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Trying desperately to raise four hundred laborers,
teamsters, and badly needed cavalry mounts, Lafayette had advised General Washington that "nothing but
a treaty of alliance with the Negroes can find us dragoon Horses
[because] it is by this means the enemy have so formidable a
Cavalry." And it was during this period, with Cornwallis
still formidable and the Americans badly in need of intelligence
as to his strength and strategy, that James Armistead sought
his master's permission to join Lafayette.
His owner consenting, Armistead enlisted and served
the future hero of the French Revolution so effectively that
after the war the general was to state that his spying activities
were "industriously collected and more faithfully delivered."
Armistead had carried out important commissions so effectively
that the general recommended him as worthy of "every reward
his situation could admit of."
The brevity of Lafayette's testimonial understated
his intelligent agent's resourcefulness. Taking advantage
of British eagerness for Negro aid, Armistead had risked his
life by pretending to supply Cornwallis with information damaging
to the Americans -- a bit of playacting so perfectly performed
that not until the defeated Cornwallis encountered him in Lafayette's
headquarters was the black man's true loyalty and identity revealed.
The rest is irony. In 1786, Armistead, who by
now expressed his continuing admiration for the marquis by calling
himself James Armistead Lafayette, was rewarded for his services
to the Revolution by being emancipated at the expense of the
General Assembly of Virginia. In 1818, still free, but
little changed in circumstance, the old ex-spy successfully petitioned
the state for relief, acquiring after thirty years a veteran's
pension.
The essential incongruity of his position was, however,
unchanged. Although a recognized veteran of the Revolution
and a free man, he was not a citizen. He had, nevertheless,
emerged somewhat from the shadow in which he had stood in earlier
years. And in 1824, during Lafayette's visit to Virginia,
Armistead's now aging features were to share once more the general's
glory.
John B. Martin, an artist as skilled in delineating
a revolutionary veteran who was an ex-slave and spy as one who
became chief justice of the Supreme Court (John Marshall), painted
Armistead's portrait. Proud and dignified, he appears with
his highly individualized features forcefully drawn, a dark,
ruggedly handsome man looking out at the viewer with quizzical
expression. He wears a white neckcloth, his blue military
coat bearing no medals is simply adorned with bright buttons
embossed with the American eagle. Asserting an individual
identity earned at the repeated risk of his life, James Armistead
Lafayette affirmed an unshakable faith in the ideal democracy.
His portrait now hangs in the Valentine Museum at Richmond,
Virginia. |
James
Armistead Lafayette