Our Nation’s 1st Friend
HERE in New York City, we are celebrating this Fourth of July with a commemoration of the alliance that secured America’s future.
An exact replica of the ship Hermione, the frigate that carried the Marquis de Lafayette to Boston in April 1780, has arrived in New York for the July 4 holiday and will take part in the Lafayette Parade in New York Bay. The replica ship took 20 years to complete, and is spending this summer visiting ports along the East Coast.
The story behind the Hermione is the story of the survival of the young American republic. The colonies had begun their armed struggle against British rule stunningly incapable of fending for themselves, like a rebellious adolescent who runs away without a penny to his name. It had no navy, almost no artillery and a ragtag army and militia bereft of even the most basic ingredient of modern warfare: gunpowder.
Soon after the Battle of Bunker Hill, Benjamin Franklin noted that “the Army had not five rounds of powder a man. The world wondered that we so seldom fired a cannon; we could not afford it.” America desperately needed to bring Britain’s longtime adversaries, France and Spain, into the conflict, the only countries with enough military might to match Britain’s.
Neither France nor Spain would take sides in a British civil war. America had to demonstrate that it was an independent nation fight
ing against a common British foe.
How to convince King Louis XVI of France and King Carlos III of Spain to help the embattled American colonies? The Second Continental Congress gave Thomas Jefferson the task of drafting something that would do the job.
The document that emerged from under Jefferson’s hand, clearly stating that “these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States,” was in fact an engraved invitation to the two nations, asking them to join in an alliance against Britain.
The man who’d first proposed the document, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, explained it clearly: “It is not choice then, but necessity that calls for independence, as the only means by which foreign alliance can be obtained.” The document was approved by the Second Continental Congress on July 4 and immediately dispatched to Europe, with the hopes that alliances would soon follow.
It became known, of course, as the Declaration of Independence, but it might just as accurately be called the “Declaration that We Depend on France (and Spain, too).”
Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, became the most powerful symbol of the alliance that resulted from the Declaration of Independence. The 19yearold French aristocrat arrived in the United States in July 1777 as an unpaid volunteer, and quickly became one of George Washington’s favorite officers.
Like his many French compatri
ots who’d also volunteered, he proved his devotion to the American cause time and again — at the battles of Brandywine and Monmouth and at Valley Forge.
In 1778, France signed a treaty of alliance with America, which brought them into the fight with Britain. Spain followed into battle the following year, which meant that Britain now had to draw ships and troops away from the United States to defend its possessions in Florida and the Caribbean and even its own homeland.
Even so, the Americans still could not fight the British army to a decisive victory.
Lafayette went back to France in 1779 to secure more aid from Louis XVI. The French king promised ships and 6,000 troops under General Rochambeau to fight alongside Washington.
In April 1780, Lafayette arrived in Boston aboard the frigate Hermione with the good news; Rochambeau arrived in Newport, Rhode Island, just three months later. While fighting continued throughout the South, and while Spain recaptured Florida from the British and thus removed a major threat to the United States, the French and American generals planned their campaign.
In October 1781, after an epic combined march, they cornered Gen. Cornwallis at Yorktown and forced his surrender.
The British government capitulated soon after. America’s independence was now secure.
Larrie D. Ferreiro is the author of the forthcoming “Brothers at Arms: France, Spain and the Men Who Saved American Independence”