James Armistead Lafayette

James Armistead was enslaved in New Kent County, Virginia, when he received permission to serve the Marquis de Lafayette in 1781. He went into the British camps around Yorktown as a servant and a pair of ears. The intelligence he sent out — on Cornwallis's strength and intentions — was the kind of news a besieging army cannot buy with a frontal assault.

After the surrender he went home still enslaved. Virginia law did not free a man for having outsmarted a British general. Lafayette wrote on his behalf. In 1787 the General Assembly passed a manumission. James took the surname Lafayette, which is a fact of gratitude and of the limited ways a freed man could write himself into the record.

He lived as a farmer in Virginia and died about 1830. An 1824 portrait from life exists from Lafayette's return visit; later prints copy it. This page uses a public-domain likeness and does not pretend it is a battlefield photograph.

The Revolution promised liberty in a document. Armistead extracted a piece of it by doing the most dangerous work in camp and then waiting six years for the paper that should have followed the work.