henceforward they were resolutely determined upon war.”
Harrison warned Chastellux not to assume that Americans were unified in all ways. Europeans “would be much deceived in imagining that all the Thirteen States of America were invariably animated by the same spirit, and affected by the same sentiments,” or that “these people resembled each other in their forms of government, their manners and opinions.” Chastellux affirms this. Virginia was first settled by “a number of adventurers” who, “disdaining agriculture and commerce, had no other profession but that of arms,” animated by a “military spirit” which “maintained the prejudices favorable to that nobility from which it was long inseparable.” These settlers carried these principles and prejudices “into the midst even of the savages whose lands they were usurping.” Such a people may adopt a democratic or republican government, but its “national character, the spirit of the government itself, will be always aristocratic.” Add the social condition of slaveholding to this spirit and you produce rulers animated by “vanity and sloth, which accord wonderfully with a revolution founded on such different principles.” “Whereas the revolt of New England was the result of reason and calculation, pride possibly had no inconsiderable share in dictating the measures of Virginia.” Admittedly, the people relied “upon a small number of virtuous and enlightened citizens” to design their government, but that “the mass of citizens was taking part in that government” and “the national character prevailed, casing things to get “worse and worse.”
The sharp class distinctions Chastellux expected to develop in New England already were evident in Virginia, where “wretched, miserable huts are often to be met with, inhabited by whites, whose wan looks, and ragged garments bespeak poverty,” contrast with the “immense estates,” sometimes of five or six thousand acres, “clear[ed] out only as much as [the proprietors’] negroes can cultivate.” The rich whites “sometimes dissipate their fortunes” by “gaming, hunting, and horse-races,” although admittedly the horses they breed “are really very handsome.” Women “have little share in the amusements of the men; beauty here serves only to procure them husbands,” as “their fate is usually decided by their figure.” As a result, “they are often pert and coquettish before, and sorrowful helpmates after marriage,” and “the luxury of being served by slaves still farther augments their natural indolence.” Like the Americans and indeed the English generally, “they are very fond of their infants, and care little for their children.” The leading virtues of rich Virginians are “magnificence, hospitality, and generosity.” Religion does little to correct either class of whites, as there is “nothing remarkable respecting it in this country, except the facility with which they dispense with it.”
There is also a middling class of whites, the farmer who lives “in the center of the woods, and wholly occupied in rustic business,” yet quite distinct from a European peasant, inasmuch as “he is always a freeman, participates in the government, and has the command of a few negroes.” In “uniting in himself the two distinct qualities of citizen and master, he perfectly resembles the bulk of individuals who formed what were called the people in the ancient republics; a people very different from that of our days, though they are very improperly confounded, in the frivolous declamations of our half philosophers, who, in comparing ancient with modern times, have invariably mistaken the word people for mankind in general.”
The slaves are beneath even the poorest whites—and although “ill lodged, ill clothed, and often oppressed with labor,” they are better off than slaves confined to the sugar colonies Santo Domingo and Jamaica. “In truth,” in Virginia “you do not usually hear the sound of whips, and the cries of the unhappy wretches whose bodies they are tearing to pieces.” Indeed, “I must do the Virginians the justice to declare that many of them treat their negroes with great humanity,” and “in general they seem afflicted to have any slavery, and are constantly talking of abolishing it, and of contriving some other means of cultivating their estates.” Whereas “the philosophers and the young men, who are almost all educated in the principles of a sound philosophy, regard nothing but justice, and the rights of humanity,” while “the fathers of families and such as are principally occupied with schemes of interest, complain that the maintenance of their negroes is very expensive,” and that day laborers would cost them less. Chastellux is happy that both types of slaveholders have come to this conclusion, “for the more we regard the negroes, the more must we be persuaded that the difference between them and us, consists in nothing more than complexion.”
