Lafayette (right) and Washington at Valley Forge. By John Ward Dunsmore (1907)
America stood poised on the cusp of celebrating the golden anniversary of its birth as a nation. With all the rising patriotism came a burst of nostalgia. America’s first and greatest generation—the heroes of the Revolutionary War—were fast leaving their mortal coil. The heirs of that founding cohort desperately wanted one last chance to hear the tales of that victory from those that were there.
Of all the people they might select to focus on, why choose a Frenchman born to the aristocracy?
Well, for one thing, his life story shows he had long ago shorn off the mantle of gentry. Indeed, he not only had the physical scars of Brandywine to prove it, he also had the Continue Reading “Lafayette’s Farewell Tour: Why Lafayette?”
Lafayette’s Farewell Tour: Overview Of His 1824-1825 American Visit (Part II)
Marquis de Lafayette commemerative announcing, “The Nation’s Guest. In Commemoration of the Magnanimous and Illustrious Lafayette’s Visit to the United States of North America in the Forty-Ninth Year of Her Independence,” Perkins and Scheffer (1825). Source: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Once again, only this time with greater speed, Lafayette marched through Virginia. That did not mean Lafayette didn’t have spare time for the local folk. Levasseur provides the following anecdote from a few miles outside of Norfolk, Virginia. It expresses the feelings for the General shared by almost every American during his tour:
“We were sitting in our carriage when the landlord presented himself, asked to see the general, and eagerly pressed him to alight for a moment and come into his house. ‘If,’ said he, ‘you have only five minutes to stay, do not refuse them, since to me they will be so many minutes of happiness.’ The general yielded to his entreaty, and we followed him into a lower room, where we observed a plainness bordering on poverty, but a remarkable degree of cleanliness. Welcome Lafayette, was inscribed with charcoal upon the white wall, enwreathed with boughs from the fir trees of the neighbouring wood. Near the fire-place, where pine wood was crackling, stood a small table covered with a very clean Continue Reading “Lafayette’s Farewell Tour: Overview Of His 1824-1825 American Visit (Part II)”