Washington & Lafayette
Founding Fathers
(1776 & 1789)
____________ It was an extraordinary comradeship --
an unlikely friendship that resulted in two unprecendented constitutions. An implausible pair indeed:
The 19-year-old Marquis de Lafayette was a French aristocrat born to the manor.
The self-made George Washington was a Virginia frontiersman. And yet these two, Generals Washington & Lafayette forged a nearly inseparable partnership to lead the struggle for the right to become something other than what birth had ordained. It was a journey to independence -- to the birth of a radically new world:
for themselves from courtier to citizen,
for their countries from monarchy to republic. If the motives for their journey were mixed,
certainly the resulting impact of their journey was not. From these founding fathers of the new world
we have inherited the guiding principle of:
government of the people,
by the people
and for the people. In their struggle to confer that principle to our own day,
Washington and Lafayette have left us with the legacy
that National Sovereignty is always guided by the obligation to remember:
This is the reason why you ought to do that.
____________ Inspiration Source:
adaptation notes from
For Liberty and Glory: Washington, Lafayette and Their Revolutions©
2007 by James R. Gaines, published by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.