Admittedly, abolition of slavery in the South presents difficult practical problems. Liberated, the African-Americans “would unquestionably form a distinct people, from whom neither succor, virtue, nor labor could be expected.” The difference between slavery now and slavery among the ancients is that the ancients’ slave was white, with “no other cause of humiliation than his actual state; on his being freed, he mixed immediately with free men, and became their equal.” Even if slavery had to some degree debauched their morals and caused them to resent work, their ambition to rise politically could overcome these handicaps. “But in the present case, it is not only the slave who is beneath his master, it is the negro who is beneath the white man.” This racial bar inclines many freed African-Americans to “continue to live with the negro slaves,” where family and economic ties support them. Chastellux’s proposed solution is to liberate and deport the male slaves and “to encourage the marriage of white men with the females,” who would then be freed. The sharp-eyed Frenchman adds that “such a law, aided by the illicit, but already well-established commerce between the white men and negresses, could not fail of giving birth to a race of mulattoes, which would produce another of Quarterons, and so on until the color should be totally effaced.”
Here as in Massachusetts, Virginians have divided their state legislature into an upper and a lower house, along with an executive branch, a “substitute for the executive power of the king in England.” Unlike Massachusetts, however, Virginians have banned the professional classes, consisting of clergy, judges, and lawyers, from “any share in the government”—this, on the democratic ground of “prevent[ing] the public interest from falling into competition with that of individuals.” The judges and lawyers are restricted to the judicial branch. Their exclusion from the other branches is “an inconvenience at the present moment,” since “the lawyers, who are certainly the most enlightened part of the community, are removed from the civil councils, and the administration is entrusted either to ignorant, or to the least skillful men.” [9]
Finally, there are the states between New England and the South. They are diverse in character. New York and “the Jerseys,” north and south, “were peopled by necessitous Dutchmen who wanted land in their own country and occupied themselves more about domestic economy and the public government.” Today, “their interests, their efforts, so to speak,” remain “personal,” their “views are concentered in their families, and it is only from necessity that these families are formed into a state.” They have fought the British with determination—New Yorkers because they were already “animated by an inveterate hatred against the savages, which generally preceded the English armies,” with whom the Indians of New York had allied, Jerseyans because they wanted “to take personal revenge for the excesses committed by the troops of the enemy, when they overran the country” in the advance-and-retreat struggles of the late 1790s.
Across the Delaware River, Pennsylvanians are quite different. Its government “was founded on two very opposite principles: “a government of property, a government in itself feudal, or, if you will patriarchal,” but animated by a “spirit of which was the greatest toleration, and the most complete liberty.” Such were the Quakers, the most eminent being William Penn and his family, who “first formed the vain project of establishing a sort of Utopia, or perfect government, and afterwards of deriving the greatest possible advantage from their immense property, by attracting foreigners from all parts,” populations now “intermingled and confounded, and more actuated to individual, than to public liberty, more inclined to anarchy than to democracy.” Even now, in Philadelphia, the Quakers “consider every species of private or public amusement as a transgression of heir law, and as a pomp of Satan.” Penn intended Philadelphia as the future capital of America, which it became, and also as a great commercial port, which now boasts “upwards of two hundred quays,” which can accommodate hundreds of ships. Its commerce has been impeded not by its geography but by its government, which has mismanaged the state’s finances, deranging the price of commodities and thereby nearly causing a famine. “Philadelphia is, so to speak, the great sink, wherein all the speculations of America terminate, and are confounded together.” The population has too many Quakers and Tories, “two classes of men equally dangerous, one from their timidity, and the other from their intentions.” Benjamin Franklin’s state constitution is “too democratical” to produce stability in such a city, although Chastellux defends Franklin himself, who was attempting to make Pennsylvanians “renounce monarchical government” by “employing a sort of seduction in order to conduct a timid and avaricious people to independence, who were besides so divided in their opinions, that the republican party was scarcely stronger than the other.” “Under these circumstances he acted like Solon; he has not given the best possible laws to Pennsylvania, but the best of which the country was susceptible.”
Given this civil-social diversity and (often) stratification, aside from antagonism toward their common imperial enemy, what unites the United States? It is the universal principle of reason, of “genuine morality”: “the equality of rights; the general interest which actuates all; private interest, connected with the general good; the order of society, as necessary as the symmetry of a beehive.” An example of this may be seen in the action of a soldier at the Battle of Saratoga. A slave who attended him, said, “Master, you are hurting yourself, but no matter, you are going to fight for liberty; I should suffer also patiently if I had liberty to defend.” “Don’t let that stop you,” the soldier replied, “from this moment you are free.” This morality will find its political expression in constitutionalism, as seen in the gentleman who asked Chastellux to send him a copy of Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des lois in the original French. Such interest in constitution pervades America. In 1788, Washington wrote to inform him that the recently proposed by the Federal Convention had already been adopted by seven states, with no rejections so far. “Should it be adopted (and I think it will be) America will lift up her head again, and, in a few years, become respectable among the nations. It is a flattering and consolatory reflection, that our rising republic has the good wishes of all philosophers, patriots, and virtuous men, in all nations that they look upon it as a kind of asylum for mankind. God grant that we may not be disappointed in our honest expectations by our folly or perverseness!”
