pressed on to Philadelphia to present to Congress the
communication from the French government. He bore also a letter from
Washington, in which the commander in chief introduced Lafayette as
one who had "signally distinguished himself in the service of this
country," and who, during the time that he had been in France, had
"uniformly manifested the same zeal in our affairs which animated his
conduct while he was among us"; who had been "on all occasions an
essential friend to America."

The greatest possible effort was now made to equip the Continental
army, but the resources of the country had already been grievously
overtaxed. Washington had hardly been able to keep his army together
at all. Half of his six thousand men were unfit for duty. They had
sometimes had no bread for six days; sometimes for two or three days
they would have neither meat nor bread. The commander clearly realized
that an army reduced to nothing, without provisions or any of the
necessary means to carry on a war, needed not a little help only--it
needed a great deal.

When, on the 2d of May, the French fleet finally set sail, delays had
reduced the number of soldiers and the amount of supplies. The English
by this time had realized what was happening, and they carefully
blockaded the second division of the squadron in the harbor of Brest;
and when the first division reached Newport, the English cleverly
surrounded the harbor with their ships, thus "bottling up" the French
and rendering them inactive and useless. In this way the great good
that was expected from the French expedition came to naught.

During all this trying time, Lafayette acted the part of a single-minded
friend of both the French and the American armies. He was sent by
Washington to Newport to confer with the French generals, and later he
was present at a joint meeting of the great French and American generals
which was held at Hartford, Connecticut. Lafayette rode from one army to
the other, holding conferences and putting important decisions into
writing, or dictating the results of conversations. Many of these
documents have been preserved in French or American state archives.

Whatever time he could get apart from these labors he spent in
training the battalion that had been assigned to him. This was a
detachment of light infantry, selected from the best of the army. He
took great pride in training these men, sent to France for black and
white plumes for their caps, and