Lafayette was ultimately permitted to command Continental Army troops in the decisive Siege of Yorktown in 1781, the Revolutionary War's final major battle that secured American independence.

This document was inspired by the United States Declaration of Independence, which was authored primarily by Jefferson, and invoked natural law to establish basic principles of the democratic nation-state.

[5] His non-Lafayette ancestors are also notable; his great-grandfather (his mother's maternal grandfather) was the Comte de La Rivière, until his death in 1770 commander of the Mousquetaires du Roi, or "Black Musketeers", King Louis XV's personal horse guard.

[6] Lafayette's paternal uncle Jacques-Roch died on 18 January 1734 while fighting the Austrians at Milan in the War of the Polish Succession; upon his death, the title of marquis passed to his brother Michel.

[8] Perhaps devastated by the loss of her husband, she went to live in Paris with her father and grandfather,[6] leaving Lafayette to be raised in Chavaniac-Lafayette by his paternal grandmother, Mme de Chavaniac, who had brought the château into the family with her dowry.

Historian Marc Leepson argued that Lafayette, "who had grown up loathing the British for killing his father", felt that an American victory in the conflict would diminish Britain's stature internationally.

The king and his minister hoped that by supplying the Americans with arms and officers, they might restore French influence in North America, and exact revenge against Britain for France's defeat in the Seven Years' War.

However, Lafayette was not on board in order to avoid being identified by British spies or the French Crown; the vessel moored in Pasaia on the Basque coast and was supplied with 5,000 rifles and ammunition from the factories in Gipuzkoa.

[42] After the battle, Washington cited him for "bravery and military ardour" and recommended him for the command of a division in a letter to Congress, which was hastily evacuating, as the British occupied Philadelphia later that month.

[31] Lafayette returned to the field in November after two months of recuperation in the Moravian settlement of Bethlehem, and received command of the division previously led by Major General Adam Stephen.

[51] The French fleet arrived at Delaware Bay on 8 July 1778 under Admiral d'Estaing, with whom General Washington planned to attack Newport, Rhode Island, the other major British base in the north.

[62] Washington, aware of Lafayette's popularity, had him write (with Alexander Hamilton to correct his spelling) to state officials to urge them to provide more troops and provisions to the Continental Army.

As Lafayette hoped, la Luzerne sent his letter on to France with a recommendation of massive French aid, which, after being approved by the king, would play a crucial part in the battles to come.

[81] He joined the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, a French abolitionist group which advocated for the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and equal rights for free people of color.

[93] Lafayette continued to work on lowering trade barriers in France to American goods, and on assisting Franklin and Jefferson in seeking treaties of amity and commerce with European nations.

[115][116] Lafayette would later initiate an investigation within the National Assembly on the now declared October Days, which led to the production of the Procédure Criminelle by Jean-Baptiste-Charles Chabroud, a 688-page document accumulating evidence and analysis on the exact events and procedures of the March on Versailles, hoping to condemn those inciting the mob (in his mind being Mirabeau and the Duc d'Orléans).

The radical Cordeliers organized an event at the Champ de Mars on 17 July to gather signatures on a petition to the National Assembly that it either abolish the monarchy or allow its fate to be decided in a referendum.

This emotion was common in the army, as demonstrated after the Battle of Marquain, when the routed French troops dragged their commander Théobald Dillon to Lille, where he was torn to pieces by the mob.

[144] Frederick William II of Prussia, Austria's ally against France, had once received Lafayette, but that was before the French Revolution – the king now saw him as a dangerous fomenter of rebellion, to be interned to prevent him from overthrowing other monarchies.

Accordingly, he stopped armed hostilities with the Republic and turned the state prisoners back over to his erstwhile coalition partner, the Habsburg Austrian monarch Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor.

They hired as agent a young Hanoverian physician, Justus Erich Bollmann, who acquired an assistant, a South Carolinian medical student named Francis Kinloch Huger.

The Lafayette family and their comrades in captivity left Olmütz under Austrian escort early on the morning of 19 September 1797, crossed the Bohemian-Saxon border north of Prague, and were officially turned over to the American consul in Hamburg on 4 October.

Bonaparte expressed rage, but Adrienne was convinced he was simply posing, and proposed to him that Lafayette would pledge his support, then would retire from public life to a property she had reclaimed, La Grange.

Among those whom Irish novelist Sydney, Lady Morgan met at table during her month-long stay at La Grange in 1818 were the Dutch painter Ary Scheffer and the historian Augustin Thierry, who sat alongside American tourists.

[182] With the roads becoming impassable, Lafayette stayed in Washington City for the winter of 1824–1825 and thus was there for the climax of the hotly contested 1824 election in which no presidential candidate was able to secure a majority of the Electoral College, throwing the decision to the House of Representatives.

[184] The general pattern of the trip was that he would be escorted between cities by the state militia, and he would enter each town through specially constructed arches to be welcomed by local politicians or dignitaries, all eager to be seen with him.

Many young revolutionaries sought a republic, but Lafayette felt this would lead to civil war, and chose to offer the throne to the duc d'Orleans, Louis-Philippe, who had lived in America and had far more of a common touch than did Charles.

Later that year, former president John Quincy Adams gave a eulogy of Lafayette that lasted three hours, calling him "high on the list of the pure and disinterested benefactors of mankind".

"[208] Lafayette became an American icon in part because he was not associated with any particular region of the country; he was of foreign birth, did not live in America, and had fought in New England, the mid-Atlantic states, and the South, making him a unifying figure.

In 1824, Lafayette returned to the United States at a time when Americans were questioning the success of the republic in view of the disastrous economic Panic of 1819 and the sectional conflict resulting in the Missouri Compromise.