Lafayette (71 page)

In Washington City, as it was called then, the simplicity of “the presidential palace” and the president’s blue suit stunned Lafayette’s secretary, Lavasseur, who expected “those puerile ornaments which so many simple ninnies wear in the ante-chambers of the palaces of Europe.”
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Not a sentinel or guard was in sight when they walked to the entrance of the white Georgian mansion; a lone servant let them in and showed them to the Cabinet Room. Monroe had hoped Lafayette would sleep at the Executive Mansion, but “the people of Washington claim you; they say you are the guest of the nation, and that they only have a right to entertain you.” Although the arrangements committee had prepared a lavish suite at a hotel, the president promised Lafayette, “Your plate will always be laid at my table, and I hope that whenever you have no other engagement you will dine with me.”
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They came for breakfast the following morning and to a formal dinner that evening with cabinet members, the justices of the Supreme Court, and high-ranking naval and military officers.

On October 19 Lafayette reached the ruins of Yorktown for the celebration of the anniversary of Cornwallis’s surrender—at George Washington’s actual tent. At the dinner and ball that evening, he paid tribute to his “brothers” Hamilton and Laurens and his “adoptive father,” Washington. From Yorktown, he went to Richmond and then to Monticello for a reunion with the enfeebled, eighty-one-year-old Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson hobbled down the steps of the entrance to greet his old friend; the two embraced and cried. At sunset, they rejoiced at the unexpected arrival of the seventy-four-year-old James Madison. Madison wrote that he found Lafayette “much increased in bulk,” while Lafayette wrote that he found Jefferson “much aged.” The next day, the three friends drove to Charlottesville to see Jefferson’s magnum opus, the University of Virginia, the great secular institution that Jefferson had founded and which he ranked with the Declaration of Independence and Virginia’s statute of religious freedom as his three greatest achievements. He had designed its buildings and lawns and created its innovative curriculum—by far the broadest in America, with instruction in every area of science and mathematics, five modern and three ancient languages, the arts and letters, political science, law, economics, history, and international affairs—but, purposely, no religion.

When one university dignitary expressed surprise at Lafayette’s command of English, he snapped back, “And why would I not speak English? I am an American, after all—just back from a long visit to Europe.”
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Lafayette spent ten days with Jefferson before leaving for Montpelier and four days with Madison and his wife, Dolley. After Lafayette left, Jefferson had to replenish almost all the red wines in his cellar.

Although Lafayette was inundated with more than four hundred invitations to visit the rest of the south and west, the approaching winter would make most roads impassable, and he postponed the rest of his tour until spring. He spent December, January, and February in the nation’s capital, witnessing the climax of the most contentious presidential election Americans had ever witnessed—with four candidates, whose vicious rhetoric raised sectional differences to levels that threatened Congress with political schisms not seen since pre-Union days during the Confederation. General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, won the popular vote, but neither he nor any one of the other three candidates—Secretary of State John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and Speaker of the House Henry Clay of Kentucky—won a majority of electoral votes on December 1. The House of Representatives would have to select the president.

Again, Lafayette’s presence proved fortuitous for the nation. The four candidates had little choice but to put aside their differences to celebrate their nation’s independence and Lafayette’s heroism when he arrived to address a joint session of Congress on December 10. As he entered the great hall, two thousand people rose as one to cheer the great knight. The feuding presidential candidates rose with them, as did the justices of the Supreme Court, leaders of the army and navy, and the entire diplomatic corps, with one exception: the French ambassador was absent.

Three days after his speech, President Monroe asked Congress to compensate “the Nation’s Guest” for his services and sacrifices to the nation. Although the arrangements committee was paying all his expenses on his current tour, he had spent half his fortune on the American Revolution, lost the rest in the French Revolution, and had spent much of the capital that Adrienne had recovered to finance the abortive revolution of the Charbonniers. He would have to live thereafter on the volatile proceeds of his farm. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison both supported the proposal, and Congress granted him $200,000 in government bonds yielding 6 percent annually and redeemable in ten years. It also awarded him a township of about thirty-six square miles of unsold public lands in Florida, on the southern Georgia border near Tallahassee, which it named La Grange Township.

