# With Americans of Past and Present Days/3
## I

WASHINGTON’S acquaintance with things French began early and was of a mixed nature. As a pupil of the French Huguenot Maryes, who kept a school at Fredericksburg, and did not teach him French, 1 we find him carefully transcribing, in his elegant youthful hand, those famous “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,” which have recently been proved to be French. Whether this French teaching given him by a Frenchman engraved itself in his mind or happened to match his natural disposition, or both, certain it is that he lived up to the best among those maxims, those, for example, and they are remarkably numerous, that deprecate jokes and railing at the expense of others, or those of a noble import advising the young man to be “no flatterer,” to “show no sign of choler in reproving, but to do it with sweetness and mildness,” those prescribing that his “recreations be manful, not sinful,” and giving him this advice of supreme importance, which Washington observed throughout life: “Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.”
Another chance that Washington had to become acquainted with things French was through his reading, and was less favorable to them. An early note in his hand informs us that, about the year 1748, he, being then sixteen, had, “in the Spectator, read to No. 143.” All those numbers had been written by Steele and Addison at a period of French wars, at the moment when we were fighting “Monsieur Malbrouk.” Not a portrait of the French in those numbers that is not a caricature; they are a “ludicrous nation”; their women are “fantastical,” their men “vain and lively,” their fashions ridiculous; not even their wines find grace in the eyes of Steele, who could plead, it is true, that he was not without experience on the subject, and who declares that this “plaguy French claret” is greatly inferior to “a bottle or two of good, solid, edifying port.”
Washington was soon to learn more of French people, and was to find that they were something else than mere ludicrous and lively puppets.
A soldier born, with all that is necessary to prove a good one and to become an apt leader, having, as he himself wrote, “resolution to face what any man durst.” 2 Washington rose rapidly in the ranks, becoming a colonel in 1754, at the age of twenty-two. He was three times sent, in his younger days, to observe, and check if he could, the progress of his future allies, in the Ohio and Monongahela Valleys. His journal and letters show him animated toward them with the spirit befitting a loyal subject of George II, none of his judgments on them being spoiled by any undue leniency.
On the first occasion he was simply ordered to hand to the commander of a French fort a letter from the governor of Virginia, and to ask him to withdraw as having “invaded the King of Great Britain’s territory.” To which the Frenchman, an old officer and Knight of Saint Louis, Mr. de Saint-Pierre, who shortly before had been leading an exploration in the extreme West, toward the Rockies, 3 politely but firmly declined to assent, writing back to the governor: “I am here by the orders of my general, and I entreat you, sir, not to doubt but that I shall try to conform myself to them with all the exactness and resolution which must be expected from a good officer.” He has “much the air of a soldier,” Washington wrote of him.
Mr. de Saint-Pierre added, on his part, a word on the bearer of Governor Dinwiddie’s message, who was to be the bearer also of his answer, and in this we have the first French comment on Washington’s personality: “I made it my particular care to receive Mr. Washington with a distinction suitable to your dignity as well as to his own personal merit.—From the Fort on the Rivière-aux-Bœufs, December 15, 1753.” Having received plentiful supplies as a gift from the French, but entertaining the worst misgivings as to their “artifices,” the young officer began his return journey, during which, in spite of all trouble, he managed to pay a visit to Queen Aliquippa: “I made her a present,” he wrote, “of a match-coat and a bottle of rum, which latter was thought much the best present of the two.” On the 16th of January, 1754, he was back at Williamsburg, handed to the governor Mr. de Saint Pierre’s negative answer, and printed an account of his journey.
