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Editor’s Note: This year marks the Bicentennial, 2024-2025, of Lafayette and his farewell tour, “Guest of the Nation”, which took place August 15, 1824-September 7, 1825. To commemorate the occasion, the LaGrange Daily News will be publishing a series of columns by Richard Ingram, a longtime resident of LaGrange and Chair of Friends of Lafayette.

Week of December 16, 1824

It is a wonder, which is to say I marvel at the welling-up of gratitude for Lafayette.  It was not a sentiment isolated to region, faction, or class, nor was it a milquetoast affair; it was spirited and genuine.  Lafayette gave occasion to express the pride of patriotism, which Charles de Gaulle would later define:  “When love of your country comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.”  Though mindful of its blemishes, the country did not see itself as defined by them, instead united by ideals still fresh and lively, even by those lacking access to the front row; hope was a ballast in a way we have never seen since. 

On December 20, 1824, the congressional committee responsible for devising an award to Lafayette “worthy of the nation that wanted to offer it to him,” rendered its recommendation.  Lafayette was to be gifted $200,000 in stock, returning six percent interest and redeemable in 1834.  In addition, a township of fertile public land, the location to be determined by the President.  On July 4, 1825, President John Quincy Adams deeded to Lafayette one township—23000 acres, 36 square miles—in central Leon County, in the territory of Florida, near its capital Tallahassee (which was established as capital just the year before).  The surveyor’s map is signed by Paul McCormick of the Surveyor General’s Office and records the plot as “Township 1 North Range 1 East.”  Lafayette never set foot on his land.  By 1855, twenty-one years after his death, the land had been parceled and sold and was no longer part of his legacy.  The trail of cashflow is unclear.

Lafayette was gracious.  He thought about refusing, but the spirit of the gift was not as though it was payment out of obligation, not as though the nation would be embarrassed at not having done it; it was a forthright expression of gratitude.  Refusal would have been awkward.  When, however, the states of Virginia, Maryland, and New York made overtures to up the ante and make contributions of their own, Lafayette “curbed this excess of gratitude,” according to his secretary Levasseur.  The Farewell Tour was not a self-serving pageant in service to personal fortune; Lafayette did not want even the appearance of what would to him have been an unforgivable impropriety. He thwarted the piling on of financial emoluments.

Seven votes in the Senate, nineteen in the House, tallied against the gift, not to its intent but in its form; the loyal opposition argued in favor of alternate means of funding.  These twenty-six became the objects of public persecution, demonized and vilified.  They felt compelled to explain themselves to Lafayette:  their votes in no way assessed the sincerity of their gratitude.  Lafayette took no offense; said, in fact, had he been among them, in position to vote, the calculus would have come to twenty-seven.  Lafayette had an intuitive sense of diplomacy.

Jefferson held Lafayette in high regard, knew him well.  Jefferson’s “pen portrait of Lafayette,” as Fred Kaplan phrased it, was incisive and perceptive: “His foible is a canine-appetite for popularity and fame.  But he will get above this.”  Lafayette did not get over it, but he did rise above it.  He did not merely like, he enjoyed the applause, and his replies were heartfelt.  Adulation was a receipt for glory.  But his celebrity did not supplant his purpose as an apostle of liberty. 

Lafayette spent much of the week at Annapolis, capital of the state of Maryland, having been invited by the state legislature.  His history with Annapolis dated to March 9, 1781, aboard “The Dolphin,” when he exited the Elk River into the Chesapeake, on to Annapolis at the mouth of the Severn River.  Annapolis was springboard to Virginia where he arrived for the first time March 14, 1781, having been ordered by General Washington to irritate Lord Cornwallis, the proximate animations toward Yorktown.  Annapolis was also where Lafayette and Washington saw each other for the last time, December 1, 1784, as Lafayette completed his four-month-five-state visit.  Finally, and significantly, Annapolis was the interim capital of the colonial confederation 1783-1784; it was in the Maryland Statehouse on December 23, 1783, that General Washington resigned his commission, surrendering power and position.  This, said King George III made him the “greatest man of the age.”  Lafayette was not there then, but he knew well what the deed meant.

Back in Washington, and managed among receptions, balls, and banquets, Lafayette sat for oil sketches by Samuel Finley Breese Morse, better known as inventor of the telegraph and the Morse Code, but his day job was painting.  Morse believed that “character was revealed in the shape of a person’s head and features.”  Morse painted Lafayette atop a set of steps, sunset in the background; three pedestals to his right, the first with a bust of Benjamin Franklin, the second with George Washington, and the third vacant, presumably to be filled by Lafayette’s own likeness.  A vase to his left grows helianthus, otherwise known as a sunflower, in heliotrope mode.  (The sunflower is, incidentally, interestingly, the National Flower of Ukraine.)  This was neither the last, nor the most celebrated of portraits of Lafayette.