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 June 23, 1825

The Farewell Tour

In “North Toward Home” Willie Morris, favorite son of Yazoo City, Mississippi, perhaps excelled there in esteem only by Jerry Clower, renders galloping tales of the “paranoid style,” Richard Hofstadter’s phrase, that roiled politics in Mississippi and Texas in the era of Lyndon Johnson.  Passion has always fueled the extremes of American politics; even in Lafayette’s time the politics of unreason was rife, where positing a question was taken to be accusatorial, cause for offense, vituperation, and retaliation.  Lafayette transcended this hardscrabble push and shove, representing as he did a reminder that, however imperfectly or incompletely achieved, the ideals of America, the first sovereign nation ever to so set its sights, remain not only worthwhile but obtainable.  That Lafayette carried the standard of liberty was widely acknowledged; less so his vigorous stand for equality before the law and the yoke of justice which must underwrite both.  He was a hedgehog in the age of the fox, Tolstoy’s vocabulary and Archilochus before him, one of those who straddle one big idea.  Each town and every little village was occasion and Lafayette the image of the uniting ideals of America.

Lafayette arrived at Kennebunk, Maine, at 1 PM on June 24th.  After the reception and cavalcade, he greeted townspeople beneath the “Lafayette Elm,” which is depicted on the city seal and impressive for its size and age, and the fact that it weathered over the years the attack of Dutch elm disease.  As Lafayette rode down Main Street he passed Lord’s Brick Store at 117 Main, a two story general store built by merchant William Lord in 1825, and distinguished for its brick construction; workers hanging out of second floor windows cheered Lafayette.  The building still stands as “The Brick Store Museum.”  Later that same day he attended receptions at Saco where he spent the night.

At 9 AM on Saturday morning, June 25th, Lafayette arrived at the State House in Portland, greeted by Albion Keith Parris, fifth governor of Maine.  Congressman Stephen Longfellow, father of “fireside poet” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (“Paul Revere’s Ride,” “The Song of Hiawatha”; the “fireside poets,” so-called because families read their poems gathered around the fireside, harbinger later of Roosevelt’s “fireside chats,” included William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and Longfellow; interestingly, in May 1826 Henry Longfellow travelled to Europe aboard the “Cadmus,” the same ship on which Lafayette had come to America for his Farewell Tour).  Speeches, no matter how long, were delivered from memory; Stephen Longfellow midway lapsed, had to retrieve his notes from his hat, on top of which a platform collapsed, scattering dignitaries this way and that; Lafayette unperturbed, shifted to sanguine space. 

Bowdoin College at Brunswick had conferred an honorary LL.D on Lafayette September 1, 1824, but Lafayette was only now able to receive it.  President William Allen made the presentation.  Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were Phi Beta Kappa graduates of Bowdoin in 1825.  Franklin Pierce graduated in 1824, fifth in a class of 14; he would become the fourteenth President of the United States in 1853.

Lafayette spent the night at Governor Parris’s house.  Although he wanted to spend more time in Maine, he needed to retrace his steps to get to Vermont.  Sunday morning, June 26th, he departed Portland amidst a bit of a scandal.  Governor Parris, according to accounts, was “aghast” that Lafayette would travel on a Sunday and refused to escort him out of town.  This was not a snub, but it was fodder for heated editorializing in Portland, Concord, and Boston.  Lafayette promised to atone by attending church, which he did at the Unitarian Second Parish Church at Biddeford.  He spent that night at Northwood, New Hampshire.

Next day, lunch in Concord at the Phoenix Hotel, after which he said farewell to the New Hampshire legislature which was still in session.  Across New Hampshire:  a reception at the Wiggin Tavern in Hopkinton; to Warner, then Bradford where Corporal Abel Blood in his excitement threw his cocked hat at Lafayette and struck him, Lafayette, “full in the face,” but failed to deter a reception at Raymond Tavern; to Newport, and Claremont where he spent the night.

Now in Vermont, he crossed the Cornish Toll Bridge over the Connecticut River, great crowds along the way.  At Windsor, from the balcony of the John Pettes Coffee House he addressed a gathering of 4000 people.  Arriving at Woodstock at 11 AM he spent an hour-and-a-half and enjoyed roast pig “with a lemon in its mouth.”  On to Barnard and then Royalton where he had dinner at 2 PM with twenty veterans at Colonel Smith’s Tavern.  That evening, on through Turnbridge and, as darkness fell, to Shepherd’s Inn at the corner of Main and Barre Streets in Montpelier, capital of Vermont.  He slept in the old William Caldwell House on State Street.

Lafayette arrived at Burlington the next day at 2 PM.  He attended a reception at Gould’s Hotel.  University of Vermont President-elect Willard Preston welcomed Lafayette to College Hill.  Lafayette did the honor of laying the cornerstone of “South College,” part of the oldest building on campus known as “Old Mill.”  A statue of Lafayette stands today at the north end of the Main Green.  That evening he dined with Vermont governor Cornelius P. Van Ness.  At 11 PM he embarked on the steamboat “Phoenix” on Lake Champlain to Whitehall, New York

He reached Whitehall by noon, June 30th.  After the artillery salute and procession, he took a carriage at West Point, visited General Philip Schuyler’s mansion, and spent the night at Waterford.