The second expedition, a military one, was marked next year by the sad and famous Jumonville incident and by the surrendering, to the brother of dead Jumonville, of Fort Necessity, where the subjects of King George and their youthful colonel, after a fight lasting from eleven in the morning till eight in the evening, had to capitulate, being permitted, however, by the French to withdraw with “full military honors, drum-beating, and taking with them one small piece of ordnance.” (July 3, 1754.) The fort and the rest of the artillery remained in the hands of the captors, as well as part of that diary which, although with interruptions, Washington was fond of keeping, whenever he could, his last entry being dated Friday, December 13, 1799, the day before his death. The part found at Fort Necessity—March 31 to June 27, 1754—was sent to Paris, translated into French, printed in 1756 by the royal government, 5 and the text given in Washington’s writings is only a retranslation from the French, the original English not having been preserved. 7
* ↑ He kept all his life a feeling that his early education had been incomplete. Strongly advised by David Humphreys to write an account of the great events in which he had taken part, he answered that he would not, on account of a lack of leisure, and a “consciousness of a defective education.” July 25, 1785. When Lafayette was beseeching him to visit France some day, he answered: “Remember, my good friend, that I am unacquainted with your language, that I am too far advanced in years to acquire a knowledge of it.” September 30, 1779. Franklin added later his entreaties to those of Lafayette; see Washington’s answer, October 11, 1780.
* ↑ “For my own part I can answer I have a constitution hardy enough to encounter and undergo the most severe trials and, I flatter myself, resolution to face what any man durst.” To Governor Dinwiddie, May 29, 1754.
* ↑ In continuation of the La Verendrie’s (father and sons) bold attempt to reach the great Western sea, a token of which, a leaden tablet with a French and Latin inscription and the arms of France, was recently discovered near Fort Pierre, South Dakota. See South Dakota Historical Collections, 1914, pp. 89 ff.
* 1 2 The Journal of Major George Washington, sent by the Hon. Robert Dinwiddie, Esq., his Majesty’s Lieut.-Governor and Commander in chief of Virginia, to the commandant of the French forces in Ohio. Williamsburg, 1754.
* ↑ Mémoire contenant le précis des faits avec leurs pièces justificatives pour servir de response aux observations envoyées par les ministres d’Angleterre dans les cours d’Europe, Paris, 1756.
* ↑ “As to any danger from the enemy, I look upon it as trifling.” Washington to his brother, John, May 14, 1755.
Note 7. Washington to Dinwiddie, July 18, 1755. [back] Note 8. Same date. Washington revisited the region in October, 1770, but the entries in his journal contain no allusion to previous events: “We lodged [at Fort Pitt] in what is called the town, about three hundred yards from the fort.… These houses, which are built of logs, and ranged into streets, are on the Monongahela, and, I suppose, may be twenty in number, and inhabited by Indian traders, etc. The fort is built on the point between the rivers Allegheny and Monongahela, but not so near the pitch of it as Fort Duquesne.” [back] Note 9. To Richard Washington, merchant, London; from Fort Loudoun, April 15, 1757. The same letter enlightens us as to Washington’s tastes concerning things material. He orders “sundry things” to be sent him from London, adding: “Whatever goods you may send me where the prices are not absolutely limited, you will let them be fashionable, neat and good in their several kinds.” Same tastes shown in his letter to Robert Cary and Co., ordering a chariot “in the new taste, handsome, genteel, and light,” painted preferably green, but in that he would be “governed by fashion.” (June 6, 1768.) The chariot was sent in September; it was green, “all the framed work of the body gilt, handsome scrawl, shields, ornamented with flowers all over the panels.” [back] Note 10. Mount Vernon, April 5, 1765. [back]

## II

SOME more years elapse, and when the curtain rises again on scenes of war, momentous changes have occurred. To the last hour the former officer of the colonial wars, now a man of forty-two, was still expressing the wish “that the dispute had been left to posterity to determine: but the crisis has arrived when we must assert our rights or submit to every imposition that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use make us as tame and abject slaves as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.” It was hard for him to reconcile himself to the fact that the English were really to be the enemy; he long tried to believe that the quarrel was not with England and her King, but only with the ministry and their troops, which he calls the “ministerials.” Writing on the 31st of May, 1775, from Philadelphia, where he was attending the second Continental Congress, to G. W. Fairfax in England, he gave him an account of the clash between the “provincials” of Massachusetts and “the ministerial troops: for we do not, nor can we yet prevail upon ourselves to call them the King’s troops.” 1 1
