In the autumn of 1782 a general parting took place, Rochambeau returning to France.
The King, the ministers, the whole country, gave Rochambeau the welcome he deserved. At his first audience on his return he had asked Louis XVI, as being his chief request, permission to divide the praise bestowed on him with the unfortunate de Grasse, now a prisoner of the English after the battle of the Saintes, where, fighting 30 against 37, he had lost seven ships, including the Ville de Paris (which had 400 dead and 500 wounded), all so damaged by the most furious resistance that, owing to grounding, to sinking, or to fire, not one reached the English waters. Rochambeau received the blue ribbon of the Holy Ghost, was appointed governor of Picardy, and a few years later became a marshal of France.
Rochambeau was keeping up with Washington a most affectionate correspondence, still partly unpublished, the great American often reminding him of his “friendship and love” for his “companions in war.” Dreaming of a humanity less agitated than that he had known, dreaming dreams which were not to be soon realized, he was writing to Rochambeau, from Mount Vernon, on September 7, 1785: “Although it is against the profession of arms, I wish to see all the world at peace.”
The French Revolution found Rochambeau still an officer in the French army, defending the frontier as a marshal of France and commander-in-chief of the northern troops. In 1792 he definitely withdrew to his estate, barely escaping with his life during the Terror. A striking and touching thing it is to note that when a prisoner in that “horrible sepulchre,” the Conciergerie, he appealed to the “Citizen President of the Revolutionary Tribunal” and invoked as a safeguard the great name of Washington, “my colleague and my friend in the war we made together for the liberty of America.” Luckier than many of his companions in arms of the American war—than Lauzun, Custine, d'Estaing, Broglie, Dillon, and others—Rochambeau escaped the scaffold.
The equilibrium of the world has been altered
Visiting some years ago the place and the tomb and standing beside the grave of the marshal, it occurred to me that it would be appropriate if some day trees from Mount Vernon could spread their shade over the remains of that friend of Washington and the American cause. With the assent of the family and of the mayor of Thoré, and thanks to the good will of the ladies of the Mount Vernon Association, this idea was realized, and half a dozen seedlings from trees planted by Washington were sent to be placed around Rochambeau's monument—two elms, two maples, two redbuds, and six plants of ivy from Washington's tomb. The last news received about them showed that they had taken root and were growing.
In less than a century and a half New York has passed from the ten thousand inhabitants it possessed under Clinton to the five million and more of today. Philadelphia, once the chief city, “an immense town,” Closen had called it, has now ten times more houses than it had citizens.
Partly owing again to France ceding, unasked, the whole territory of Louisiana in 1803, the frontier of this country, which the upper Hudson formerly divided in its center, has been pushed back to the Pacific; the three million Americans of Washington and Rochambeau have become the one hundred million of today. From the time when the flags of the two countries floated on the ruins of Yorktown the equilibrium of the would has been altered.
There is, perhaps, no case in with the unavoidable mixture of human interests, a war has been more undoubtedly waged for an idea. The fact was made obvious at the peace, when victorious France, being offered Canada for a separate settlement, refused, and kept her word not to accept any material advantage, the whole nation being in accord and the people illuminating for joy.
Source: J. J. Jusserand (June 1917), “Our First Alliance”, The National Geographic Magazine 31(6): 518–548.