On New Year’s Day, Congress gave a banquet in Lafayette’s honor; the four feuding candidates were there. The president, who would soon retire after eight years, broke with tradition and also attended, and the dinner began with Henry Clay’s toast to Monroe. After a portrait of Lafayette was presented to the Congress, Clay raised his glass to Lafayette: “To the great apostle of liberty whom the persecutions of tyranny could not defeat, whom the love of riches could not influence, whom popular applause could never
seduce. He was always the same, in the shackles of Olmütz, in his various labors on the summits of power and glory.”
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Lafayette stood to reply with a toast “to the perpetual union of the United States. It has always saved us in times of storm; one day it will save the world.”
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His prescient words embarrassed the candidates into softening the tones of their bitter rhetoric. On February 9, 1825, the House of Representatives elected John Quincy Adams president. Some Jackson supporters had threatened violence, and foreign diplomats were gleefully predicting the collapse of the American republic, but at President Monroe’s reception for the president-elect at the Executive Mansion, Andrew Jackson appeared and stepped forward, his hand outstretched, to congratulate John Quincy Adams and pledge his loyal support. Lafayette beamed with satisfaction as he watched the promise of American liberty and republican self-government fulfilled. The French knight was content: liberty in America was secure.

In March, he began touring southern and western states, spending a few days each in the major cities of North and South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The governors greeted him in every state capital, and Masonic lodges sponsored banquets in every town. He all but exploded with pride in North Carolina, where he visited the first American town named in his honor—Fayetteville. In the years that followed his visit, Americans would rename more than six hundred villages, towns, cities, counties, mountains, lakes, rivers, educational institutions, and other landmarks for him or his château at La Grange.

His trip across the south exhausted the old knight. The bumpy, rutted roads and primitive wagon trails sent his carriage or stagecoach lurching unpredictably and left him ill, often too shaken to eat or sleep. In contrast, the two-week steamboat ride up the Mississippi from New Orleans was a delight. The
Natchez
was a luxuriously appointed boat, its lounge an ornate hotel lobby with rich oriental rugs, oil paintings, and chandeliers. It carried a famous New Orleans chef, an orchestra, and a large staff of maids and butlers that saw to the passengers’ every need. The magnificent river journey had completely rejuvenated him by the time he reached St. Louis at the end of April. He all but fainted, however, at the governor’s banquet when a young man approached, looking every bit like the ghost of the young Alexander Hamilton. It was Hamilton’s son.

From St. Louis, the
Natchez
steamed to the Ohio and up to the mouth of the Cumberland River, where the Lafayette party switched to a smaller steamboat for the trip to Nashville, Tennessee. General Andrew Jackson, the hero of New Orleans, greeted the Hero of Two Worlds in full parade dress, with the Tennessee militia. Lafayette spent three days at Jackson’s “Hermitage” mansion, with Jackson showing him every inch of his huge farm and discussing the latest agricultural techniques.

Two days after Lafayette resumed his trip upriver, an enormous jolt awakened him at midnight. The boat had run aground and was sinking. George and Lavasseur rushed into Lafayette’s cabin, led him topside to the rail, and lowered him carefully into a lifeboat—a job made difficult because of his stiff leg. After rowing him to the Kentucky shore, they helped the captain and crew evacuate the ship before its hull sank into the Ohio River mud. Although everyone aboard escaped uninjured, all their possessions were lost—including (much to his relief) more than six hundred unanswered letters Lafayette had accumulated during his American tour. They spent the rest of the night huddled around huge bonfires, and early the next morning, another steamboat, bound for New Orleans, stopped to rescue them. When the owner learned Lafayette’s identity, he put about and took the stranded passengers to Louisville, Kentucky.

