But also, this chapter is going to come up in the talk I'll be doing while I'm out on tour, because that talk is about how we make choices as authors about what goes into a book like this and what gets left out, what gets elaborated on and what gets truncated, what informs our choices about what we think important to talk about and why.

And I use chapter 22 as an example of how and why I made the choices I did.

Now if you would like to come out and hear me talk about this stuff, I will be on tour from September the 6th to September the 24th.

and I will be traveling in order from Madison to Chicago to Portland to Seattle to Boulder to Denver to Dallas to Austin to Houston to New Orleans to Atlanta to Chapel Hill to Raleigh and then we actually just added the Bookmarks Book Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina on September 24th so that's where I'll be ending.

For many of those events some kind of registration or RSVP is needed so go check their websites and I think two of them specifically Boulder and New Orleans have a nominal $5 cover to get in the door.

The details will be in the show notes and I'll also be dropping a long thread of links on Twitter.

But I really hope to see you all out there.

I'm very, very excited to get back on the road.

Now, if you are among those who have not yet read Hero of Two Worlds, we are walking into chapter 22 here, so we're getting near the end of the book.

I think the only thing you need to know is that in chapter 21, Lafayette and his son Georges and a bunch of other liberal leaders had just gotten embroiled in a failed Carbonary conspiracy to overthrow King Louis XVIII, which is a big reason Lafayette thought James Monroe's invitation to visit the United States sounded like such a great idea.

You will also need to know that the now-widowed Lafayette had begun a very it's complicated relationship with the much younger Scottish social activist named Fanny Wright, who will remain his it's complicated through much of his U.S.

tour before she splits off to go found a utopian colony dedicated to the emancipation of slaves.

And with those little key bits of information in hand, I think you can pretty much just pick up this chapter and enjoy it on its own.

It's a tour of what the young American Republic looked like in the 1820s, at the precise midpoint between the American Revolution and the American Civil War.

So I hope you enjoy it, and then I hope to see you somewhere out there in America.

Chapter 22 The Nation's Guest, 1824-1825

As soon as he received the letter from President Monroe, Lafayette began arranging his return to America.

Georges planned to accompany him, along with a faithful servant named Bastian.

To serve as secretary, Lafayette approached an idealistic young officer named Auguste Lavasseur.

Lavasseur eagerly accepted the offer to join Lafayette's party.

He happened to be a Carbonarist officer from the infamous 29th Regiment and deeply implicated in the failed Belfort uprising.

Lavasseur would act as traveling secretary and record keeper of the trip.

Upon their their return to France, Lavasseur turned his notes into a two-volume account of their tour called Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825, or Journal of a Voyage to the United States,

which was part travel log, part economic report, part social commentary, and part political manifesto.

Fanny Wright and her sister Camilla desperately wanted to accompany Lafayette, and his children fought over whether it was appropriate for young unmarried women to travel with their father.

Wright suggested the possibility of marrying Lafayette so she could travel as his wife, but Lafayette swore he would not remarry after Audreen's death.

Wright then suggested adoption, but Anastasi and Virginie were dead set against the idea.

Lafayette did want them to come, though, so eventually they reached a compromise.

Fanny and Camilla would travel to the United States separately and and only join Lafayette after he made his initial grand entrance.

In July 1821, Lafayette, Georges, and Lavasseur traveled to Lavre to meet their waiting ship.

As if to remind them why they were leaving, the local authorities broke up an impromptu farewell celebration staged by supporters in the city.

This would be the last time for 18 months Lafayette entered a city where the local authorities did not trip over themselves to invite everyone in a 500-mile radius to fete, toast, and cheer him.

In France, local leaders couldn't wait for Lafayette to leave.

In America, they couldn't wait for him to arrive.

After four easy weeks at sea, Lafayette and the party arrived in New York on August 15, 1824.

Newspapers publicized the imminent arrival of the hero of two worlds, so when he reached Manhattan, boats of every shape and size packed the the harbor.

On shore, tens of thousands of people line the streets, docks, and wharfs.

A New York newspaper said, The distinguished friend of civil liberty is again on our shores after a long absence.

He left us weak, unorganized, and tottering with infancy.

He returns to us and finds our shores smiling with cultivation, our waters white with the sails of every nation, our cities enlarged, flourishing, and wealthy, and our free government, for whose establishment he himself suffered, perfected in beauty, union, and experience.

When Lafayette disembarked in Manhattan, an honor guard of aging veterans of the American War of Independence saluted the last surviving major general of the Continental Army.

Lafayette had not set foot on American soil for 40 years, and already he could tell he was going to enjoy himself.

It was nice to be loved again.

The Grand Tour started started with a memorable blowout in New York City.

After Lafayette disembarked, a welcome committee thrust him into the center of a huge parade traveling up Broadway from the shore to City Hall.

Le Vasseur said, all the streets were decorated with flags and drapery, and from all the windows, flowers and wreaths showered upon the general.

Lafayette's welcome parade up Broadway established a model repeated many times until it became a fixture of public life in New York City, eventually evolving into the famous ticker tape parade.

When Lafayette arrived at City Hall, he was greeted by a giant banner welcoming the nation's guest.

Lafayette's stay in New York was a whirlwind of balls, receptions, and banquets.

He made himself available every afternoon to greet long lines of well-wishers.

Some were strangers wanting to meet him for the first time.

others old friends and comrades he knew from previous sojourns in America.

Lafayette was was always quick to remember everyone, whether he remembered them or not.

He also enjoyed an unexpected reunion with Francis Eugie, whom Lafayette only met once, 30 years earlier, for about five minutes, during the failed prison break from Olmutz.

That he did remember.

Lafayette and Eugie finally got a chance to do more than yell a few garbled words at each other while wrestling with an Austrian prison guard.

Lafayette also met and befriended James Fenimore Cooper, who helped arrange the festivities, and an aspiring artist named Samuel F.B.

Morse, eager to paint Lafayette's portrait.

Lafayette's arrival happened to land in the middle of one of the most contentious presidential elections in a generation, which made the collective embrace by the Americans even more remarkable.

The era of good feelings, defined by de facto one-party rule of Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans, was drawing to a close.

The election of 1824 was an acrimonious four-man race, pitting North against South, East against West.

The leading candidates were John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, who first sat at Lafayette's table in Paris as a young man back in the 1780s, William Crawford, an old stalwart Democratic-Republican from Georgia, whom Lafayette knew as American ambassador to France during the heady days of the Bourbon Restoration and the Hundred Days.

Henry Clay, the dynamic orator from Kentucky who essentially invented the job of Speaker of the House.

And finally, the man who commanded the most attention, Populist General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee.

So dominant was Jackson's personality that party labels in the 1820s are often simply denoted Jacksonian or anti-Jacksonian.

But though the election of 1824 was a brutal exercise in scorched earth hyper-partisanship, Lafayette was something all Americans shared in common.

When we landed in New York, Levesseur wrote, the people of the United States were occupied by the choice of a new political chief.

The newspapers, which, the evening before, were furiously combating for their favorite candidate, now closed their long columns on all party disputes and only gave admission to the unanimous expression of public joy and national gratitude.

At the public dinners, instead of caustic toasts, intended to throw ridicule and odium on some potent adversary, none were heard but toasts to the guest of the nation, around whom were amicably grouped the most violent of both parties.

Lafayette inspired universal love among all parties in America, a marked contrast to France, where he excelled at unifying otherwise disparate groups in their shared hatred of him.

In America, he was a living legend, a pristine icon of the most glorious days of the Revolution.

Lafayette was eager to play the role the Americans assigned him in every town and city he passed.

He found himself as celebrated in Philadelphia as New Orleans, Vermont as much as South Carolina, rural hamlets as well as big cities, Jacksonians as well as anti-Jacksonians.

Lafayette belonged to everyone, and wherever he went, he was described as the nation's guest.

Whether Lafayette intended it or not, his very presence reminded local and state leaders they were a single nation with a shared past and a collective future.

Lafayette certainly never let them forget it.

From New York, the Lafayette party went to Boston.

Every town they approached erected triumphal arches, festive decorations, and banners welcoming the nation's guest,

establishing a pattern that would prevail in every stop on the journey.

They also heard countless speeches from local leaders that Lafayette endured endured with grace and fortitude.

