Washington's Engineer by Norman Desmarais (speed reading book TXT) 📕

blamed him for leaving the volunteers without arms or equipment. He would also be attacked by both the military committee of the legislature and the revolutionaries from the summer of 1791. He tendered his resignation on December 3, 1791, and it was quickly accepted. He was replaced three days later, not by the man he proposed, but by Louis Marie Jacques Amalric, Comte de Narbonne-Lara. Later, during the French Revolution, he was forewarned of threats against his life.

He was promoted to lieutenant general on January 13, 1792, and commanded the Twenty-First Division at Moulins on February 22, but he never reached his post. This assignment bore a note saying, “never reported,” which indicates both the state of his health and the hatred against him. Everyone who was appointed by the king or who was in charge of a ministry was suspected of hatching plots against the nation.

The legislative assembly accused him on August 15, 1792, of having entered into negotiations with émigrés and having worked against the constitution. He left the army and concealed himself in Paris for about twenty-two months, before fleeing to the United States in 1794, where he became head of the Corps of Engineers.

10

AMERICAN CITIZEN AND FARMER

Louis Duportail and the French officers swore allegiance to the United States while serving in the Continental Army at Valley Forge in 1778. General Washington witnessed Duportail signing the document that ipso facto conferred citizenship and served the French general in good stead when he fled the Reign of Terror fifteen years later. He sought refuge in America and intended to buy land and to establish himself there. His flight from France did not permit him to bring very much. The inventory of his property after his death lists only his books, which consisted of about thirty volumes, mostly about agriculture and his need to enrich his vocabulary in these matters.

Duportail knew his adopted country better than most Americans. He rode the whole range of it on horseback from post to post during his five years in the Continental Army. He chose to establish himself around Valley Forge. Despite the miseries of that dreadful winter of 1777–1778, the natural advantages of that part of the country, its climate, and the general beauty of its wooded hills greatly impressed him. He was particularly enchanted with the streams that flowed down from the hills, the crystal-clear “great springs of water,” and the majesty of the winding Schuylkill.

The region around Valley Forge was originally included in Letitia Penn Manor. The property had been divided into farms, mostly owned by members of the Society of Friends (Quakers), to which William Penn belonged, so practically all of the region was cultivated by 1778. Early in the eighteenth century, a strip of land on the right bank of the Schuylkill, known as “Swede’s Ford Tract,” extended a mile along the river. It extended two miles inland and had been purchased and settled by Swedes from the region of the Delaware.1

Definite boundaries were drawn up in 1784, and new counties made. The Swede’s Ford Tract became part of Montgomery County and in the township of Upper Merion. The waters of the Schuylkill were still crystal clear and teeming with fish. The shad-fishing industry, carried on by the Swedes who settled there, thrived. All this appealed greatly to Duportail, who wished to leave behind him as far as possible the bitter memories of the last few years. He wished to possess some part of the Swede’s Ford Tract and was particularly attracted to that part that followed the Swede’s Ford Road. The Continental Army had marched along that highway fifteen years earlier on its way from the Whitemarsh encampment to that of the Gulph, the last resting place before taking up winter quarters at Valley Forge.

Duportail knew that road well, as he constructed a bridge of wagons floored with rails from nearby fences so the army could cross the Schuylkill at Swede’s Ford. It was there that he watched the Continental Army cross on their march to winter quarters at Valley Forge. The location brought back many memories and held a particular significance for him.

PURCHASE OF A FARM

Duportail was not the only émigré who sought shelter from the French Revolution in the farmlands of the United States. Louis Marie and Guy de Noailles both bought farms in Montgomery County. Many other French names occur in the records, including that of James Philip Delacour, who in 1792 bought a large segment of Swede’s Ford Tract. It was to him that Duportail expressed his desire to settle in that locality. Delacour sold his entire plantation of 189¼ acres “to Louis Lebegue Duportail” for the sum of “2,368 pounds and 15 shillings lawful money of Pennsylvania” on June 8, 1795.2

The recorded deed (in the Montgomery County Courthouse, Norristown, Pennsylvania) gives a lengthy description of the land and an accurate description of its boundaries. It states that the land runs for a considerable distance along the Swede’s Ford Road, but there is no mention of its touching the river. Duportail bought a “piece of land, situate on the south east side of the road leading to Norristown ford on Schuylkill included between and bounded by said road the said river and the plantation of the said Louis Lebegue Duportail, containing by computation three acres more or less” from John and Margaret Eastburn for the sum of fifty-five pounds lawful money of Pennsylvania on September 25, 1795.3 The river frontage thus acquired measured a little more than a quarter-mile in length, and the farm is henceforth listed as composed of 194 acres. It is important to note that while the first deed had no land directly on the river, Duportail was careful to secure the right “to half part of the shad fisheries opposite Swede’s Ford Tract,” as well as “free egress, ingress, and regress . . . for carrying out seins and putting fish on shore.”4

The former major general (Maréchal de Camp) and French minister of