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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 24, 1825

The Farewell Tour

Lafayette could have been King of France.  In 1830 his reputation and popularity made the crown his for the asking, but he turned it down.  He is criticized for talking liberty without assuming the trappings of power necessary to move it along.  It’s a fair criticism, but it underestimates his commitment to the idea of liberty; he was not, as Frank Bruni says, “Ideologically elastic.”  Chateaubriand said Lafayette had only one idea, but it was the idea of the century, and he fixed on it.  Liberty was a polestar that kept him intellectually honest to the point of naivete, an accusation academics have frequently levelled.  Lafayette was not gifted, some would say not tainted, with political pragmatism.  When power, however popular, threatens institutions of liberty, Napoleon the pristine example, Lafayette’s single-mindedness becomes a bulwark of protection.

After two nights and a day sailing, February 25th at 9 AM, the “Potomac” arrived at Norfolk, Virginia.  Lafayette and company disembarked, climbed into a carriage for the twenty-mile ride southwest to Suffolk, Virginia.

Levasseur recounts a remarkable moment occurring several miles outside Norfolk.  The troupe stopped at an inn to water the horses and freshen up.  It was out of the way, the inn a spartan affair.  It turned out to be the ocean in a thimble, the universe in a grain of sand.

Lafayette stayed in the carriage.  The innkeeper came out, entreated Lafayette to come into his home.  “If you might have only five minutes to give me,” he said, “do not refuse them, because it would be five minutes of happiness for me.”  Lafayette, Levasseur, and George followed the innkeeper into the house and to a lower room which was plain and “bordered on poverty,” but neat and orderly.  On the far white wall, scrupulously written with charcoal and ornamented all around with branches of fir was the greeting, “Welcome Lafayette.”  Flames crackled in the hearth, in front of which was a table with a clean, tidy tablecloth, garnished with flasks of brandy and whiskey, and a “plate filled with slices of bread carefully arranged.”  These were offered, Levasseur says, with kindness and humility.

The innkeeper momentarily disappeared, returned with his wife and their three- or four-year-old son.  He introduced his wife, put his son’s hand into the General’s as if for a handshake, and led the little boy in a rehearsed greeting: “General Lafayette, I thank you for the freedom that you have won for my father, my mother, for me and for my country.”  Concludes Levasseur, “So simple yet so sublime, General Lafayette must have found this moment one of the sweetest of his life.”

Later that same day, before reaching Suffolk, a group of Blacks flagged Lafayette, invited him to their cabin to examine an animal that had been beached on the shore of the Elizabeth River.  It turned out to be a seven-foot sea lion; they were excited to show their famous visitor something unusual and Lafayette reciprocated their enthusiasm.  Lafayette took the occasion to visit a nearby dwelling of free Blacks who, according to a Norfolk traveling companion, had been quite prosperous, having doubled the value of their property; for Levasseur, this confirmed his suspicions that liberty motivates.

A short visit at Suffolk, on to Murfreesboro where despite the late hour of their arrival, a cannon salute and a bonfire greeted.  A night’s rest and on to Halifax, seventy miles from Suffolk, where Cornwallis camped and made his fatal decision to turn north to Virginia.  Masonic Lodge #96 welcomed Lafayette with a reception followed by another reception at the Eagle Tavern, where he spent the night.

Two more days of travel to reach Raleigh, North Carolina, the capital, where Governor Hutchins Gordon Burton greeted them; a public banquet at the University of North Carolina; and rest at the Governor’s mansion.