Georges and Lavasseur eventually grew weary of the exhausting daily grind of the never-ending celebrations, but the old man who survived the winter in Valley Fords and the prison of Omutz remained unfazed by the onslaught of American well-wishers, no matter how repetitive and tiresome they became.

In Boston, the Massachusetts governor greeted them, as would governors of every state they visited.

Lafayette and company spent five days and nights in and around Boston, reuniting with old comrades and meeting new friends.

A newspaper reported of one morning reception.

Numerous incidents in this scene brought tears from many manly eyes.

One decrepit veteran, on crutches, was recognized by the general as a companion-in-arms at the memorable onset at Yorktown.

Others were recalled to recollection by events at Monmouth, at Brandywine, at West Point, at Saratoga, and other places.

Others, as belonging to the light army which the Marquis commanded in 1780, 81, etc.

The hands of all these he seized with the most affectionate cordiality, frequently repeating, Oh, my brave light infantry, my gallant soldiers, excellent troops.

On a visit to the battlefield of Bunker Hill, Lafayette found organizers preparing for a great 50th anniversary celebration the following year.

The centerpiece of the celebration would be the laying of a cornerstone for a massive monument.

The organizers asked Lafayette, the last living Continental Army general, to consider taking part in the ceremony.

Originally, Lafayette only planned to stay in the United States for about four months and return to France before winter.

Moved by the offer and overcome with joy at the reception he received everywhere he went, Lafayette said that if he should then be in the United States, it would be his earnest desire to be present.

After this offer, Lafayette changed his plan so he would be present.

Rather than spending a few months visiting the major cities of the eastern seaboard, he would instead spend more than a year visiting every single one of the United States.

While in Boston, Lafayette received a letter from John Adams, now 89 years old.

I would wait upon you in person, Adams wrote.

but the total decrepitude and imbecility of 89 years has rendered it impossible for me to ride.

I pray you to appoint a day when you will do me the honor to pass the day with me in my cottage in our lapidary town of Quincy, with a few of your friends.

Lafayette went to Quincy to pay a call on the old man.

When they arrived, Adams's grandson, Charles Francis, recorded in his diary, The Marquis met my grandfather with pleasure, and I thought with some surprise, because really, I do not think he expected to see him quite so feeble as he is.

Grandfather exerted himself more than usual, and, as to conversation, appeared exactly as he ever has.

Adams couldn't get up, and members of his family fed him dinner, but Lafayette found his mind was sharp as ever.

The party left New England and traveled back to New York City, where they met Fanny and Camilla, just arrived from England.

As feared, the presence of the two young women was socially awkward.

They could not stand with him on stage or accompany his official retinue, which so frequently stopped for greetings and speeches.

In particular, the Wrights ran afoul of Eleanor Park Custis Lewis, Washington's step-granddaughter, who also joined Lafayette's party in New York.

Nellie Lewis did not take kindly to the unaccompanied young women following Lafayette around,

but they would always be there wherever he went, and Lafayette was glad for their comforting presence whenever he could get away from the gladhanding.

Part of the reason for the tension with Nellie Lewis was Fanny Wright's staunch abolitionism, while the Washingtons remained committed slave owners.

Lafayette was caught in between his own abolitionist principles and the desire for social harmony.

Though he never publicly embarrassed his slave-owning friends in America, Lafayette also never missed an opportunity to demonstrate his own commitment to emancipation.

Believing the universal education of the African population of paramount importance to successful emancipation, Lafayette made a point of visiting the African Free School, an academy established by the New York Manumission Society to give equal education to hundreds of black pupils.

Lafayette was greeted by an address from a bright, 11-year-old student named James McCune Smith.

Here, sir, you behold hundreds of the poor children of Africa sharing with those of a lighter hue in the blessings of education.

And while it will be our pleasure to remember the great deeds you have done for America, it will be our delight also to cherish the memory of General Lafayette as a friend to African emancipation and a member of this institution.

Young James McCune Smith would grow up to become the first African American to hold a medical degree, a prominent antebellum abolitionist, and a mentor of Frederick Douglass.

Departing New York City, Lafayette and company made a quick run up the Hudson River to Albany.

For this leg of the trip, Alexander Hamilton's widow Eliza and her son Alexander Jr.

joined the party.

When asked what Hamilton meant to Lafayette, he reflected on his friend, now dead twenty years.

Hamilton was to me more than a friend.

