The Founding Father and his protégé. Historic partnership set the course of a nation

Before Batman and Robin, there was Washington and Lafayette.

A combination of mentorship, partnership and friendship, the relationship between founding father George Washington and the young French aristocrat Gilbert du Motier — better known as the Marquis de Lafayette — is one of legend.

Lafayette was just 19 when he first met a 45-year-old Washington in August 1777. A headstrong teen pegged as a country bumpkin in the French Court, Lafayette had a plan to boost his stock at home by reinventing himself as a war hero abroad.

He offered his services free of charge to Congress, which made the teen a major general for the Continental Army in July 1777. Beyond his bankroll, Lafayette had key connections in the French Court, where Benjamin Franklin was attempting to secure Washington a vital alliance.

At that point, Washington had grown skeptical of nobles buying ranks for show and French generals inflating their self-worth. He had also seen minimal success on the battlefield. Only small victories logged at Trenton and Princeton had bolstered Washington’s backtracking forces.

It is unclear if Washington was attempting to keep a short leash on Lafayette in the months that followed — show him a good time but generally keep him out of trouble — as he attempted to get a reign on his revolution.

Washington perhaps saw in Lafayette a rung on a ladder he desperately wanted to climb. Lafayette may have conversely pegged the stern old plantation owner as a vital springboard to boost his reputation and his status in France. Their 22-year alliance would come with mutual benefits and flowery odes of admiration.

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Lafayette sees Washington as a father figure

Laura Auricchio, dean at Fordham College at Lincoln Center at Fordham University, says Lafayette saw Washington as a father figure. The author of 2014’s award-winning book, The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered, Auricchio describes the teen as an ingénue who took everyone too literally and was known to respond to adult exasperation with childlike bewilderment.

“He wants to do the right thing,” she says. “And he wins Washington over through his earnestness.”

Regardless of the reason, Lafayette infiltrated Washington’s inner circle with impressive haste and mysterious ease, wrote prominent Washington biographer Douglas Southall Freeman. Once there, Lafayette prodded the general for his own division. “I cannot help to tell you that a division of Virginians … would be the most agreeable for me,” Lafayette wrote Washington in October 1777.

Correspondence between them shows Washington’s consistency in offering guidance to Lafayette. With occasionally terse letters, he attempted to temper Lafayette's innocence and optimism. In others, he reminded Lafayette of their common interests and the potential for mutual gain. Throughout, he urged patience, prudence and focus.

“I have no doubt but that everything happens so for the best; that we shall triumph over all our misfortunes, and shall, in the end, be ultimately happy,” Washington wrote Lafayette in December 1777.

Washington was caring and took his paternal role seriously, Auricchio says. And Lafayette genuinely looked up to him, she adds. As part of Washington's entourage, Lafayette hit all the famous wartime spots in Bergen County: The Hermitage in Ho-Ho-Kus, Old Paramus Reformed Church in Ridgewood and The First Reformed Church of Hackensack for the 1780 funeral of General Enoch Poor.

Once in command of a detachment, the teen unabashedly offered Washington his thoughts on how to lead, punish and motivate troops. The upstart criticized what he saw as an unfair court martial of his soldier, thwarted a mutiny without threatening physical violence and bought his troops shoes, clothes and blankets. He also gained further respect for Washington.

The message was clear: Don’t embarrass us

In response, Washington urged Lafayette not to do anything that would ruin their relationship. The message was clear: Don’t embarrass us. “You will remember that your detachment is a very valuable one, and that any accident happening to it would be a severe blow to this army,” he wrote Lafayette in May 1778. “You will therefore use every possible precaution for its security, and to guard against a surprise.”

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Lafayette’s success, as Washington wrote to his protégé in September 1778, was vital on fronts beyond the battlefield. “I, your friend, have no doubt but that you will use your utmost endeavors to restore harmony that the honor, glory, and mutual interest of the two nations may be promoted and cemented in the firmest manner,” Washington wrote.

