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In a recent interview in the historical magazine American Heritage, renowned author David McCullough claimed that "When you're working on the Revolutionary War, as I'm doing now, you realize what the French did for us. We wouldn't have a country if it weren't for them."[1] On either side of the Atlantic few historians of that war would dispute the fundamental truth of this assertion. But to most Americans of today, the notion of Frenchmen fighting side by side with Continental soldiers for American liberty and independence comes as a surprise. Some 200 years after Yorktown, far too few Americans are aware of the crucial importance of America's French allies during the Revolutionary War.

The critical support provided by French King Louis XVI toward the success of that war has been largely obliterated in the collective memory of the American people. Not just "out West," where no French soldier ever set foot, but even in states such as Connecticut it was until recently left to devoted individuals such as town historians, and to private organizations such as the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Sons of the American Revolution, or the Souvenir Français, to keep the memory of the Franco-American alliance alive. Only after long efforts by among others, State Representative Pamela Z. Sawyer and the Inter Community Historic Resources Committee, did the State Legislature in 1998 appropriate the first installment of funds for the "Rochambeau in Connecticut: Tracing His Journey" project to be administered by the Connecticut Historical Commission. The present report is part of a collaborative effort by archaeolo-gists, mapmakers, and historians to research, map, and document the route of the French expeditionary corps in Connecticut from 1780 to 1782 and to emphasize the significance of France's, and Connecticut's, contribution in the American Revolutionary War.

The support of Connecticut was vital for the success of the comte de Rochambeau's mission and thus for America's success in her war for independence. Almost as soon as Rochambeau's forces landed in Newport, Rhode Island, Connecticut became a prime supply base for the French expeditionary corps. In December 1780, Rochambeau became one of the many important personages to visit Governor Jonathan Trumbull in his War Office in Lebanon, the nerve center of Connecticut between 1775 and 1783. In two important conferences in Hartford in September 1780 and in Wethersfield in May 1781, the groundwork was laid for the successful cooperation of the two unlikely allies that culminated in Lord Cornwallis' surrender of Yorktown to the combined Franco-American army later that year. From November 1780 until June 1781, a French cavalry detachment under the duc de Lauzun was quartered in Lebanon. Finally, and that is the topic of this study, Rochambeau's army marched through the state during the month of June 1781 and again in October 1782, on its way to and from the battlefield of Yorktown where America's freedom was won.

Despite some initial apprehension about "Papists" in their state, the citizens of Connecticut welcomed the foreigners as indispensable allies against a common foe. Most French officers shared the feelings of Baron Ludwig von Closen, a Bavarian captain in the Royal Deux-Ponts and aide to Rochambeau, who wrote in his journal: "The inhabitants of Hartford have heaped us with attentions, and beyond a doubt, Connecticut has been the province which has welcomed the French most."[2] Personal contact between Americans and French obliterated, at least for the time being, many of the mutual prejudices fostering after a century of "French and Indian Wars."

But as the Revolutionary generation passed away in the 1820s and 1830s, and canals and railroads altered modes and patterns of transportation in the 1840s and 1850s, the memory of the "gallant" Frenchmen under General Rochambeau marching from Newport to Yorktown, the memory of their crucial contribution to American Independence, and the memory of the bond forged in the crucible of that war, began to recede into the mist of history. A prime example of this development was given by Benson J. Lossing, who could write as early as 1852, that "a balance-sheet of favors connected with the alliance will show not the least preponderance of service in favor of the French, unless the result of the more vigorous action of the Americans, caused by the hopes of success from the alliance, shall be taken into the account."[3]

The tragedy of the Civil War and the turmoil of the (Second) Industrial Revolution brought massive economic and demographic dislocation in the 1860s and 1870s. As waves of immigrants from southern and east-central Europe settled along the coast in the 1880s and 1890s, interest in the French alliance was increasingly confined to professional historians and Americans living in France. The celebrations of the centennials of the American and French Revolutions in 1876 and 1889 saw the publication of Thomas Balch's Les Français en Amérique pendant la Guerre de l'Indépendance des États-Unis, 1777-1783, published in Paris and Philadelphia in 1872.[4] In 1881 Henry P. Johnston published the still useful The Yorktown Campaign and the Surrender of Cornwallis, and Edwin M. Stone followed with Our French Allies … in the Great War of the American Independence, published in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1884.

In Paris, Henri Doniol published his ambitious Histoire de la participation de la France à l'établissement des États-Unis d'Amérique. Correspondance diplomatique et documents in five volumes between 1886 and 1892. In 1903, Amblard Marie Vicomte de Noailles' Marins et Soldats Français en Amérique Pendant la Guerre de l'Indépendance des États-Unis, 1778-1783 ran off the presses in Paris. Finally, with the strong support of the "Society in France, Sons of the American Revolution," founded in Paris in September 1897, the French Foreign Ministry in 1903 published the names of thousands of Frenchmen who had fought in the Revolutionary War in Les Combattants Français de la Guerre Américaine 1778-1783.[5]

A few years later, the First World War brought the renewal of an alliance that had flourished some 140 years earlier. "LaFayette, we are here!" an American officer is said to have pronounced over the tomb of the famous marquis in Paris in 1917. With Armistice Day 1918 the "debt to Lafayette" was paid. But the war "over there" also brought renewed interest in the earlier military cooperation against a common foe during the Revolutionary War. When Boston banker Allan Forbes retraced the route taken by Rochambeau and the French forces through Connecticut in the early 1920s, he located some two dozen markers, monuments and sites connected with the French presence in Connecticut during the Revolutionary War as well as mostly anecdotal evidence handed down through family tradition. At Breakneck Hill locals remembered "that one of the Bronson family, which at that time owned the camp site, locked up his daughter, Esther, for fear she would elope with one of the French officers."[6] In Ridgefield a Civil War veteran named Coe "explained how the French soldiers made a rush for the tannery that stood back of his house and from the vats he said they procured many frogs to satisfy their taste." [7]

Occasionally, however, the memory of the French allies was completely gone. At Windham, he "called on the President of the Windham Bank and asked him if he knew anything about the French camps there and he looked at us as if we had escaped from some lunatic asylum. No one else had ever heard of a Frenchman or a camp." [8]From there it was but a small step to the near complete unawareness of Rochambeau's troops and their contributions displayed some 50 years later at the time of the American Bicentennial. Two centuries of America-centered historiography had so marginalized French contributions to American Independence in the public mind that little more was left than the efforts of the Marquis De Lafayette. Many a re-enactor in one of the French units tracing Rochambeau's journey from East Greenwich to Yorktown in October 1981 has told me of the incredulous "Who are YOU?!" that greeted them at their public appearances.

It is my hope that this report, which covers but one aspect in the first phase of the "Rochambeau in Connecticut: Tracing His Journey" project, will provide at least part of the answer to that question of "Who are YOU?" Because McCullough may just have a point when he claims that without the French "We wouldn't have a country."