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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 February 10, 1825

The Farewell Tour

Lafayette knew firsthand the hurt of losing someone close.  After thirty-four years of marriage his wife Adrienne died on December 24, 1807, and the emptiness never went away.  The first of the week he wrote a sincere note of condolence to Samuel F. B. Morse on the recent death of his wife Lucretia.  “I have feared to intrude upon you, my dear sir,” he wrote, “but want to tell you how deeply I sympathize in your grief, a grief which nobody can better than me appreciate the real feelings.”

On the evening of February 11, he went to the Washington Theater to see Mr. Keene perform as Thomas Meadows in the play, “Love Is a Village.”  Rosetta, in the play, is betrothed to Thomas Meadows, whom she has neither seen nor met.  Rosetta and Thomas, independently, fear a melancholy match.  She runs away, takes employ as a chambermaid for Judge Woodcock; Thomas likewise runs away, takes employ as a gardener for the very same Judge Woodcock.  They meet and fall in love.  But they are discovered, forced to live up to the original commitment to marry pre-arranged suitors, and at last happy to find out they were betrothed to one another all along.  Today’s critique renders the play contrived and sentimental, but in keeping with popular romance of the time.

The next day he visited, once again, William H. Crawford.  Crawford was from Georgia.  James Madison appointed him minister to France 1813-1815, during Napoleon’s rule of the First French Empire; Lafayette and he became acquainted then.  His stroke in 1823 left him paralyzed and partially blind, unable to attend festivities marking the election of John Quincy Adams, which prompted Lafayette to pay his respects personally.

Lafayette wrote to his friend in Philadelphia, Judge Richard Peters to ask, “Do you believe the purchase of a steamboat such as the ‘Robert Fulton’ in New York would find encouragement in Philadelphia?”  Robert Fulton, a painter of portraits and landscapes by trade, launched the “North River Steamboat,” known officially as the “Claremont,” unofficially as “Fulton’s Folly,” in a highly successful commercial venture:  it travelled the Hudson River from New York to Albany and back, 300 miles in 62 hours.  Before this, while living in Paris, he invented the first submarine, the “Nautilus.” Powered by a hand-crank, it could submerge for seventeen minutes in twenty-five feet of water.  He abandoned development when Napoleon declined to subsidize it.  Fulton is buried in Trinity Church Cemetery on Wall Street, not far from the graves of Alexander Hamilton and Albert Gallatin.

Inventions interested Lafayette.  He was a member of the American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin, and to which he, Lafayette, was inducted January 19, 1781.  He wrote to inform the Society of the hot-air balloon ascent from the lawn of Versailles, carrying in its basket a sheep, a duck, and a rooster, orchestrated by the Montgolfier brothers, which launched an age of air travel.  He was much taken by a man, identified only as “D,” who promised to use “elastic shoes” to walk across the Seine River on January 1, 1784; once on the other side, “D” would collect proceeds, to which Lafayette had contributed considerably.  The man sank; proceeds were given to charity.  On August 12, 1784, Lafayette gave a talk to twenty-two members of the APS at Carpenters’ Hall, Philadelphia, on “Mesmerism.”

His inquiry to Judge Peters was in this same vein.  Peters had been the secretary of the Continental Board of War and Lafayette had come to know him during the “Albany Campaign” of 1778.  Peters’ grandson helped found Marthasville, which later changed its name to Atlanta, Georgia; his great-grandson Edward Peters owned a sizable segment of what is today Midtown Atlanta.  I do not know how Judge Peters replied to Lafayette’s inquiry.

On February 15 Lafayette declined an invitation to dine with President-elect John Quincy Adams.  He and his son George learned of the death in Paris of Mme de Tracy, George’s mother-in-law.  George and Emilie Destutt de Tracy were married June, 1802.  Her father was Antoine Destutt de Tracy, who coined the term “Ideology,” and defined it as “the science of ideas.”  Lafayette was not an intellectual, but according to Lloyd Kramer, after 1800 he began to read books and periodicals on history and politics.  His mentors, with whom he corresponded, included Benjamin Constant, Jeremy Bentham, and Tracy.  Tracy and Lafayette served together in the Estates General and the National Assembly.  Tracy was a cavalry officer under Lafayette’s command in 1792; he was imprisoned for a year during the Reign of Terror.  Mme de Tracy supported her husband’s vagaries for over forty years.