Excerpt From 'Revolutionary Brothers'

On February 21, 1781, the day after being ordered to Virginia, Lafayette had penned the first of the many letters he would write over the coming years to Thomas Jefferson. The marquis’s delight with his new orders, he noted to the governor, were heightened by his earlier command of a Continental army division of Virginians. Due to those ties and the fact that Virginia was his adoptive father’s native state, “I Am the More flattered By the Command Which His Excellency General Washington Has Been Pleased to Intrust to Me.”