Lafayette's Toast

The stone house at the corner of West Market Street was built around seventeen fifty-one, and in the winter of seventeen seventy-seven to seventeen seventy-eight it belonged to General Horatio Gates, the hero of Saratoga. Gates was at the peak of his fame. He had just engineered one of the great American victories of the Revolution, and a group of officers and politicians believed he should replace George Washington as commander of the Continental Army.

The informal scheme was known as the Conway Cabal, named for Brigadier General Thomas Conway, an Irish-born officer in Washington's ranks who had written a private letter disparaging Washington's abilities. Into this charged atmosphere rode the Marquis de Lafayette, twenty years old, passionate, and devoted to Washington without reservation. He was invited to a dinner at the Gates house, a gathering that included men who privately hoped to ease Washington out.

At a moment when glasses were raised to toast General Gates, Lafayette lifted his own glass and called instead for a toast to George Washington, affirming that France's alliance, and his own loyalty, lay with the commander in chief. Those present, according to Lafayette's own later account, reddened with embarrassment. Within weeks, Conway resigned his commission.

Gates wrote Washington a letter of apology. The cabal dissolved. The house is now part of the York County History Center's Colonial Complex.

The house has been restored and is open to visitors as part of the museum. A toast, lifted in an unremarkable dining room in a Pennsylvania market town, may have changed the course of the war.