Lafayette (70 page)

Monroe’s invitation not only insulted King Louis XVIII, it convinced some members of his court that America was plotting to seize the French West Indies and appoint Lafayette governor. The king made Lafayette’s departure as unpleasant as possible by ordering troops on horseback to disperse the crowd that gathered with the American consul at quayside to see him off at Le Havre. Although Congress had offered to bring him to America aboard a navy frigate, he deemed it undemocratic to use such a vessel for his personal use and booked passage on an American merchantman with George, his secretary August Lavasseur, and his valet.

In contrast to the disagreeable scene at Le Havre, dozens of ships jammed New York Harbor, their masts and stays aflutter with flags and ensigns. Guns boomed and church bells pealed from all directions, and tens
of thousands lined the shores to cheer him as his ship passed by. Thirty thousand greeted him on lower Manhattan when he landed; fifty thousand more awaited on Broadway to see the huge procession that would escort him up to City Hall. At the foot of the gangway, a group of veterans in patched-up, ill-fitting old uniforms stood as straight as their crooked old limbs allowed. As he passed before them, each snapped out his name and company, and the battle where he had served with the marquis: “Monmouth, sir”; “Barren Hill, sir”; “Brandywine, sir” . . . It was all too much for the old man, and he burst into tears. He turned to his son for solace. More than forty years had passed; he felt helpless for a moment—old and lame, without his sword or rifle, without his general’s uniform, without his youth.

But the cannon booms, the pealing church bells, and the cheering crowds revived him, and he climbed into the mayor’s magnificent open carriage to begin the procession. The “Guards of Lafayette”—young, elite volunteers—stood in smart parade dress to lead the way; each wore a broad bandoleer marked “Welcome La Fayette.” The procession up Broadway to City Hall—normally a twenty-minute walk—took two hours. Horse guards led the way, troops marched, bands played, flags and bunting blanketed the buildings. Storms of flower petals rained from every window and rooftop. The mayor and other dignitaries welcomed him to City Hall, where he stood for two more hours shaking hands until his own were raw. As darkness enveloped the city, fireworks lit the sky, and spectacular illuminations set the city’s public buildings aglow. Lafayette was guest of honor at a spectacular “Lafayette Ball” that evening on Castle Island, an otherwise forbidding fortress at the southern tip of New York Island (Manhattan). Hundreds of workers and artists had transformed it into what newspapers described as “a fairy zone . . . such as we read of in oriental tales,”
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surrounded by thirty-foot-tall scrims illuminated from the rear. One bore a huge portrait of Lafayette, another a breathtaking view of the château at La Grange. Adjustable lighting changed the shading and colors of the château each hour to simulate a full day there, from dawn to dusk. A third transparency showed Lafayette and Washington standing in a red, white, and blue “Temple of Liberty.” Musicians composed waltzes and marches to honor him, and five thousand guests came to what was, for the moment, unquestionably the most elaborate formal banquet and ball ever staged in America.

New York celebrated Lafayette’s presence for four days and nights, almost continuously. Americans had never seen anything like it. He spent two hours each afternoon greeting the public at City Hall—trying to shake every hand in the endless line. Some waited all night to see him. They came from every walk of life: weeping veterans hobbled up to kiss his hand and ask, “Sir, do you remember . . . ?” (And he always said he did.) Women brought their babies for him to bless; fathers led their sons into the past,
into American history, to touch the hand of a Founding Father. It was a mystical experience they would relate to their heirs through generations to come. Lafayette had materialized from a distant age, the last leader and hero at the nation’s defining moment. They knew they and the world would never see his kind again.

After four exhausting days and nights, he and his party left on what they hoped would be a tranquil carriage ride through the New England countryside to Boston, with restful stops at quiet wayside inns. But crowds lined every inch of the route. At the approach to every town and village, militiamen, cavalrymen, and fife-and-drum corps waited to escort him into town—by torchlight if necessary. They waited in the hot sun and driving rain; they waited through the night and lit the town with bonfires to greet him. Regardless of the hour, church bells tolled his arrival, and militiamen fired thirteen-shot salutes from the town cannon or their own muskets. The pastor of every church welcomed him with a prayer and the mayor of every town with a speech; then, after a reverential silence, Lafayette limped front and center to address the townspeople.

My obligations to the United States, ladies and gentlemen, far surpass the services I was able to render. These date back to the time when I had the good fortune to be adopted by the United States as one of her young soldiers, as a beloved son. The approbation of the American people . . . is the greatest reward I can receive. I have stood strong and held my head high whenever, in their name, I have proclaimed the American principles of liberty, equality and social order. I have devoted myself to these principles since I was a boy, and they will remain a sacred obligation to me until I take my final breath. . . . The greatness and prosperity of the United States are spreading the light of civilization across the world—a civilization based on liberty and resistance to oppression, with political institutions based on the rights of man and republican principles of government by the people.
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His message could not have come at a better time in America’s history, and it generated a patriotic fervor that swept the nation. Lafayette had arrived ten years after America’s victory over Britain in the War of 1812. President Monroe’s election two years later had set off an “Era of Good Feeling,” with a vast westward expansion that added six states to the Union and six stars to the flag, and produced unprecedented economic development that enriched every home and transformed the nation into the most prosperous on earth. The land was awash in optimism as it approached the fiftieth anniversary of independence; Americans were enjoying, as never before, the fruits of freedom that Lafayette and the other Founding Fathers had won for them. Besides venerating him for his role in the Revolution, they venerated him as a missionary of America’s republican principles—a heroic opponent of tyranny
who had suffered the worst cruelties in the Old World for his love of the New World. His visit not only revived American patriotism, it reminded Americans of their good fortune as the only people on earth with the freedom to govern themselves and their nation. In celebrating Lafayette, they were celebrating themselves and their nation as they had never done before and would never again do in their lifetimes.

