"These wounds are my pride," he said. "I received them fighting for the independence of my country. Your blood, my general, flowed the same day . . . where we were so unfortunate." At Brandywine, the enemy had outflanked the defenders and forced them to flee in confusion. Lafayette, faint from loss of blood, had been led from the field but had stayed at a bridge on a road behind the lines in Chester, Pennsylvania, to make order among the retreating men.
"It was indeed a rough day," Lafayette said now, forty-eight years later, "but have we not since been deeply indemnified?"
Whom did he mean by we? Lafayette had a gift—shown hundreds of times on his American tour—of connecting quickly and warmly with the people before him, no matter their age or sex, class or race. These bursts of spontaneous fraternity were especially strong with veterans of the Revolution. In that moment in Natchez, we meant, first and foremost, the two comrades of 1777. Young once, they had lived to old age; wounded, they were now whole; mementoes of pain had become souvenirs of glory. This was simple indemnification for them, for any old soldier: We struggled, sometimes we lost, but we have prevailed and endured.
But Lafayette's we was also meant to encompass the American people, among whom he always included himself. This we had won independence from their colonial masters and had maintained it through decades of international upheaval, including a second shooting war with Britain. The country Americans had created and passed on to a new generation was, or seemed, united, prosperous, orderly, free, and self-ruled. Once children of a royal patriarch, cogs in an imperial machine, they now ran their own affairs—and evidently ran them well. This was indemnification, not for two men but for millions.
-Richard Brookhiser, The Hero Returns: Lafayette and the Legacy of Revolution
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