Note 1. This continued until the proclamation of independence. By letter of March 19, 1776, Washington notified the President of Congress of the taking of Boston, and the retreat of the “ministerial army.” The flag of the “insurgents” was then the British flag with thirteen white and red stripes, emblematic of the thirteen colonies. [back] Note 2. An appointment accepted in a characteristically modest spirit, as shown by his letter to his “dear Patsy,” his wife, giving her the news, and that to Colonel Bassett, where he says: “I can answer but for three things, a firm belief in the justice of our cause, close attention in the prosecution of it, and the strictest integrity. If these cannot supply the place of ability and experience, the cause will suffer, and, more than probable, my character along with it, as reputation derives its principal support from success.” June 9, 1775. [back] Note 3. To his brother, John, December 18, 1776. [back] Note 4. August 19, 1777. [back] Note 5. November 14, 1778. [back] Note 6. To Washington, June 15, 1777. Same impression later (1785) on Lafayette, who saw the Prussian grand manœuvres, and sent an account of them to Washington: “The Prussian army is a perfectly regular piece of machinery.… All the situations which may be imagined in war, all the movements which they may cause, have been by constant habit so well inculcated in their heads that all those operations are performed almost mechanically.” February 8, 1786. Mémoires, correspondance et manuscrits du Général Lafayette, Bruxelles, 1838, I, 204. [back] Note 7. Pp. 10 ff. [back] Note 8. To General Sullivan, September, 1778. [back] Note 9. December 12, 1779. [back] Note 10. To President Reed, May 28, 1780. [back] Note 11. “Before York,” October 12, 1781. [back] Note 12. To Lafayette, October 20, 1782. [back] Note 13. February 6, 1783.

## III=

NO less characteristic of Washington’s sentiments thereafter is the correspondence continued by him with a number of French people when the war was a thing of the past and no further help could be needed. With Rochambeau, with d’Estaing, Chastellux, La Luzerne, then ambassador in London, whom he had seen with keen regret leave the United States, 1 and, of course, with Lafayette, he kept up a correspondence which affords most pleasant reading: a friend writes to his friends and tells them of his feelings and expectations. The attitude of France at the peace is the subject of a noble letter to La Luzerne: “The part your Excellency has acted in the cause of America and the great and benevolent share you have taken in the establishment of her independence are deeply impressed on my mind, and will not be effaced from my remembrance, or that of the citizens of America.… The articles of the general treaty do not appear so favorable to France, in point of territorial acquisitions, as they do to the other Powers. 2 But the magnanimous and disinterested scale of action which that great nation has exhibited to the world during this war, and at the conclusion of peace, will insure to the King and nation that reputation which will be of more consequence to them than every other consideration.” 3 1
—with invocations to abstract virtues:
16
Des deux mondes vengés embellira l’histoire; Toi que la main des Dieux, en nos siècles pervers, Envoya consoler, étonner l’univers Par le rare assemblage et l’union constante D’un cœur pur et sans fard, d’une â bienfaisante, Aux talents de Turenne, aux vertus des Catons, Et qui te vois plus grand que les deux Scipions, Jouis de ton triomphe, admire ton ouvrage. 18
Prononce avec Thémis par l’organe suprême De tant de Sénateurs, ornements des Etats, Une foule d’arrêts où tous les potentats Du droit des nations devraient venir apprendre Les principes sacrés, et jusqu’où peut s’étendre Le sceptre qu’en leurs mains les peuples ont commis, —you have cast on us “a torrent of light and shown us how to break the detestable bonds of tyrants.” A prophetical foot-note, commenting on this passage, announces that “this will perhaps, be seen sooner than one thinks. Happy the sovereigns who will know how to be nothing but just, pacific, and benevolent.” Six years later the French Revolution began. 19
