Ragged and out-at-elbows as the small American army was, it marched proudly through the streets of Philadelphia. With sprigs of green branches in their hats the soldiers stepped along to the tune of fife and drum, presenting, at least in the eyes of the townspeople, a very gallant appearance. Lafayette rode by the side of Washington, glad that the opportunity had come for him to be of service.
Very soon he had a chance to share danger with his commander. When the troops arrived on the heights of Wilmington, Washington, with Lafayette and Greene, made a reconnaissance, and, being caught by a storm and darkness, was obliged to spend the night so near to the British lines that he might easily have been discovered by a scout or betrayed into the hands of the enemy.
Meantime General Howe and Lord Cornwallis had landed eighteen thousand veteran troops near what is now Elkton in Maryland, and was advancing toward Philadelphia. To defend the city Washington drew up his forces on September ninth at Chadd’s Ford on the Brandywine. One column of Howe’s army marched to this place and on September eleventh succeeded in driving across the river to the American camp. The other column, under command of Cornwallis, made a long détour through the thickly wooded country, and bore down on the right and rear of Washington’s army, threatening its total destruction.
The American commander at once sent General Sullivan, with five thousand men, to meet this force on the right. Realizing that most of the fighting would be done there, Lafayette asked and was given permission to join General Sullivan. Riding up as a volunteer aid, he found the half-formed wings of the American army attacked by the full force under Cornwallis. The Americans had to fall back, two of General Sullivan’s aids were killed, and a disorderly retreat began. Lafayette leaped from his horse, and, sword in hand, called on the soldiers to make a stand.
He checked the retreat for a few moments; other troops came up, and the Americans offered gallant resistance. Lafayette was shot through the calf of the leg, but, apparently unconscious of the wound, continued to encourage his men. Then Cornwallis’s brigades swept forward again, and Sullivan’s troops had to give ground before the greater numbers. The battle became a general rout. Gimat, Lafayette’s aid, saw that the young man was wounded, and helped him to mount his horse. The wounded man then tried to rejoin Washington, but soon after he had to stop to have his leg bandaged.
The first British column had driven the American troops from Chadd’s Ford, and the latter, together with Sullivan’s men, fell back along the road to Chester. Washington attempted to cover the retreat with rear-guard fighting, but night found him pursued by both divisions of the enemy. In the retreat Lafayette came to a bridge, and made a stand until Washington and his aids reached him. Then together they rode on to Chester, and there the Frenchman’s wound was properly dressed by a surgeon.
The battle had been in one sense a defeat for the Americans, but it had shown General Howe the fine fighting quality of Washington’s men, and the American commander had been able to save the bulk of his army, when Howe had expected to capture it entire. Today a little monument stands on a ridge near the Quaker meeting-house outside Chadd’s Ford, erected, so the inscription says, “by the citizens and school children of Chester County,” because, “on the rising ground a short distance south of this spot, Lafayette was wounded at the Battle of Brandywine, September 11, 1777.” And the monument also bears these words of Lafayette: “The honor to have mingled my blood with that of many other American soldiers on the heights of the Brandywine has been to me a source of pride and delight.”
The battle-field of the Brandywine was only about twenty-six miles from Philadelphia, and the cannonade had been clearly heard in the city. The word the couriers brought filled the people with alarm; many citizens began to fly from the city and Congress took its departure, to meet at the town of York, one hundred miles to the west. The Americans wounded at the Brandywine were sent to Philadelphia, and Lafayette was conveyed there by water. From that city he was sent up the Delaware River to Bristol. There he met Henry Laurens, who had succeeded John Hancock as the president of Congress, and Laurens, being on his way to York, took Lafayette with him in his own carriage to the Old Sun Inn at Bethlehem, the quiet home of a people called the Moravians, fifty miles to the north of Philadelphia. In later times Henry Laurens, by one of those strange turns of the wheel of fate, became a prisoner in the Tower of London, and Madame de Lafayette repaid his kindness to her husband by seeking the aid of the French government to secure his release.
There could have been no better place for a wounded man to recover his strength than in the peaceful little Moravian community at Bethlehem. For six weeks he stayed there, and the people tended him like one of themselves. He could not use his leg, but he spent part of his enforced idleness drawing up plans for the invasion of the British colonies in the West Indies. He also wrote long letters to his wife in France. “Be entirely free from anxiety as to my wound,” he said in one of these, “for all the doctors in America are aroused in my behalf. I have a friend who has spoken for me in a way to ensure my being well taken care of; and that is General Washington. That estimable man, whose talents and whose virtues I admired before, whom I venerate the more now as I learn to know him, has been kind enough to me to become my intimate friend. His tender interest in me quickly won my heart.... When he sent his surgeon-in-chief to me, he directed him to care for me as I were his son, because he loved me so much; and having learned that I wanted to join the army too soon again, he wrote me a letter full of tenderness in which he admonished me to wait until I should be entirely well.”
Wonderful it was that Washington, beset and harassed with all the burdens of a commander-in-chief, could yet find the time to pay so much attention to his wounded French aid!