From Kentucky, the Lafayette troupe went to Indiana, Ohio, western Pennsylvania—with a special visit to Fayette County—and up to Buffalo and Niagara Falls, where the chief of the Senecas greeted him. He returned east to Albany on the amazing new New York State Barge Canal—then one of the wonders of the world—and he arrived in Boston in time to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Two hundred thousand lined the roads as the procession began, led by eight open carriages, each carrying five veterans of the Battle of Bunker Hill—forty in all. Seven thousand troops marched behind them in parade dress. Lafayette followed in a huge open carriage drawn by six splendid white horses. George and Lavasseur followed in a second carriage, while a third carriage carried the day’s principal orator, the golden-tongued Massachusetts representative Daniel Webster. Fifteen thousand waited in the wooden amphitheater built around the crest of the hill, where the city’s Order of Masons awaited. As Right Worshipful Grand Master, Lafayette took the silver trowel and laid the cornerstone. A pastor, a veteran of Bunker Hill, gave the benediction; then a huge choir exploded into “Old Hundred”:

O is not this a holy spot?

’Tis the high place of Freedom’s birth;

God of Our Fathers! Is it not

The holiest spot of all the earth?
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Tears streamed down Lafayette’s face as Webster began his address, directing the first part to the veterans of Bunker Hill before turning to Lafayette:

You are connected with both hemispheres and with two generations. Heaven saw fit to ordain that the electric spark of liberty should be conducted, through you, from the New World to the Old; and we, who are now here to perform this duty of patriotism, have all of us long ago received it in charge from our fathers to cherish your name and your virtues.
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After Webster finished, the choir exploded into song, praising God and America; the cannons boomed, church bells pealed; and, as participants prepared to leave, Lafayette asked for a canvas sack and carefully troweled it full of soil from Bunker Hill to carry back to France. After the huge banquet that followed, Lafayette wrote to his children in La Grange “of the most beautiful patriotic fête ever celebrated. Nothing can compare to it except the
Fédération
of ’90. . . . Nothing can describe the effect of that republican prayer pronounced before an immense multitude. . . . I stood up at the head of all the other Revolutionary soldiers. . . . We sat down at a table with four thousand others, where I said that after celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of freedom in the American hemisphere, the toast of the next such anniversary will be to Europe’s freedom.”
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Before leaving Boston, Lafayette returned to Quincy to say farewell to John Adams, then went off to Maine and Vermont to fulfill his pledge to visit all twenty-four states. He laid the cornerstone of the University of Vermont at Burlington, then took the midnight steamboat down Lake Champlain, and another down the Hudson from Albany to New York, where he arrived on July 4. He laid the cornerstone of the public library in Brooklyn, where heaps of stones blocked the view of a group of children. Some of the men lifted them up to see, and Lafayette swept one six-year-old boy into his arms, kissed his cheek, and set him down to watch as he laid the cornerstone. The boy’s name was Walter Whitman.

Lafayette spent ten days in New York, returned to Philadelphia, revisited the Germantown and Brandywine battlefields, and went for a month’s stay at the White House in Washington as President John Quincy Adams’s personal guest. They were old friends: Lafayette had known the president when Adams was a winsome boy of fifteen living with his father in Paris and called simply Quincy. Adams allowed his aging friend to rest after his long trip; he scheduled no receptions or banquets and went along with Lafayette when the latter wanted to revisit his three old friends in Virginia—Monroe, Jefferson, and Madison. All knew it was the last time they would ever see each other. Thomas Jefferson died ten months later, on July 4, 1826, as did the president’s father, John Adams, on the very same day, in Quincy, Massachusetts.

John Quincy Adams insisted on Lafayette’s remaining at the White House for an official celebration of the Frenchman’s sixty-eighth birthday on September 6. Although presidents never offered toasts, Adams broke with protocol and raised his glass “to the 22nd of February and the 6th of September, the birthday of Washington and the birthday of Lafayette.” Lafayette responded, “To the 4th of July, the birthday of liberty.”
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Washington City declared a holiday the following morning to say goodbye to the last living general of the Revolutionary War. A huge, silent crowd
encircled the White House; the president and the members of the cabinet all awaited Lafayette’s appearance. Finally he arrived, and the president, his voice trembling, said farewell on behalf of the American people: