Revolutionary Brothers: Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Friendship That Helped Forge Two Nations

Through extensive reliance on Thomas Jefferson’s and the Marquis de Lafayette’s writings, along with their contemporaries’, Chaffin (Giant’s Causeway) burnishes his reputation as a popular historian with this compulsively readable deep dive into “the story of a single, and singularly extraordinary, friendship, and its role in the making of two revolutions—and two nations.” The two men met in 1781; Lafayette had been given a command by George Washington after allying himself with the American rebels and traveling to the colonies in 1777, and was dispatched to Virginia to help defend it from British attacks during Jefferson’s term as governor of that colony. That assignment began a friendship that deepened after the Revolutionary War’s end; Lafayette was able to facilitate Jefferson’s diplomatic efforts after Jefferson joined a delegation to Paris negotiating treaties with European nations. Lafayette sought to help resolve France’s fiscal crisis of 1787, the precursor to the French Revolution, and Chaffin is especially good at detailing Lafayette’s shifting roles during that tumultuous period. Noting that “cherished legends” concerning both men are more familiar than the “more complex, sometimes less ennobling, truths,” Chaffin successfully elucidates the latter, such as Jefferson’s hypocrisy regarding slavery and Lafayette’s “vacillations during the French Revolution.” This worthy history will deepen lay readers’ understanding of both men. Agent: Alex Hoyt, Alexander Hoyt Associates. (Nov.)