“Permit me, my dear General, now that you are about to enjoy some repose, to propose a plan for elevating the African race. Let us unite in purchasing a small estate where we may try the experiment of freeing the negroes, and use them only as tenants. Such an example as yours would render the practice general; and if we should succeed in America, I will cheerfully devote a part of my time to render the plan fashionable in the West Indies. If it be a wild scheme, I would rather be mad in that way than be thought wise on the other tack.” Although Washington, Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Patrick Henry, and others cordially sympathized with him, nothing definite was done except by the indefatigable La Fayette himself. Not waiting for others, he purchased a plantation in Cayenne, upon which were a large number of slaves, and in order to prepare them for gradual emancipation, he began to fit them for their freedom by a thorough course of education.
Regarding this philanthropic act of La Fayette, his daughter Virginie writes:—
“An earnest wish to contribute to all that was good, and a horror for all injustice, were prominent features in my mother’s character. It was, therefore, with deep satisfaction that she witnessed my father’s efforts in favor of the abolition of the slave trade. He purchased a plantation at Cayenne, La Belle Gabrielle, in order to give the example of gradual emancipation. Every just and liberal idea found a place in my mother’s heart, and her active zeal made her seek ardently for every means of putting them into immediate execution. My father entrusted her with all the details of this undertaking, in which the desire of teaching the negroes of that plantation the first principles of religion and of morals was united with the wish she shared with my father of making them worthy of liberty. Her charity was excited by the hope of teaching the blacks to know and love God, and of proving to the free-thinkers who sympathized with the negroes that the success of their undertaking would be in great part due to religion. The events of the Revolution have not allowed us to see these hopes realized, but we have at least had the satisfaction of hearing that the negroes of La Belle Gabrielle did not commit the atrocities which were perpetrated in other places.”
Regarding this philanthropic plan of La Fayette’s for the uplifting of the negroes, Washington thus wrote to him in 1786: “Your late purchase in Cayenne, with a view of emancipating your slaves, is a generous and noble proof of your humanity. Would to God a like spirit might diffuse itself generally into the minds of the people of this country! But I despair of seeing it. Some petitions were presented to the Virginia Assembly at its last session for the abolition of slavery, but they could scarcely obtain a hearing. To set the slaves afloat at once would, I really believe, be productive of much inconvenience and mischief; but by degrees it certainly might, and assuredly ought, to be effected, and that, too, by legislative authority.”
La Fayette also interested himself at this time in behalf of the persecuted French Protestants. Though himself belonging to the Romish Church, he was neither bigoted nor intolerant, and hated the tyranny of priests as bitterly as the tyranny of kings.
In the midst of the sterner subjects regarding war and politics, which form so large a part of the correspondence between Washington and La Fayette, it may be pleasing to note the following homely little incident which brings both men in somewhat closer relationship with lesser mortals whose lives are made up of petty details and home affairs. In the “Mémoires et Manuscrits” of La Fayette, a work published by his family, in Paris, in 1837, and which has never been entirely translated into English, only scattered letters having been from time to time culled therefrom, for the various sketches given regarding the life of La Fayette, we have noticed much valuable and interesting information not elsewhere to be found.
Among the correspondence of General La Fayette many letters from Washington were collected, several of which were quoted in their proper chronological order, and of the date of June, 1786, we find the following little note, which is interesting, as it takes us into the home-circle at Mount Vernon, and shows us the goodly housewife in the person of Lady Washington, and the kindly host rather than the stately general in this picture of Washington. The note reads as follows:—
“My dear Marquis: You will be astonished to see so ancient a date upon the letter which I send you, if I did not say to you that the ship which was to have carried this letter has since returned. Nothing new has occurred since then, and I would not give you the weariness of a second epistle, if I had not forgotten to say to you that Madam Washington sends to Madame de La Fayette a cask of ham. I know not if these are better, or even as good, as those in France, but these are of our own making, and you know that the ladies of Virginia pride themselves upon the excellence of their ham, and we remember that it was a dish much to your taste. She has therefore desired that I offer them to you. I had wished to send with them a barrel of old brandy peaches, but I have not been able to procure enough of good quality to be placed by the side of your luscious wines, and so I send them not. After all, these two gifts would be more proper to offer as a ration after a long march in the rain than to figure upon your table in Paris.”
The Honorable Chauncey M. Depew, in his memorial address, delivered at the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, the gift of France to America, thus ably comments upon the French alliance, and the character of General La Fayette:—
“The French alliance, which enabled us to win our independence, is the romance of history. It overcame improbabilities impossible in fiction, and its results surpass the dreams of imagination. The most despotic of kings, surrounded by the most exclusive of feudal aristocracies, sending fleets and armies officered by the scions of the proudest of nobilities to fight for subjects in revolt and the liberties of the common people, is a paradox beyond the power of mere human energy to have wrought or solved. The march of this mediæval chivalry across our states, respecting persons and property as soldiers never had before, never taking an apple or touching a fence-rail without permission and payment, treating the ragged Continentals as if they were knights in armor and of noble ancestry, captivating our grandmothers by their gallantry, and our grandfathers by their courage, remains unequalled in the poetry of war. It is the most magnificent tribute in history to the volcanic force of ideas and the dynamitic power of truth, though the crust of the globe imprison them. In the same ignorance and fearlessness with which a savage plays about a powder magazine with a torch, the Bourbon king and his court, buttressed by the consent of centuries and the unquestioned possession of every power to the state, sought relief from cloying pleasures and vigor for enervated minds in permitting and encouraging the loftiest genius and the most impassioned eloquence of the time to discuss the rights and liberties of man. With the orator the themes were theories which fired only his imagination, and with the courtiers they were pastimes or jests. Neither speakers nor listeners saw any application of these ennobling sentiments to the common mass and grovelling herd whose industries they squandered in riot and debauch, and whose bodies they hurled against battlement and battery to gratify ambition or caprice. But these revelations illuminated many an ingenuous soul among the young aristocracy, and with distorted rays penetrated the Cimmerian darkness which enveloped[enveloped] the people. They bore fruit in the heart and mind of one youth, to whom America owes much, and France everything,—the Marquis de La Fayette. As the centuries roll by, and in the fulness of time the rays of Liberty’s torch are the beacon lights of the world, the central niches in the earth’s Pantheon of Freedom will be filled by the figures of Washington and La Fayette.