“Sir, America loves you,” proclaimed the mayor of a small town that welcomed him on his way to Boston.

“Sir,” Lafayette replied, “I truly love America.” And so he did.
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The two-day trip to Boston took four days, with Lafayette sometimes spending what was left of each night in a hotel or public lodging house, but just as often as the guest of prominent citizens and political and military leaders. It was two o’clock in the morning when he reached the outskirts of Boston, where Governor William Eustis of Massachusetts awaited with a procession of torch-lit carriages—and an explosion of rockets—to welcome Lafayette to his country home for the night. After only two hours’ sleep, cannon booms and the blare of a band startled Lafayette from his sleep. On the lawn outside his window he saw the Lafayette Light Infantry in parade dress, complete with their distinctive red and black plumes.

“My brave Light Infantry!” he cried out to George. “That is exactly how their uniforms looked. What courage! How I loved them!” An imaginative commander of a company of riflemen had reproduced the old uniforms and arranged the surprise.
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It took Lafayette’s procession two hours to weave its way through the crowds that clogged the two-mile route to Boston. They passed through a succession of twenty-four triumphal arches—one for each state—built of wood frames, covered with stretched canvas, painted to look like granite blocks. Almost 75,000 packed Boston’s narrow streets as Lafayette proceeded, amid the thunder of booming cannons and clapping church bells, to the State House to address the legislature. He spent three weeks in the Boston area, visiting Massachusetts coastal towns and Portsmouth, New Hampshire—and sharing Sunday dinner with the eighty-nine-year-old John Adams in Quincy. In the most important of the many Masonic receptions, he was elevated to the thirty-third degree and named Honorary Grand Master of the Supreme Council of the Northern United States before two thousand brother Masons, who invited him to return the following June 17 to lay the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument.

“Liberty, brotherhood and goodwill to man are the symbols of Freemasonry,” he responded. “May the practice of these principles forever earn us the esteem of humanity’s friends and reproof of its enemies.”
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Every city tried to outdo the previous city’s celebration. Learning of Boston’s extravagant festivities, New York outdid its own first reception when Lafayette returned by staging an even larger and grander formal ball at Castle Garden. And in its determination to surpass both New York and Boston, Philadelphia added huge floats to its procession, one for every trade—and twenty thousand marchers, who tramped beneath thirteen elaborate triumphal arches, one for each of the original states.

Lafayette’s visit actually saved Independence Hall and generated the first effort in America to restore and preserve historic sites for future generations.
The hall had stood empty and rotting in the twenty-five years since Congress had moved to Washington City, but the prospect of Lafayette’s visit forced Philadelphia to restore it, to provide Lafayette with a place to greet the public. Lafayette received visitors in the room in which the Founding Fathers—many of them his friends—had signed the Declaration of Independence. In addition to encouraging the preservation of historic sites, Lafayette’s visit generated a surge of monument construction—until then, not a customary public art form in the United States. As a Mason, he laid the cornerstones for monuments to Revolutionary War heroes in almost every city he visited—to his old friend “Baron” de Kalb in Camden, South Carolina; to Pulaski in Savanna, Georgia; and to his beloved Nathanael Greene, also in Savannah. Lafayette’s tour generated a vast expansion in various arts and crafts. The communities he visited commissioned artists to paint his portrait for their municipal buildings, schools, and Masonic lodges—and to reproduce them in various sizes for books or souvenirs to sell to the public. A huge and altogether new souvenir industry emerged, with hundreds of artists and craftsmen working day and night to meet the demand for mementos of his visit. They produced medallions, scarves, handkerchiefs, sashes, gloves, fans, bowls, jugs, plates, furniture—many of fine quality—bearing his name and image. Writers, poets, and songsmiths produced stories, poems, and songs about him, including “Companion of Washington,” “Prisoner of Olmütz,” “The Nation’s Guest,” and the popular “Lafayette March.”

What began as a four-month tour would stretch into a thirteen-month triumphal procession over six thousand miles, through all twenty-four states, from New Hampshire to South Carolina, across the south to New Orleans and up the Mississippi by steamboat to St. Louis. Crowds of fifty thousand to one hundred thousand turned out to see and cheer him in every city; even small towns drew throngs of ten thousand or more from miles around. From St. Louis, he traveled through Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania, then up to Buffalo and Niagara Falls, before returning east.

Lafayette made several detours on his travels. One was on the way from New York to Philadelphia, to visit and reminisce with Joseph Bonaparte at the latter’s astonishing re-creation of a French château at Bordentown, New Jersey. And, on the way from Philadelphia to Washington City, he stopped to show his son the scenes of his heroics at Brandywine. Despite his denials, Americans insisted on believing that his limp came from his wound at Brandywine. After an emotional reunion with President Monroe, Lafayette went to an even more emotional—and tearful—visit to Mount Vernon and the tombs of George and Martha Washington. The Washingtons and Custises he had known as children forty years earlier gathered about him with their own children and grandchildren. Martha’s grandson, the playwright George Washington Custis, presented him with a
ring containing a lock of Washington’s hair, which is now on display at Chavaniac.