Lafayette left for France in January 1779. He wrote to Washington once in June, but Washington said he didn’t get the letter. Washington didn’t take the separation well. In a September 1779 letter to Lafayette, he tried to maintain his stoicism and play it cool. “Often, since you left this country, have I written to you but have not been favored with a single line from you since you lay in Boston Harbor,” Washington wrote. “This I shall ascribe to any cause rather than a decline of friendship. I feel my own regard for you so sensibly, that I shall never suspect a want of it in your breast.”

Lafayette, perhaps wisely, said he never received any letters from Washington while he was in France, but had surely sent him plenty. After a tough winter in Morristown, Washington nonetheless received a short message from Lafayette in late April 1780. The Frenchman was back in Boston and bearing good news.

They reunited two weeks later in Morristown in an iconic scene with Alexander Hamilton that is recreated with statues on the Morristown Green. Lafayette said 6,000 French troops and supplies were on their way. Moreover, he was ready to lead patrols in North Jersey and adjacent areas of New York State.

By the fall, his correspondence with Washington shows Lafayette’s grasp of their parallel tracks and the importance of their shared success. Their victories would show Americans they have a willing ally, and the French that their sacrifice of support was worthwhile, Lafayette wrote. “My private glory, and yours, my dear general — both of which are very dear to my heart — are greatly interested not so much for the opinions of America but for those of Europe in our doing something this campaign,” he wrote Washington in October 1780.

The following spring, Washington sent Lafayette south. While outnumbered by British troops in Virginia, Lafayette successfully executed some strategic orders, kept his regiment intact and otherwise awaited Washington’s arrival.

Washington stopped at Mount Vernon on Sept. 10, 1781, to herald his impending arrival. He was coming — along with the French general Jean-Baptiste de Rochambeau — to help defeat the British general Charles Cornwallis. “I hope you will keep Lord Cornwallis safe, without provisions or forage until we arrive,” Washington wrote to Lafayette in his postscript.

Within two weeks, the two would reunite for the battle that would secure their shared and separate legacies. The battle was Lafayette’s last. French backup had all but assured America’s independence and Lafayette’s return to Europe as a hero: a 24-year-old brigadier general in the French Army.

A token of victory gained by liberty

Galvanized by the success and the support of his troops and Washington, Lafayette wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man and became a key figure in the French Revolution. Outside of a trip to Mount Vernon in 1784, he and Washington shared letters of adoration laden with progress updates and thoughts on international politics, Democracy and the rights of men from overseas.

In March 1790, Lafayette sent then-President Washington the key to the main gate at the Bastille, the prison where the revolt that launched the Revolution began. Washington’s significance in that effort wasn’t lost on Lafayette. “It is a tribute which I owe as a son to my adoptive father, as an aide-de-camp to my general, as a missionary of liberty to its patriarch,” he wrote.

Washington gladly accepted what he called a “token of victory gained by liberty over despotism” and sent his young aristocratic friend a far less poignant but much more practical gift.  “Not for the value of the thing, my dear Marquis, but as a memorial and because they are the manufacture of this City, I send you herewith a pair of shoe buckles,” he wrote from New York City in August 1790.

The following year Washington sought to persuade the marquis that, despite the victories, their shared mission could never rest. Though Washington’s service as the first president of the United States and Lafayette’s exile and imprisonment — he had challenged the French monarchy during the revolution — led to some lapses in correspondence, until his death in December 1799, the general invariably assured Lafayette that they shared a goal of unity between France and America.

It was for this reason that Washington denied Lafayette a passport in 1798. Lafayette, on the outs with the French, wanted to return to America. Washington, however, didn’t want America to be on the outs with the French. Lafayette’s next visit to the states went unsanctioned by his government, nonetheless. The sitting monarch, Louis XVIII, had spent the French Revolution in exile thanks in part to him.

Lafayette’s August 1824 arrival to Castle Garden in New York brought a welcoming party of eight ships and 30,000 spectators there to crown the champion of the American Revolution as he embarked on a year’s tour of all 24 states. The 66-year-old hero’s 44-year-old son was with him. Born just two years after his father first met Washington, the younger Lafayette was a walking tribute named George Washington de La Fayette.