Note 1. Sending him a farewell letter in which he said: “You may rest assured that your abilities and dispositions to serve this country were so well understood, and your service so properly appreciated that the residence of no public minister will ever be longer remembered or his absence more sincerely regretted. It will not be forgotten that you were a witness to the dangers, the sufferings, the exertions and the successes of the United States from the most perilous crises to the hour of triumph.” February 7, 1788. [back] Note 2. They merely sanctioned some territorial exchanges and restitutions on both sides in the colonies, and stipulated that the British agent in Dunkirk, who had been expelled at the beginning of the war, would not return. [back] Note 3. March 29, 1783. [back] Note 4. Princeton, October 12, 1783. He started for that journey the following autumn. [back] Note 5. September 10, 1791. [back] Note 6. Mount Vernon, April 4, 1784. [back] Note 7. December 8, 1784. Bayard Tuckerman, Lafayette, 1889, I, 165. [back] Note 8. July 25, 1785. [back] Note 9. “Excellence, Vos vertus civiles et vos talents militaires ont donné à votre patrie la liberté et le bonheur; mais leur influence sur celui du globe entier est encore préférable à mes yeux. C’est à ce grand but que tend tout homme qui se sent digne d’arriver à l’immortalité,” etc. May 28, 1789. Papers of the Continental Congress, LXXVIII, 759, Library of Congress. [back] Note 10. June 22, 1784. Jean Antoine Houdon, by C. H. Hart and Ed. Biddle, Philadelphia, 1911, p. 182. [back] Note 11. Ibid., p. 189. Peale’s full-length portrait, with “a perspective view of York and Gloucester, and the surrender of the British army,” price thirty guineas, reached Paris in April, 1785, and has since disappeared. [back] Note 12. July 10, 1785. Ibid., p. 191 [back] Note 13. Above, p. 12. [back] Note 14. Amsterdam, 1783. The author is strongly anti-English and is indignant at the “guilty Anglomania” still existing in France. [back] Note 15. In the Mercure de France, 1785, prefacing a review of Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer, and reproduced at the beginning of the French edition of the Letters, 1787. [back] Note 16. Observations sur le gouvernement et les loix des Etats Unis d’Amérique, Amsterdam, 1784, 12mo; in the form of letters to John Adams. The Constitutions under discussion are those of the original States. “Tandis,” says Mably, “que presque toutes les nations de l’Europe ignorent les principes constitutifs de la société et ne regardent les citoyens que comme les bestiaux d’une ferme qu’on gouverne pour l’avantage particulier du propriétaire, on est étonné, on est édifié que vos treize Républiques ayent connu à la fois la dignité de l’homme et soient allé puiser dans les sources de la plus sage philosophie les principes humains par lesquels elles veulent se gouverner.” (P. 2.) [back] Note 17. Wanting, on his return to America, to make Washington’s acquaintance, Franklin’s own grandson called similarly provided. Lafayette to Washington, warmly praising the young man, July 14, 1785. Mémories, correspondance et manuscrits du Général Lafayette, publiés par sa Famille, Brussels, 1837, I, 201. [back] Note 18. May 25, 1788. J. P. Brissot, Correspondance et Papiers, ed. Perroud, Paris, 1912, p. 192. [back] Note 19. 1787. Text of the reports of the sittings. Ibid., pp. 105 ff. [back] Note 20. Ibid., pp. 114, 116, 126, 127, 136. [back] Note 21. “Under that name of liberty the Romans, as well as the Greeks, pictured to themselves a state where no one was subject save to the law, and where law was more powerful than men.” (Bossuet.) [back] Note 22. Nouveau Voyage dans les Etats Unis de l’Améique Septentrionale, Paris, 3 vols., April, 1791, but begun to be printed, as shown by a note to the preface, in the spring of 1790. The work greatly helped to make America better and very favorably known in Europe, for it was translated into English, German, and Dutch. While Brissot was returning to France (January, 1789), his brother-in-law, François Dupont, was sailing for the United States, to settle there among free men and, scarcely landed, was writing to a Swiss friend of his, Jeanneret, who lived in Berlin, of his delight at having left “a small continent like that of Europe, partitioned among a quantity of petty sovereigns bent upon capturing each other’s possessions, causing their subjects to slaughter one another, in ceaseless mutual fear, busy tightening their peoples’ chains and impoverishing them—and I am now on a continent which reaches from pole to pole, with every kind of climate and of productions, among an independent nation which is now devising for itself, in the midst of peace, the wisest of governments. We are not governed here by a foolish or despotic sovereign.… Farmers, craftsmen, merchants, and manufacturers are encouraged and honored; they are the true nobles.… Between the man who sells his labor and the one who buys it the agreement is between equals. The French are, however, very popular in this country.” Brissot, Correspondance, ed. Perroud, pp. 218, 219.

