Review: "For Liberty and Glory," James R. Gaines

By Paul Carrier

The subtitle of James R. Gaines’ For Liberty and Glory makes the author’s intended focus quite clear: Washington, Lafayette, and Their Revolutions.

Published in 2007, For Liberty and Glory is a dual biography of sorts that chronicles the relationship between George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette during the American Revolution and the political agendas each of them pursued in the years that followed — Washington in the United States and Lafayette in France. In the process, Gaines provides partial histories of the American and French revolutions.

Washington was commander-in-chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolution (1775-1783) and president of the United States from 1789 to 1797. The French-born Lafayette, a wealthy nobleman who initially had no battlefield experience but hailed from a military family, served as a major general in Washington’s army. He went on to play a prominent role in the French Revolution of 1789 and France’s so-called July Revolution of 1830.

The two men became so close that some historians have likened their relationship to that of a father and son. Lafayette joined the Patriot cause when he was only 19; Washington was some 25 years older. Within weeks of Lafayette’s arrival in 1777, Gaines writes, he was “living in Washington’s house” with Washington’s family of military aides, and riding with Washington on parade and into battle. When Lafayette was wounded at the Battle of Brandywine, he was cared for by Washington’s personal physician and “watched over anxiously” by Washington himself.

That friendship remained strong throughout the war and in the years following the American Revolution, when Lafayette, having  returned to France, found himself deeply embroiled in the early stages of the French Revolution. Gaines goes so far as to describe Lafayette as a “founding father” of his country’s revolution.

For his part, Washington was caught up in a second American revolution after the United States won its independence, but this one was political rather than military.

In the 1780s, pressure mounted to scrap the feeble Congress that had come into being in 1781 and replace it with a truly workable federal government with more extensive powers. “By the mid 1780s,” Gaines writes, “Congress had all but given up trying to govern, rarely able to raise a quorum” for its meetings. When a convention convened in Philadelphia in 1787, ostensibly to fix the existing system, it elected Washington, who supported a muscular federal government, as its president.

The convention ultimately proposed abandoning the country’s grossly inadequate governmental structure and adopting a new Constitution that greatly strengthened federal authority. Eleven of the 13 states ratified the Constitution by 1788, with North Carolina following suit in 1789 (the year the Constitution took effect) and Rhode Island in 1790.

Despite the lasting bond that Washington and Lafayette developed during the American Revolution, Washington had to watch Lafayette’s rise and fall from afar during the French Revolution. After passionately advocating a constitutional monarchy to replace France’s all-powerful king, Lafayette ran afoul of the revolution’s increasingly radical leadership. He crossed into enemy territory in 1792, to avoid being guillotined in France.

Lafayette’s role in the French Revolution “was a continual source of anxiety” to Washington during his first presidential term, Gaines explains. His second term was “shadowed” by Lafayette’s imprisonment for some five years, first in Prussia and then in Austria. As president, Washington could do little to help his friend during his incarceration, but he did take in Lafayette’s only son, the teenage George Washington Lafayette.

By the time the aged Lafayette made a triumphant, final visit to the United States in 1824-25, Washington had been dead for more than two decades. But Lafayette’s devotion never wavered. Visiting Washington’s tomb in 1825, he asked to be left alone and remained in the tomb for an hour. Gaines writes that “someone who looked through a crack in the door said that he was kneeling.”

In 450 pages, Gaines juggles a tremendous amount of historical information from two countries — character sketches of key players, momentous events on military and civilian stages, high-stakes political machinations that dramatically reshaped entire nations. The author displays a clear command of his material and presents a compelling examination of two inspiring, larger-than-life heroes.