The battle had been in one sense a defeat for the Americans, but it had shown General Howe the fine fighting quality of Washington’s men, and the American commander had been able to save the bulk of his army, when Howe had expected to capture it entire. Today a little monument stands on a ridge near the Quaker meeting-house outside Chadd’s Ford, erected, so the inscription says, “by the citizens and school children of Chester County,” because, “on the rising ground a short distance south of this spot, Lafayette was wounded at the Battle of Brandywine, September 11, 1777.” And the monument also bears these words of Lafayette: “The honor to have mingled my blood with that of many other American soldiers on the heights of the Brandywine has been to me a source of pride and delight.” The battle-field of the Brandywine was only about twenty-six miles from Philadelphia, and the cannonade had been clearly heard in the city. The word the couriers brought filled the people with alarm; many citizens began to fly from the city and Congress took its departure, to meet at the town of York, one hundred miles to the west. The Americans wounded at the Brandywine were sent to Philadelphia, and Lafayette was conveyed there by water. From that city he was sent up the Delaware River to Bristol. There he met Henry Laurens, who had succeeded John Hancock as the president of Congress, and Laurens, being on his way to York, took Lafayette with him in his own carriage to the Old Sun Inn at Bethlehem, the quiet home of a people called the Moravians, fifty miles to the north of Philadelphia. In later times Henry Laurens, by one of those strange turns of the wheel of fate, became a prisoner in the Tower of London, and Madame de Lafayette repaid his kindness to her husband by seeking the aid of the French government to secure his release.