As an Enlightenment man, Chastellux hopes and expects that education will refine and sustain these moral and political strengths. As an exemplar, he chooses Thomas Jefferson, whom he visited at Monticello, the elegant home Chastellux elegantly describes as “a debt nature owed to a philosopher and a man of taste, that in his own possessions he should find a spot where he might best study and enjoy her.” “We may safely aver that Mr. Jefferson is the first American who has consulted the fine arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather.” “At once a musician, skilled in drawing, a geometrician, an astronomer, a natural philosopher, legislator, and statesman,” Jefferson has a “mild and pleasing countenance” with a mind to match. As a good Lockean, unlike most Americans, “he himself takes charge” of the education of his children. And he is a man of refined sentiment: after dinner, they happily conversed about the poems of ‘Ossian.’ For Chastellux, Jefferson embodies the standard for the American mind and heart.
To see more Jeffersonlike men, America will need to build colleges and cultivate the fine arts. A brief visit to the College of New Jersey at Princeton revealed how much work needed doing. Nassau Hall is a building “only remarkable for its size” and therefore unnecessary to describe. The president, John Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a member of Congress, and “much respected in this country,” spoke French very imperfectly, and although his college is “a complete university” with room for two hundred students, the library was ransacked by the British and needs to be restocked. The University of Williamsburgh in Virginia (the royal name, ‘College of William and Mary’ seems to have been suppressed) evidently had suffered less damage. There, Chastellux conversed with the Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics, Bishop James Madison, cousin of the future fourth president of the United States, on the prudent way to bring the arts and sciences to greater prominence and better influence in America. Evidently mindful of Rousseau’s critique, Madison sought a way to reconcile them to civic virtue. Chastellux is far from destitute of recommendations. The arts, admittedly, “can never flourish, but where there is a multitude of men,” but the biggest cities of America “are seaports, and commerce, it cannot be dissembled, has more magnificence than taste; it pays, rather than encourages artists.” To remedy this, Americans should build state capitals, cities, that do no commerce. Although commerce “is friendly to individual” liberty, making no discrimination “between citizens and foreigners,” a city whose business is government conduces to civic liberty. “I should desire that their capital were situated in the center of [each] republic, so that every citizen, rich enough to look after the education of his children, and to taste the pleasures of society, might inhabit it for some months of the year, without making it his own residence, without renouncing his invaluable country-seat,” where he will continue to serve in local government. Each capital would have a university teaching civil and public law and the higher sciences in a three-year course of study. In the capital, with these universities, “the true national spirit might be preserved, like the sacred fire; that is to say, that spirit which perfectly assimilates with liberty and public happiness.”
What about the rest of the country, where commerce prevails? Merchants aim at “exciting the taste of the consumers,” thereby “establish[ing] the empire of fashion,” the material expression of “those caprices of opinion which have begot so many errors, so many revolutions.” The remedy to this, “the study of the arts, the knowledge of abstract beauty, the perfection of taste”—in sum, reason and philosophy—alone will suffice. “Let us never cease repeating, that ignorance is the source of evil, and science that of good,” the Enlightenment man insists. “Erect altars, then, to the fine arts, if you would destroy those of fashion and caprice,” as those who “taste and learn to relish nectar and ambrosia” will never become “intoxicated with common liquors.” American women, especially (“I have observed them as a philosopher”) ought to be protected from the excesses of fashionableness by “retirement, and distance from all danger” but also by the “loftiness” of sentiment, “that estimable pride for the preservation of their virtue as well as of their fame.” To be sure, a woman should attend to her dress, since “every woman ought to seek to please,” as “this is the weapon conferred on her by nature to compensate the weakness of her sex,” and “without this she is a slave, and can a slave have virtues?” American women should be well but simply dressed, eschewing the luxurious display of “gold, silver, and diamonds.” Thus “we have imperceptibly prepared the way for the fine arts, by removing the principal obstacles which might be opposed to them; for if, far from rendering nations vain and frivolous, they rather tend to preserve them from the excesses of luxury, and the caprices of fashion, they can certainly be considered neither as dangerous nor prejudicial.” Americans have the advantage of living amidst nature, “always great and beautiful.” “Let them study; let them consult her, and they can never go astray.”
