Michel Capitaine du Chesnoy, the marquis de Lafayette's cartographer

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1998 by Paul E. Cohen

When the nineteen-year-old Gilbert du Motier, the marquis de Lafayette, arrived in America on June 13, 1777, he was at the beginning of one of the most illustrious military careers in American history. Six weeks earlier the idealistic young officer had ignored his relatives and defied the king of France by setting sail to participate in the American Revolution. Determined to make his mark in the cause of liberty, he had secured an appointment in the American army from Silas Deane (1737-1789), the agent for the Continental Congress in paris. Based on this commitment Lafayette had purchased a ship named La Victoire, enlisted several aides, and secretly embarked for America.

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On board ship with Lafayette was one of the most skillful military map makers of the era, Michel Capitaine du Chesnoy. As Lafayette's aide-de-camp he was at the general's side much of the time during Lafayette's two tours of duty in America, and he was on the site during many of Lafayette's battles. The masterful maps he drafted of these encounters are among the most important records of Lafayette's military career and include several of the most significant maps of the American Revolution. Despite their historical importance, these maps are virtually unknown, largely because they have remained almost exclusively in manuscript form and are exceedingly rare. There are only six eighteenth-century Capitaine manuscript maps preserved in American libraries.(1)

Now six previously unknown maps by Capitaine have been found in an American private collection. These maps were drafted and colored by hand (very likely by Captaine himself, or at least under his direction) and are dissected (a once popular technique of cutting a map into sections so it can be folded) and glued to eighteenth-century linen. They add considerably to our knowledge of Lafayette and his map maker. One of these maps was completely unrecorded and others were known only from one or two eighteenth-century manuscript copies or later nineteenth-century ones. Lafayette himself possessed a sizeable collection of Capitaine's maps, but they have disappeared.(2) So this private collection represents by far the largest group of Capitaine's maps in existence, exceeding even the holding of the Service Historique de l'Armee de Terre at Vincennes.

From his initial landing near Georgetown, South Carolina, Lafayette and most of his men traveled to Philadelphia to report for duty, arriving on July 27, 1777. Capitaine had become ill on his strip north and spent the next several months recuperating in North Carolina. In Philadelphia Lafayette was treated as an unwanted foreign adventurer who did not even have the backing of his own government. He was informed that Deane had not had the authority to issue commissions and that his was invalid. Unlike other foreign mercenaries, however, Lafayette wrote a petition to the Continental Congress stating that he would serve at his own expense as a volunteer officer. (Volunteer officers were usually young men waiting for older officers to die in battle so they could claim a commission.) In common with European custom, Lafayette presented laudatory letters of introduction pointing out his many virtues, the most important being his aristocratic pedigree. At that moment Lafayette was the richest nobleman in France. Once the Americans realized the importance of their well-connected volunteer officer, they appointed him a major general in the Continental army and introduced him to a man who would change his life: General George Washington. A legendary bond was established between the forty-five-year-old commander in chief and the teenage major general.

Lafayette wrote to Congress soon thereafter:

I shall neglect nothing on my part to justify the confidence which the Congress of the United States has been pleased to repose in me, as my highest ambition has ever been to do everything only for the best of the cause in which I am engaged. I wish to serve near the person of General Washington till such time as he may think proper to entrust me with a division of the army.(3)

When Washington had to deliver the bad news that Congress objected to Lafayette's having his own division, Washington, who was childless, added that he would be pleased to have Lafayette's confidence as a friend and a father. Louis R. Gottschalk, who wrote masterfully of Lafayette in the 1930s, commented:

To Lafayette, it was the most decisive moment of his life....the titles 'father and friend' dropped perhaps casually by Washington, took a real and precise meaning in the quixotic lad's mind. He had - almost suddenly - ceased to be merely a companion of French soldiers of fortune seeking glory in an unknown world and had become the adopted son of a hero.(4)

On September 11, 1777, Washington tested his new general with a combat assignment. British forces under Admiral Richard Howe (1726-1799) and General William Howe (1729-1814) had assembled off the Delaware capes with a plan to capture Philadelphia. As the British advanced, Washington and Lafayette established positions along the Brandywine Creek, about twenty-five miles southwest of the city. On September 11 Lafayette was drawn into battle for the first time in his life at the Battle of Brandywine, when he confronted a flank attack by the British general Charles Cornwallis (1738-1805). Using military tactics learned in France, Lafayette dismounted and himself led his disbelieving men in charging the enemy. A musket shot hit the marquis below the calf and went through his leg. He was thrilled. The wound was not serious, but enough so to provide a much needed emblem of courage. Baron de Kalb (1721-1780), a major general in the Continental army, called this "an excellent bit of good fortune, for it established Lafayette in the eyes of his American comrades."(5) Regrettably, it is the only battle of Lafayette's American years for which there is no Capitaine map, for the map maker was still in North Carolina at the time of the action. Philadelphia fell to the British at the end of September 1777.

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Michel Capitaine du Chesnoy, the marquis de Lafayette's cartographer

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1998 by Paul E. Cohen

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