Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

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 February 3, 1825

The Farewell Tour

Lafayette was a Romantic Hero, even according to the strictest definition.  The Scientific Revolution began with Rene Descartes’ “Cogito, Ergo Sum” (“I think, therefore I am”), peaked with Newton’s “Principia Mathematica,” and dissolved into the Enlightenment, that Age of Reason; the death of reason’s most ardent advocate Immanuel Kant ushered in the Romantic Movement with its emphasis on “a full life and creative work” through “liberty” of mind and imagination, says scholar M. H. Abrams.  The Romantic Hero sacrificed personal privilege and security for some greater cause, and his or her playbook was Goethe’s, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” which Napoleon said was the best book ever.  “Liberty” also spoke to the particularities of national sovereignty and prompted the iconic image of the era, Lord Byron, to fight for Greek independence against the Ottoman Empire, and for which he lost his life in early1824 at the age of 36.  Lafayette was a nexus between tradition and custom, on the one hand, and on the other the idea that one life can have broad significance; Victor Hugo, Lady Morgan, and James Fenimore Cooper were the storytellers of this age, all of whom Lafayette knew.  Another romantic hero who was coming of age was sixteen-year-old Abraham Lincoln, whose favorite authors were Lord Byron and, especially, Robert Burns.  I find no evidence they met, but Lafayette’s name surely surfaced in shoptalk at Gentry’s Store in the Indiana backwoods.

Lafayette was in Washington, D.C., for the week.  When John Quincy Adams called on him at Gadsby’s Hotel, Lafayette made a case for support of Greece’s fight for independence; perhaps he had Lord Byron in mind.  The Monroe Doctrine tended away from such entanglements, even if they were in the mold of America’s own revolutionary war.

On February 7 Lafayette attended the theater with President Monroe and General Jackson, to see “Damon and Pythias.”  Pythias is jailed and sentenced to death for criticizing the tyrant Dionysius; he is temporarily released to tidy his affairs on condition someone takes his place in jail until he returns, and who will be executed if he fails to return.  His good friend Damon volunteers, knowing his life is in jeopardy if his friend Pythias does not come back.  Dionysius is amazed that two people could have this kind of trust:  he frees both.  Very romantic.

Earlier in the day Lafayette sat for a portrait by Samuel F. B. Morse, who had travelled from his home in New Haven, Connecticut, leaving behind his wife Lucretia and three-week-old son James Edward Finley Morse, their third child.  Suddenly, while Morse was sketching Lafayette, Lucretia became ill and died, presumably of a heart attack, at the age of twenty-five.  The speed of communication was such that Lucretia had already been buried by the time her husband was notified she had died.  Years later, Morse happened to meet inventor Charles Thomas Jackson, who schooled him on the idea of electromagnetic impulses traveling over wires at great distance; ten years after Lucretia’s death, says John Becica in “Trail Tales,” Morse invented the telegraph, and three years later Morse Code.  The invention was born of tragedy.

On February 9 Lafayette was in the gallery at the Capitol.  The electoral vote declared no victor for President:  37 for Henry Clay of Kentucky; 41 for William Crawford of Georgia; 84 for John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts; and 99 for Andrew Jackson of Tennessee.  Clay was Speaker of the House, knew Jackson well and despised him, thought he was a ruffian riding on military celebrity; with the decision now thrown into the House of Representative, he decided to release his votes and encourage them to be cast for John Quincy Adams.  As consequence, Adams became the sixth President of the United States.  Jackson was livid, especially when Adams made Clay his Secretary of State.  That evening there was a party at the White House.  President Monroe, who had endorsed his Secretary of the Treasury William Crawford, hosted along with his wife and his daughters.  Clay, Adams, and Jackson arrived.  Lafayette was the unifying influence; adversaries were cordial.      

William Crawford did not attend the party as he was paralyzed from his stroke.  Lafayette in a very kind gesture paid him a visit at home.  There were many who thought Crawford would not survive the year.  In fact, he died nine years later, four months after Lafayette.

The next night a celebratory ball with 500 militia officers hosted by President Monroe and President-Elect John Quincy Adams.  Lafayette was guest of honor.