French in Newport, 1780-1781

Comte Jean Baptiste Charles Henri Hector d’Estaing (1729–1794) held positions as admiral in the French navy and major general in the French army. Five weeks after King Louis XVI signed …
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With the Naval War College on Aquidneck Island, we island residents have a familiarity with the idea of “wargaming” or rehearsing the decisions leaders would make during warfare involving joint …
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“The moment I heard of America, I lov’d her.” The Marquis de Lafayette wrote this in a letter from his camp near Warren, Rhode Island, on September 23, 1778. It …
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Mention Rhode Island during the American Revolution, and two things come to mind: the 1772 burning of the Gaspee, and the famous 1st Rhode Island Regiment initially composed largely of …
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Lieutenant General Jean Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur Comte de Rochambeau (1725–1807) did not simply wake up on the morning of June 18, 1781 and order his army of more than …
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There were five or six duels fought in General Rochambeau’s army, three of them in Newport, Rhode Island in 1780 and 1781. Frenchmen can be irascible and easily offended, so …
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When General Jean Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur Comte de Rochambeau arrived in Newport, Rhode Island, on July 10, 1780 with over 5,800 troops, most of the officers and men could …
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[This article originally ran in the Journal of the American Revolution, at www.allthingsliberty.com]

In July 1780, after three and half months at sea, nearly 6,000 thousand men[1] and supplies crammed …
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One would expect that a country that had been at war for five years would welcome its first ally with open arms. We might have mental images of civic officials …
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The sixteenth, seventeenth and the first part of the eighteenth centuries were times of great turmoil in Europe. They were characterized by a number of wars, such as the Thirty …
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