The Brandywine. W. Barksdale Maynard

it ultimately sowed much confusion about the events of the battle, which historians are still trying to disentangle. The distinguished tourists also employed the services of an American major who had fought that day and now lived in a house on the battlefield. In the woods where the Virginians had fought and Lafayette was wounded, “most of the trees bear the mark of bullets or cannon shot,” the excursionists noted. But already, just three years after the battle, they expressed perplexity and disagreement about what had happened where.²³

      More than four decades later, the elderly Lafayette undertook a triumphal tour of America amid hysterical enthusiasm for the last living superstar of the Revolution. He revisited the Brandywine on July 26, 1825, in the company of prominent locals, including Captain Jacob Humphrey, whose forehead was laced with a scar from a musket ball that grazed him in the Battle of Trenton. Lafayette rode up from Delaware in a barouche drawn by four gray horses, having spent the night with Eleuthère du Pont at Eleutherian Mills on the Brandywine; among the party was U.S. congressman and future secretary of the treasury Louis McLane, who owned a mill site on the river. On passing over the bridge at Chadds Ford, Lafayette remarked, “It could not be here we crossed. It must have been further up,” astonishing everyone with his accurate recall: the new bridge was in fact a little below the old ford. But specific memories of the battle had faded locally; when Lafayette asked where the “bridge of rails was across the Brandywine”—erected hastily during the campaign—nobody seemed to know.²⁴

      Then he visited the dying Gideon Gilpin, with whom he had headquartered, before riding to Dilworthtown and Birmingham, followed by a huge crowd shouting “Long live Lafayette!” “Show me where is the meetinghouse,” he requested, and upon seeing it again he began to speak at length in French about the battle to du Pont and his other companions, pointing out where he had been wounded near Sandy Hollow, now Jacob Bennett’s cornfield. He lunched in the cannon-scarred Samuel Jones mansion north of the meetinghouse and was shown a collection of military relics dug up by farmer Abraham Darlington on the surrounding battlefield.

      Then Lafayette went past Strode’s Mill to West Chester, escorted by volunteer soldiers. There were ten thousand patriots in the streets, it was said, and Lafayette smiled and exclaimed, “Happy people! Happy people!” He was treated to a dinner in the grand jury room of the court-house. He rose to speak of his memories, recalling how it was “my first action under the American Standard, and our great and good Commander-in-Chief, in company with your gallant Chester Countyman, my friend Gen. Wayne.” He called it an honor “to have mingled my blood with that of many other American soldiers, on the heights of the Brandywine.” Toasts followed, including one by banker-botanist William Darlington (who commanded the local troops during that festive commemoration) to “The fields of the Brandywine: irrigated, on the Cadmean system of agriculture, with the blood of Revolutionary patriots—the teeming crop must ever be Independent Freemen.” The Greek hero Cadmus had sowed dragon teeth in a field, from which brave soldiers sprang.

      The next day, Lafayette left West Chester by going southward over Cope’s Bridge on the East Branch, continuing his American tour. In the District of Columbia and Virginia he would meet former and current presidents Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and John Quincy Adams; soon after, he returned to France on a new U.S. frigate named, in his honor, Brandywine, a ship that saw distinguished service up through the Civil War. As Andrew Wyeth liked to tell, when Lafayette was eventually buried, soil from the Brandywine Valley was sprinkled inside his coffin.²⁵

      Turning up Bones