Scope and Content Note
The papers of Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau (1725-1807) are bound in fifteen volumes dated 1777-1794. There is one volume of manuscript histories covering some of the Revolutionary War years; five volumes of correspondence and other papers concentrated in the 1780s; and nine letterbook volumes, 1780-1784, containing copies of letters to and from the comte de Rochambeau and relating chiefly to the Revolutionary War. There is also a sixteenth-century volume that consists of a partial inventory 1 of the papers and correspondence with the Library of Congress about their sale.
The manuscript histories in Volume 1 consist of a 212 page memoir entitled “Histoire de l’Origine, & des Progrès de la Guerre . . . 1763 . . . 1780" (an incomplete manuscript which covers only the period up to 1778) and a 49-page manuscript entitled "Mémoire de la guerre en amérique en 1780" (which covers the period July 1780 to October 1781).
Among the other notable items in the papers are the extant records of the French branch of the Society of the Cincinnati in the eighteenth century and Rochambeau’s correspondence with George Washington. 2 Rochambeau’s letters to Washington are written chiefly after his return to France and discuss the French Society of the Cincinnati and contemporary affairs, particularly the financial and other problems of the French government. Washington’s letters to Rochambeau (17 of the 36 are holographs) are dated 1782-1790 and discuss primarily social and friendly matters.
Other prominent correspondents in the Rochambeau papers include King Louis XVI of France; the French minister of war, Alexandre Marie Léonor de Saint Mauris, Prince de Montbarey; Philippe Henri, marquis de Ségur; Nathanael Greene; Benjamin Tallmadge; Charles Gravier, marquis de Vergennes; Anne-César, chevalier de La Luzerne; Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse; Charles Hector, comte d'Estaing; Chevalier Charles Destouches Andrault, comte et marquis de Langeron; Sir Henry Clinton; and Robert Digby.
A letter of La Pérouse to Rochambeau, dated April 2, 1781, recounting his interview with George Washington is in volume 3, microfilm reel 1, following the printed page papers of Rochambeau, 1763-1794.
1. The Inventory was prepared in the 1870s prior to the Library's acquisition of the papers; it is incomplete.
2. According to Arnold Whitridge in his book Rochambeau (New York, Macmillan, 1965), the Rochambeau-Washington correspondence has never been published.