“As long as a taste for the arts can assimilate itself with rural and domestic life, it will always be advantageous to your country, and vice-versa.” Such arts as music, drawing, painting, and architecture comport with home life; “public spectacles, gaudy assemblies, and horse races” do not. Make music with your neighbors. Have your daughter amuse herself with drawing, an art she can teach to her own children. Do not hire foreign teachers of the arts, as “Europeans, it must be confessed, have vices from which you are exempt.” It will be “much better to defer even for a long time, the progress of the arts, than to make the slightest step towards the corruption of your manners.” As to foreign artists, “naturalize them as much as possible” in order “to assimilate and identify them with the inhabitants of the country.” The way to do this is to make them husbands of American women, property owners, and citizens. “It is thus that by securing the empire of morals, you will still farther guard against the effect of those national prejudices, of that disdain which render foreigners so ridiculous and odious, and which reflect upon the art itself the disgust inspired by the artist.” Put them, and your own artists, to work making statues of your virtuous men, such as Washington and the courageous officer Nathaniel Greene. Hang pictures of battles. Sculpting the likenesses of such men and painting the scenes of courage will encourage civic virtues in the hearts of artist and onlooker, alike.
As for the sciences, Chastellux assured Madison that “America will render herself illustrious” by them, even as she has distinguished herself “by her arms and government.” To remove “obstacles which might possibly retard their progress,” avoid the mistake of the English universities, which have been “too dogmatical” (i.e., too rigorous in the promotion of theology) and “too exclusive.” This leaves the English in a condition of “a half liberty.” “Leave to an unrestrained philosophy the care of forming good men,” the confident Enlightener advises the Anglican bishop-philosopher of Virginia. “Leave owls and bats to flutter in the doubtful perspicuity of a feeble twilight; the American eagle should fix her eyes upon the sun.”
To this end, consider the academician “a senator of the republic of letters,” taking “an oath to advance nothing he cannot prove.” It is true that “such men cannot be numerous,” and so “ought not to be thrown into discredit by associates unworthy of them”—presumably, those dogmatic, theological types. As to ‘the many,’ the public draw them to science by offering prizes, especially for the invention of “the most useful objects.” “It is to them that first efforts are indebted for celebrity; it is by them also the young man thirsting for glory is dispensed with sighing long after her first favors.” Chastellux would worry about a country that attached celebrity to mere entertainment. In the sciences as in the arts, Americans can thrive in the midst of nature, as guarded by the extended republic that the other James Madison commended. “The extent of [America’s] empire submits to her observation a large portion of heaven and earth. What observations may not be made between Penobscot and Savannah? Between the lakes and the ocean?” The American land, waters, and sky should inspire the American people to the scientific study of nature.
Along with Chateaubriand, then, Chastellux establishes himself as a worthy predecessor of Tocqueville as an observer and commentator on the American way of life. As a soldier, of course, he far surpassed them both.
Notes
- On his visit to Boston, Chastellux had occasion to notice that Louis-Philippe de Rigaud, Marquis de Vandreuil, a veteran naval officer and eventually the commander of the French fleet in the war, had similarly “contributed to conciliate the two nations, and to strengthen the connections which unite them” by setting a “splendid example of good morals’; this, along with “the simplicity and goodness of his manners, an example followed, beyond all hope and belief, by the officers of his squadron,” had “captivated the hearts of a people, who though now the most determined enemies to the English, had never hitherto been friendly to the French.” Indeed, “the officers of our navy were everywhere received, not only as allies, but brothers; and though they were admitted to the ladies of Boston to the greatest familiarity, not a single indiscretion, not even the most distant attempt at impertinence every disturbed the confidence, or innocent harmony of this pleasing intercourse.”
- Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte, Comte de Guibert published his Essai générale de Tactique in 1770. Translated into many languages, it was considered the best study of military affairs of the time. Washington read it, along with Frederick the Great’s “Instructions to His Generals,” showing, Chastellux writes, that “he knew well how to select his authors as to profit from them.”
- In an unsigned footnote (most are clearly attributed to the anonymous translator, but not this one), the writer judges the British use of the Indians to have been the reverse of their hopes. The Indians “united the inhabitants of all the countries liable to their incursions as one man against them and their allies,” thereby “producing such bloody scenes of inveterate animosity and vengeance as make human nature shudder.” One such incident illustrated “to what lengths even the christians of an enlightened age can go, when compelled to act under the guidance of the worst passions.” In western Pennsylvania, in 1782, American settlers “goaded to fury by the ravages committed on them by the Indians, and by the murder of their families and kindred,” militiamen came upon the Muskingums, a small tribe of Christian Indians. Despite the pleadings of these peaceful folk, the Americans murdered all two hundred of them. Herded into a barn, “the innocent victims spent the night in singing Moravian hymns, and in other acts of christian devotion; and in the morning, men, women and children, were led to the slaughter, and butchered by their fellow worshippers of the meek Jesus!” Once the news of the massacre reached Philadelphia, “both Congress and the Assembly of the State were fond unequal to the punishment of these assassins, who were armed, distant form the seat of government, the only safeguard and protection of the frontiers, and from their own savage nature”—savagery being the monopoly of no one race but a potentiality of all.
- An example of this among the American military officers was General Henry Knox, who worked as a bookseller in Boston prior to the war, “amus[ing] himself in reading military books in his shop.” He quickly transitioned to a capable artillery commander during the war and would later serve as President Washington’s Secretary of War.
- On one such occasion in Philadelphia, Chastellux is pleased to recall, “The Comte de Darnes had Mrs. Bingham for his partner, and the Vicomte de Noailles, Miss Shippen. Both of the, like true philosophers, testified a great respect for the manners of the country, by not quitting their handsome partners the whole evening.”
- Although Lafayette remains a well-known figure of the American Revolution in the United States, he has become a matter of some puzzlement to the French of recent generations. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, the great historian Jules Michelet dismissed him as “a mediocre idol,” and at his May 1962 dinner in honor of André Malraux, President Kennedy acknowledged that the French now tended to think of Lafayette as “a rather confused sort of ineffectual, elderly figure, hovering over French politics” for entirely too long. But not so, in his lifetime. Chastellux calls “the confidence and attachment of the troops” Lafayette’s “invaluable possessions, well acquired riches, of which nobody can deprive him,” yet “what, in my opinion, is still more flattering for a young man of his age, is the influence and consideration he has acquired among the political, as well as the military order” in the United States. “Fortunate his country, if she knows how to avail herself” of his talents; “more fortunate still should she stand in no need of calling them into exertion!” Unfortunately, as it happened, his country did need him, during its own revolution, but did know how to avail itself of those talents, or of his virtues, which may explain his descent into obscurity in the minds of later generations.
- See Chateaubriand: Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, Book VI, chapter 8, reviewed on this website in the “Nations” category under the title, “The Many Regimes of Chateaubriand.”
- This was confirmed in a later conversation with Governor Jonathan Trumbull of Connecticut, who affirmed that the Massachusetts Bay Colony declined to ask for Parliament’s protection in 1670, when threatened by war with nearby Indian tribes, since “if they put themselves once under the protection of parliament, they should be obliged to submit to all the laws that assembly might impose, whether on the nation in general, or on the colonies in particular.” This proves that “these colonies, even in the very origin, never acknowledged the authority of parliament, nr imagined they could be bound by laws of their making.”
- Respecting the other states, Chastellux reports that Maryland was initially a proprietary colony, a “private domain” held “in a state of the most absolute dependence” upon its owners. It nonetheless “seems to be forming under good auspices” since independence,” and “may become of great weight after the present revolution.” He did not venture into the Carolinas and Georgia, and so was “not sufficiently acquainted with these three states to hazard on them observations,” other than hearsay. Of them, South Carolina is the most important, with its major seaport city, Charleston. As a “commercial town, in which strangers abound, as at Marseille and Amsterdam…the manners there are consequently polished and easy” and its inhabitants “love pleasure, the arts, and society,” exhibiting manners “more European than any in America.”
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