The Marquis de Lafayette, a French nobleman who rushed to the aid of the United States in its darkest hours, and an audacious hero of two revolutions, was born on this day in history, Sept. 6, 1757.

Lafayette — who lives in the town of Meaux, just outside of Paris — was a young French officer who, in 1777, joined the American colonies in their fight for independence from Great Britain.

The Marquis de Lafayette who first arrived on U.S. soil in South Carolina on June 13, 1777, was an unformed, untested youth of 19. In a way, he had nowhere else to go.

The nineteen-year-old Marquis de Lafayette left France in 1777 and crossed the Atlantic to support the American colonies’ fight for independence. While at sea, he wrote to his wife, “The welfare of ...

Gen. George Washington first met 19-year-old Lafayette in a Philadelphia tavern in the summer of 1777, shortly after he was commissioned as commander in chief of the Continental army by delegates ...

In 1777, at the age of twenty, the Marquis de Lafayette traveled from France to the colonies to volunteer his services with George Washington’s Continental Army.

Frenchman Lafayette fought and was injured at the Sept. 11, 1777 Battle of Brandywine and was subsequently recognized as America’s champion and hero for gaining France’s participation in the … ...

In 1777, a passionate young French aristocrat named Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, known as Marquis de Lafayette, set sail for America at just 19 years old.