The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has owned the Benjamin Ring and Gideon Gilpin houses for many years. The latter house (Gilpin’s) has been, and continues to be, interpreted as Lafayette’s headquarters during the Battle of Brandywine. Eyewitness accounts, however, call this conclusion into question.1
In 1780, just three years after the Brandywine, Lafayette visited the battlefield on his way to take up a command in Virginia. His traveling party reached the area late at night with the intention of touring the field the next morning. One of his companions, the Marquis de Chastellux, left this account of that night: “It was already late when we came within reach of the field of battle, and as we could see nothing until next morning and were too numerous to remain together, we had to separate into two divisions. Messrs. de Gimat, de Mauduit, and my two aides-de-camp, stayed with me at an inn three miles this side of Brandywine; and M. de La Fayette, attended by the other travelers, went further on to ask for hospitality from a Quaker named Benjamin Ring, at whose house he had lodged with General Washington the night before the battle [emphasis added].” The next morning, Chastellux rejoined Lafayette and “found him in great friendship with his host who, Quaker though he was, seemed delighted to entertain ‘the Marquis.’”2 According to this reliable account penned just three years after the battle, Lafayette lodged with the Ring family just as he had done prior to the battle with General Washington.
The contention that Lafayette slept in the Gilpin home the night before the Brandywine battle seems to have derived from an account penned long after the war by Lafayette’s secretary August Levasseur. On July 26, 1825, during his lengthy visit to the United States, Lafayette and his son George Washington Lafayette toured the Brandywine battlefield. According to Levasseur, “At Chads-Ford the general learned that one of his companions in arms, Gideon Gilpin, under whose roof he had passed the night before the battle, was now confined to bed by age and infirmity, and despaired of being able to join his fellow citizens in their testimony of respect to the general; he went to visit the aged soldier, whom he found surrounded by his family. Gideon Gilpin, notwithstanding his extreme weakness, recognized him on his entrance,” continued Levasseur, “and proved by tears of grateful and tender recollection how much this visit tended to the comfort and soothing of his last moments.”3
There are several problems with this account. First, Levasseur penned it nearly 50 years after the battle, long after memory becomes unreliable. Second, if Lafayette had stayed with Ring in 1777, he could not have visited him in 1825 because Ring died in 1804. The account also refers to Gilpin as a “comrade in arms.” If by this Lafayette’s secretary meant that Gilpin fought with the French general at the Brandywine, he is mistaken. Gilpin served in the militia after the battle; he did not fight on September 11, 1777, and it is unlikely he ever served under Lafayette’s command at any time during the war.
It is my contention that Lafayette stayed with Washington either in the Ring house or in a tent in the Ring yard prior to the battle of September 11. The 1780 account is consistent with this interpretation. Any confusion on where he spent that night arises from the account of his 1825 visit, during which he made a point of visiting Gilpin. Unfortunately, Lafayette did not leave a personal account of the subject. It seems more likely than not that in 1825 he wanted to see a man (Gilpin) he likely met long ago and one of the few still alive nearly half a century after the battle—but with whom he probably did not stay with in 1777. Unless a new source becomes available to substantiate that Lafayette lodged with Gilpin in 1777, it is more likely he slept on the Ring property on September 10, 1777.