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 April 14, 1825

The Farewell Tour

For Georgia fans the gridiron celebrates winning, discipline, and hard work; it’s an identity Georgia fans claim by virtue of showing up.  Some fans may be from out-of-state, no Georgia plate, perhaps from Alabama or Louisiana, and fans no less of the Bulldogs, but native Georgians may hold them suspect, their allegiance in doubt.  True, an Alabama fan may go rogue, pose as a Georgia fan in the interest of mischief, but these suspicions are mostly misplaced, part of America’s long obsession with conspiracy and mistrust of outsiders.

The Farewell Tour was a celebration of Lafayette as the image of American identity; he embodied the ideals of valor and virtue.  People came to the parades, banquets, and balls to lay claim to this identity, in solidarity with the principles of the American Revolution.  Cities along the eastern seaboard had what Sandra Frink calls “familial and spatial” attachments to the War:  their relevance to Lafayette and their claim to celebrate him caused no conflict, no voice raised in objection.

New Orleans was different.  It was a mixture of Anglo-Americans and Creoles.  “Creole” has forever been in want of precise definition but generally has fealty to those with some combination of Spanish, French, Caribbean, or African heritage, and who saw themselves as natives dedicated to the ideals of American identity.  Anglo-Americans, relatively recent immigrants from east of the Appalachians, were suspect of Creole allegiances.

Mayor Louis Philippe de Roffignac believed New Orleans must prove its patriotism; it had no “civic splendor” in the form of a grand capitol, fortifications, or even “a building deserving his [Lafayette’s] attention,” any of which would have authenticated claim to American identity.  The state of Louisiana chipped in $15000 to spruce up the pageantry.

Creoles were self-conscious about not being able to claim a direct link to the Revolutionary War since they had fought at none of those battlefields; instead, they claimed American identity by way of the ideals of valor and virtue exhibited at the Battle of New Orleans at the close of the War of 1812.  For this reason, Lafayette’s first stop was at the Chalmette Battleground, proceeding to the Montgomery Plantation where Andrew Jackson had his headquarters.

Even the one-hundred-gun salute was a bone of contention:  should the “Louisiana Legion Militia,” mostly Creole, or the “Louisiana Guard Militia,” mostly Anglo-Saxon, give the order to fire?  The commander of the Legion’s artillery took the initiative, only to be challenged to a duel by an upset Anglo-American officer.  Lafayette was a unifying influence, the duel averted, but the harmony was only momentary.

Led by their Commander John Mercier, Free People of Color requested and were granted an audience with Lafayette to point out their involvement in the War of 1812; Lafayette thanked each one, shook every hand in a genuine gesture of respect and appreciation.

A Choctaw delegation stood in a long receiving line to make the case that the Choctaw, as consequence of their role in the Florida Seminole War on the side of Americans, were in the American camp and licensed to claim American identity.

New Orleans was a Farewell Tour watershed.  People were unified in their pride of Lafayette, through whom they professed the mantle of American identity which was defined by the ideals of valor and virtue.  Ideals unite, but it takes repeating the message often because distractions and assumptions dissemble the focus.

On April 15, aboard the “SS Natchez,” Lafayette left New Orleans.  Ten thousand watched “until the boat was out of sight up the river.”

The next day at 2 PM, Lafayette arrived at Duncan’s Point where a grand mansion once stood, since destroyed by fire but the brick columns are still visible at a bend in the river eight miles south of Baton Rouge.  Two hours later he was at Baton Rouge where he visited the Pentagon Barracks, which had only four sides, the fifth having been demolished because of poor construction.  He attended a public dinner for two hundred and re-boarded the “Natchez” at 1 AM.

Thirty-two hours later he arrived at Natchez, Mississippi, his only stop in that state.  Jackson replaced Natchez as the capital of Mississippi in 1822 because of its more central location.  Lafayette had a reception at the Steamboat Hotel and an evening ball at Travelers Hall.  He re-boarded at 1 AM for the six-hundred-mile trek to St. Louis.