## IV

DURING the early stages of the French Revolution, Washington had followed with the keenest sympathy and anxiety the efforts of our ancestors, taking pride in the thought that the American example had something to do, as it undoubtedly had, with what was happening. “The young French nobility enrolled for the cause of [American] independence,” wrote Talleyrand in his memoirs, “attached itself afterward to the principles it had gone to fight for.” Pontgibaud, who remained a royalist, who hated the Revolution and became an émigré observes the same fact, although deploring what occurred: “The officers of Count de Rochambeau had nothing better to do [after Yorktown], I believe, than to visit the country. When one thinks of the false ideas of government and philanthrophy with the virus of which these youths were infected in America, and which they were to enthusiastically propagate in France, with such lamentable success—since that mania for imitation has powerfully helped toward the Revolution without being its unique cause—people will agree that all those red-heeled young philosophers had much better, for their sake and ours, have stayed at court.… Each of them fancied he would be called upon to play the part of Washington.” Asked to join Lafayette and “his former brothers-in-arms of beyond the sea,” he refused: “It has been justly said that in a revolution the difficulty lies not in doing one’s duty, but in knowing where it is. I did mine because I knew where it was,” and he joined the princes and emigrated. 1 1
Calmes dans la tempête et grands dans les revers, Vous sûtes, par l’effet d’une sage harmonie, Enfanter des vertus, un peuple, une patrie. 15
Note 1. Mémoires du [Chevalier de Pontgibaud] Comte de Moré, 1827, pp. 105, 132. Writing at that date, Lafayette’s former companion thought that monarchy had been re-established in France forever. [back] Note 2. January 1, 1788. [back] Note 3. New York, April 29, 1790. [back] Note 4. June 18, 1788. [back] Note 5. March 17, 1790; August 11, 1790. The key is the one which gave access to the main entrance; those at the Carnavalet Museum in Paris opened the several towers. [back] Note 6. To this remarkable forecast of the Terror, and of the ruin of such great hopes, Jared Sparks, in his edition of the Writings, caused Washington to add a prophecy of Napoleon’s rule, described as a “higher-toned despotism than the one which existed before.” But this is one of the embellishments which Sparks, who prophesied à coup sûr, since he wrote after the events, thought he was free to introduce in the great man’s letters. [back] Note 7. Paris, May 12, 1787. Washington papers, Library of Congress. [back] Note 8. Calais, April 3, 1789. [back] Note 9. Paris, July 31, 1789. [back] Note 10. “Rochambeau near Vendôme,” April 11, 1790. [back] Note 11. Paris, May 12, 1787. [back] Note 12. Ternant to Montmorin, Philadelphia, March 13, 1792. Correspondence of the French Ministers, ed. Turner, Washington, 1904. [back] Note 13. July 28, 1792. [back] Note 14. Philadelphia, May 18, 1793. Correspondence of the French Ministers in the United States, ed. Turner, Washington, 1904, p. 214. [back] Note 15. May 31, June 19, 1793. Ibid.,pp. 216, 217. [back] Note 16. June 19, 1793. Ibid., p. 230. [back] Note 17. October II, 1793. Ibid., p. 287. [back] Note 18. Washington to Alexander Hamilton, July 29, 1795. [back] Note 19. To Jefferson, June 6, 1796. [back] Note 20. To Oliver Wolcott, May 15, 1797. [back] Note 21. Mount Vernon, May 29, 1797. [back] Note 22. To T. Pickering, August 29, 1797. [back] Note 23. “Nulli flebilior quam mihi,” wrote Lafayette, in learning the news, to Crèvecœur, who had just dedicated to Washington his Voyage dans la haute Pennsylvanie, adorned, by way of frontispiece, with a portrait of Washington, “gravé d’après le camée peint