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

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1998 by Paul E. Cohen

Gloucester was a battle of little consequence to anyone but Lafayette. After recovering sufficiently from his wound, Lafayette was given charge in mid-November 1777 of a reconnaissance mission of three hundred men to locate British pickets. Cornwallis was encamped north of Gloucester. As Lafayette reported to Washington:

I came pretty late into the Gloucester road....A scout...found a strong post of three hundred and fifty hessians with field pieces...we pushed the hessians more than half a mile from the place where was theyr main body, and we made them run very fast - british reinforcements came twice to them but very far from recovering theyr ground, they always went back.(10)

Lafayette's forces killed one man, took fourteen prisoners, "and only five of ours were wounded. Such is the account of our little entertainment."(11)

Soon after the battle, Lafayette acquired the sought after division to command. Washington lobbied Congress to reward Lafayette's "Bravery and military ardor"(12) as demonstrated at Brandywine and Gloucester, and he sent along to Congress a letter from General Nathanael Greene (1742-1786) that enlarged somewhat on Lafayette's achievements on the battlefield at Gloucester:

The marquis, with about four hundred militia and the rifle corps, attacked the enemy's picket last evening, killed about twenty, wounded many more and took about twenty prisoners. The marquis is charmed with spirited behavior of the militia...[and] is determined to be in the way of danger.(13)

It was difficult for Congress to reject such an appeal, and on December 1, 1777, it passed a resolution "that the marquis de La Fayette be appointed to the command of a division in the Continental army."(14) He spent the next few months drilling the 3,096 soldiers in his troop.

Lafayette considered Capitaine to be part of his family and greatly missed his companionship during the campaigns of 1777. By April 1778, his aide-de-camp had traveled to York, Pennsylvania, on his way to rejoin Lafayette at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, but he was sidetracked into a mapping expedition on the Susquehanna River. Lafayette was frustrated by this turn of events, and wrote to Henry Laurens (1724-1792), the president of the Congress, on April 25, 1778:

I schould have been happy had Mr. Capitaine been left to me for drawing the last campaign as far as possible and for to begin the next one - but if he thaught useful any where else I have no objection to his going and am very glad he is employed if no other can do the business. However I want him [to] be considered as mine because he was given to me by the Marshal and Count de Broglio - to whom he was belonging before they attached him to me as a present.(15)

The youthful major general had good reason to be possessive about his talented aide-de-camp, Capitaine, who was probably the most accomplished military cartographer on the American side until the arrival of Jean Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur (1725-1807), comte de Rochambeau, and his army in 1780. While many of the British map makers were trained as draftsmen or engineers, the Americans were comparative amateurs whose maps were often crude.