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Hearing reports that the British were preparing to withdraw from Philadelphia, Washington ordered a French officer in his service, Maj. Gen. Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, to reconnoiter the enemy with a Patriot force of some 2,200 soldiers. The younger French commander had already proven his valor in combat, sustaining a wound at the Battle of Brandywine last September. On 20 May, a larger British force attempted to trap Lafayette’s scouts at Barren Hill, but the French officer led his troops to safety down a little-known road while using small patrols to distract the enemy. Washington came away impressed with the young officer’s talent.
"General Washington had entrusted me to conduct a detachment of two thousand four hundred chosen men to the vicinity of Philadelphia. It would be too long to explain to you the cause, but it will suffice to tell you, that, in spite of all my precautions, I could not prevent the hostile army from making a nocturnal march, and I found myself the next morning with part of the army in front, and seven thousand men in my rear. These gentlemen were so obliging as to take measures for sending to New York those who should not be killed; but they were so kind, also, as to permit us to retire quietly, without doing us any injury. We had about six or seven killed or wounded, and they twenty-five or thirty, which did not make them amends for a march, in which one part of the army had been obliged to make forty miles."
Maj. Gen. Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette to Adrienne, Marquise de Lafayette, 16 June 1778https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8376/8376-h/8376-h.htm#link2H_4_0009