par Madame Bréhan, à New York, en 1789.” Crèvecœur wanted to offer a copy of his book to Bonaparte. “Send it,” a friend of his who knew the young general told him; “it is a right you have as an associate member of the Institute; add a letter of two or three lines, mentioning in it the name of Washington.” St. John de Crèvecœur, by Robert de Crèvecœur, 1883, p. 399. [back] Note 24. Eloge funèbre de Washington, prononcé dans le temple de Mars (Hôtel des Invalides) le 20 pluviose, an VIII (8 février, 1800),” in (�uvres de M. de Fontanes, recueillies pour la première fois, Paris, 1839, 2 vols., II, 147. [back] Note 25. Lafayette’s journeys to America. [back] Note 26. An exact justification of Lacretelle’s prediction; above, p. 94. [back] Note 27. Histoire des Etats Unis, 3 vols.; preface dated 1855; the lectures had been delivered in 1849. Washington is the hero of the work, which is carried on only to 1789. [back] Note 28. Washington, libérateur de l’Amérique, 1882, often reprinted, dedicated: “A la mémoire de Lazare Hoche, le soldat citoyen, quiaurait été notre Washington s’il eût vécu.”

## V

ONCE more now a republic has been established in France, which, having, we hope, something of the qualities of “coolness and moderation” that Washington wanted us to possess, will, we trust, prove perpetual. It has already lasted nearly half a century: an unexampled phenomenon in the history of Europe, no other republic of such magnitude having thus survived in the old world since the fall of the Roman one, twenty centuries ago. 1
Note 1. August 1, 1786. [back] Note 2. “It is estimated that there are more small holdings of land in France than in Germany, England, and Austria combined.” Report of the [U. S.] Commissioner of Education, 1913, p. 714. [back] Note 3. To Richard H. Lee, December 14, 1784. On French exertions in that line, Consul-General Skinner wrote: “If correspondents could penetrate, as the writer has done, the almost inaccessible mountain villages of this country, and there discover the enthusiastic French forester at work, applying scientific methods to a work which can not come to complete fruition before two or three hundred years, they would retire full of admiration and surprise and carry the lesson back to the United States.” Daily Consular Reports, November 2, 1907. [back] Note 4. “The story of French success in the exploration, the civilization, the administration, and the exploitation of Africa, is one of the wonder tales of history. That she has relied on the resources of science rather than those of militarism makes her achievement the more remarkable.… Look at Senegambia as it is now under French rule.… Contrast the modernized Dahomey of to-day with its railways, schools, and hospitals with the blood-soaked country of the early sixties; remember that Algeria has doubled in population since [the time of] the last Dey—and you will have a bird’s-eye view, as it were, of what the French have accomplished in the colonizing field.” E. Alexander Powell, The Last Frontier, New York, 1912, p. 25. Concerning the Arabs under French rule, Edgar A. Forbes writes: “The conquered race may thank the stars that its destiny rests in a hand that seldom wears the rough gauntlet.” The Land of the White Helmet, New York, 1910, p. 94. [back] Note 5. To Lafayette, Aug. 15, 1786. Cf. below, p. 347. Same views in Franklin, who had written to his friend David Hartley, one of the British plenipotentiaries for the peace: “What would you think of a proposition, if I should make it, of a family compact between England, France, and America? … What repeated follies are those repeated wars! You do not want to conquer and govern one another. Why, then, should you continually be employed in injuring and destroying one another?” Passy, Oct. 16, 1783. [back] Note 6. June 15, 1782. [back]