| |
Lafayette and Slavery
By Diane Windham Shaw
About the time
the young Marquis de Lafayette first came to America in 1777, the international movement that would eventually bring an end to the institution of slavery was just gathering strength. Lafayette’s own ardent opposition to slavery seems to have been an outgrowth of his experiences fighting  for American liberty. His earliest encounters with slaves were on American soil when he arrived off the coast of South Carolina in June 1777. Although he more than once suggested using black troops in the conflict, it is clear that he considered them “property,” at least as late as 1781. At some point, very late in the American Revolution, he ceased to regard slaves as chattel, and embraced what was to become his lifelong commitment to freedom for all men.
Lafayette was undoubtedly influenced by the ideas of his friend, John Laurens, a fellow aide-de-camp to George Washington and the proponent of a plan to offer slaves their freedom in exchange for their service in the Continental Army. A personal reason for Lafayette’s interest in emancipation may have been his association with the slave James Armistead during the Revolutionary War. With the permission of his master, Armistead volunteered for service with Lafayette during the siege of Richmond in 1781. Before long, he was performing important espionage behind enemy lines, masquerading as an escaped slave while he obtained information about the plans and movements of the British. He continued his spying as a servant in Cornwallis’ camp during the Yorktown campaign and relayed intelligence to Lafayette that helped bring
about the American victory at Yorktown. When Lafayette returned to America in 1784, he wrote a testimonial about Armistead’s service, which was instrumental in helping the slave win his freedom from the Virginia General Assembly in 1787. In tribute to Lafayette, James Armistead adopted the surname Lafayette, which he used for the rest of his life.
The first inkling that Lafayette wished to take action in the cause for the emancipation of slaves appears in a remarkable letter from Lafayette to George Washington, written from Cádiz, Spain, February 5, 1783. This letter (which is owned by Lafayette College) was written to inform Washington of the signing of the preliminary peace treaty between England and the United States in January 1783, which was to bring about the end of the Revolutionary War. It is a lengthy letter of celebration, but contains a startling paragraph requesting Washington’s collaboration in an experiment to emancipate slaves and use them instead as tenant farmers. As radical as the suggestion may have been, it is not surprising that it was Washington’s aid that Lafayette hoped to enlist. The relationship between the two men was like that of father and son, and Lafayette knew how influential such an action by Washington could prove. Promising to lend his own support to make such a plan work in the West Indies, he told Washington: “If it be a wild scheme, I had rather be mad that way, than to be thought wise on the other tack.” Although Washington never took such action during his lifetime, upon his death in 1799, his slaves were freed by a provision in his will. It was a step very few of Washington’s peers were willing to take and Lafayette almost certainly helped influence his decision.
In 1786 Lafayette acquired land along the Oyapok River in the French colony of Cayenne (present day French Guiana) on the coast of South America. Here, on a plantation called La Belle Gabrielle, he set up his experiment for the gradual emancipation of a group of nearly seventy slaves, whom he had purchased with the property. According to the plan, which was administered by Lafayette’s agents in Cayenne, the slaves were paid for their labor, schooling was provided, and the sale of any slave was expressly forbidden. Lafayette hoped to show that the birth rate would rise and infant mortality would decrease under these more favorable conditions, thus undercutting the need for the slave trade.
During the mid-1780s, Lafayette eagerly joined anti-slavery societies on both sides of the Atlantic. He took an active role in the French Society of the Friends of Blacks formed in 1788 to promote the abolition of the slave trade. Lafayette corresponded with leading British abolitionists, Enlightenment philosophers, and American statesmen about slavery, writing to John Adams in February 1786: “Whatever be the complexion of the enslaved, it does not, in my opinion, alter the complexion of the crime which the enslaver commits—
a crime much blacker than any African face.” After
the upheavals of the French Revolution, Lafayette returned to France from prison and exile in 1799 and began once again to follow the developments of the antislavery movements in England, France, and the United States, rejoicing as both England and the
U.S. voted to outlaw the slave trade in 1807.
Lafayette’s last visit to the United States was a fourteen-month odyssey in 1824-25 that took him to every one of the twenty-four states then in the Union. Everywhere he went during the Farewell Tour, as it became known, he was met with an outpouring of affection from the American people on an unprecedented scale—thousands turned out to see him at every stop and he was regaled with parades, ceremonies, balls, dinners, and toasts in his honor. Lafayette’s status as the “Guest of the Nation” made it awkward for him to speak publicly against slavery. Instead, he chose to make more symbolic gestures that conveyed his interest in the welfare of African Americans. He insisted on visiting the African Free School in New York City and publicly greeted a delegation of black War of 1812 veterans in New Orleans, shaking hands with each. In Virginia he stopped to visit in the homes of some slaves and free blacks, and he renewed acquaintances with at least two slaves that he had known during the American Revolution. He also attended a meeting of the American Colonization Society (an organization promoting the return of freed slaves to Africa) in Washington, D.C., where he was made a perpetual vice president. In private, however, Lafayette had frank discussions about slavery with his old friends Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, as well as other Virginia planters, during which, according to his secretary Auguste Levasseur,
he “never missed an opportunity to defend the right which all men without exception have to liberty.”
Lafayette’s  championship of the antislavery movement was only one of the several human rights causes he espoused during his long and eventful life. In the years preceding the French Revolution he lobbied for the restoration of civil rights to French Protestants and he was largely responsible for the gains in their status in the late 1780s. His efforts helped pave the way for the reforms of the French Revolution, which granted religious freedom to Protestants, Jews, and other non-Catholics. Lafayette was also a friend to the American Indian, dating back to the American Revolution, when he was instrumental in establishing an alliance with the Six Nations in 1778 and was given the honorary name Kayewla by the Iroquois. During his American visit of 1784, he helped negotiate a peace with the Six Nations over access to the lands of western New York and he arranged to take a young Onondaga boy back with him to France to receive a European education. Native Americans were eager to greet Lafayette during the Farewell Tour of 1824-25, and Lafayette made a point to meet with them, even leaving a ball in Illinois to spend time with the daughter of a chief he had known during the Revolution. Lafayette was also something of an early feminist with his support of a number of prominent women writers and reformers of his day, including Germaine de Staël and Frances Wright.
For Lafayette, these actions were the logical extension of those ideals which had brought him to America in
the first place. And perhaps nowhere are these ideals better expressed than in the beautiful passage written by the nineteen-year-old Lafayette during his voyage in 1777: “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.”
Diane Windham Shaw is special collections
librarian and College archivist.
|
| | |
General Lafayette at Yorktown attended by James Armistead (painted by Jean-Baptiste Le Paon about 1783).
“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.”
—Marquis de Lafayette
Lafayette composed the text of this testimonial in 1784
in gratitude for the services rendered by James Armistead.
|
