This volume, the fifth in a distinguished and admired series, includes correspondence with George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Henry Knox, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Patrick Henry, French foreign minister Vergennes, Spanish foreign minister Floridablanca, and Lafayette 's wife, Adrienne. The book opens with Lafayette's return to France after Yorktown to press the benefits of that victory. Displaying his role as Franklin 's "political aide-de-camp" in the diplomatic negotiations that culminated in the treaty of peace, the documents also give evidence of his personal mediation with members of the French government as well as with the King. The documents chronicling his tour of America in 1784 clearly show that Lafayette intended it to be more than a triumphal display. They reveal his desire to promote in the individual states as well as among the American people at large a sense of unity that would produce a stronger government and thus ensure the survival of those liberties for which Lafayette had been struggling. The volume ends with clear evidence that his interest did not wane with the close of the war but found renewed vigor in his determination to secure and extend those "rights of mankind" that he espoused.

The fourth volume in this distinguished series is a documentary chronicle of the 1781 campaign that culminated in the October surrender of Cornwallis and his army to the joint American and French forces at Yorktown. As leader of the American troops in Virginia from April through September 1781, Lafayette played a major role in planning this campaign; the greatest American victory of the war was also an outstanding personal triumph. In this volume Lafayette's correspondents include American military figures such as Washington, Greene, Steuben, and Wayne; the British commanders Phillips and Cornwallis; and such civil authorities as Jefferson, Thomas Nelson, William Davies, and Thomas Sim Lee. Their exchanges provide a vivid picture, with all the immediacy and authenticity that only documents can give, of the problems and frustrations of the campaign, and they draw attention to the specific decisions that led to the allied containment of the British forces.

Volume IV