You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington

by Alexis Coe

The heartbreak didn’t end after Yorktown. Washington had grown fond of the men who served under him, and he spent the next year saying goodbye, in one way or another, to many of them. “I often asked myself, as our Carriages distended, whether that was the last sight, I ever should have of you? And tho’ I wished to say no—my fears answered yes,” he wrote to Lafayette, who, having secured independence and nationhood for the United States, returned to his native France, eyes firmly fixed on the monarchy. Alexander Hamilton went to Congress in New York. Others died in the waning skirmishes of the war. “Poor Laurens is no more,” Washington wrote to Lafayette in 1782, upon learning John Laurens, who had served as his aide-de-camp, was killed by redcoats while foraging (or plundering, as the British argued in their defense) in South Carolina.31