He was a brother.

Our friendship forged in days of peril and glory suffered no diminution from time.

He then added wistfully, We were both very young.

Upon their arrival in Albany, Lafayette Lafayette marveled at the changes since his first encounter with a hell of blunders, madness, and deception in the winter of 1778.

He was even more shocked when visiting nearby Troy, which had been a handful of buildings last time he saw it, and was now a bustling and industrious city of 8,000.

There, he visited the Troy Female Seminary, a school founded by progressive educator and women's rights activist Emma Willard.

After a program of songs, speeches, and poems, Willard presented Lafayette with her plan for female education, which Lafayette accepted with great interest.

While in Troy, Lavasseur also observed with satisfaction, there are scarcely 30 slaves in the city.

A dinner companion told him legal slavery in New York was scheduled to expire in three years.

Levesseur noted with hopeful satisfaction, After 1827, liberty will no longer have to blush in the presence of colored men.

men.

This turned out to be an overly optimistic prediction.

Traveling south toward Philadelphia, Lafayette made a point to call on an old acquaintance, Joseph Bonaparte.

The brother of the emperor successfully escaped to America after the Hundred Days and was now living the life of a gentleman farmer outside Trenton, New Jersey.

Despite winding up on different sides of politics in France, Lafayette and Joseph always personally liked one another.

The party stopped at his house on September 25th, and Bonaparte opened his door so his neighbors could join the party, as he often did on special occasions like the 4th of July.

They spent a few hours talking, then Joseph escorted Lafayette toward Philadelphia.

When they reached the state line, Bonaparte said, Permit me to halt upon my frontiers and restore you to the tenderness of the Americans.

Their usual roles were now reversed, with Joseph living in quiet rustic obscurity and Lafayette having the triumphant run of an entire continent.

In Philadelphia, a local paper described the local residents gathering on the morning of Lafayette's arrival.

The citizens preparing to gratify their curiosity as early as possible by taking possession of the fences and eminences, balconies, scaffolds, roofs of houses, and upon the road and streets from the field of parade, the whole prescribed course of the procession to the State House.

Levesseur reported when they arrived, The whole population came out to meet him.

Stages have been erected on each side of the streets, as high as the eaves of the houses for the accommodation of spectators.

Lafayette's imminent arrival also prodded the city leaders of Philadelphia to appropriate money to restore and rehabilitate the old Statehouse.

They spruced it up and turned the rechristened Independence Hall into a permanent fixture of the city, no longer used for anything but exhibiting the birthplace of American liberty, which, not unlike Lafayette himself, was a tangible link to an increasingly mythical past.

Fanny Wright caused a minor scandal in Philadelphia when she arranged a meeting for Lafayette with a black man named Jonathan Granville.

Granville was a representative from the Free Republic of Haiti who came to the United States to encourage black families to relocate to Port-au-Prince.

Granville was a refined and well-educated emissary who served for a number of years in the French army.

Wright, said Granville, was delighted with his interview with the general, even though, to avoid causing a stir, they met in private in Lafayette's bedroom.

Wright also noted with approval Lafayette intentionally ruffled social feathers.

The general afterward purposefully conducted Granville to the receiving room room crowded with visitors and then took a second affectionate leave of him, conducting him to the head of the stairs in sight of all.

Though Lafayette was pleased to demonstrate his aversion to racist social norms, from this point forward, Nellie Lewis did everything in her considerable social powers to ice the Wright sisters out as unwelcome disruptions.

They departed Philadelphia on October 5th and moved on to Baltimore.

At a reception at Fort McHenry, Lafayette reunited with a now 83-year-old former French soldier named François Dubois-Martine,

one of the small band of officers who first traveled to America with Lafayette aboard La Victoire in 1777.

They were also joined by Washington's step-grandson, George Washington Park Custis, whom George lived with at Mount Vernon for two years.

While at Fort McHenry, they also linked up with John Quincy Adams, presently Secretary of State and candidate for President.

Accompanying them on the ferry down the Chesapeake toward Washington, D.C., Lebasseur was amazed to find Adams, a man on the brink of becoming President of the United States and scion of one of the greatest families in the country, preparing to sleep on a humble mattress, laid out on the floor of a crowded makeshift dormitory.

Only after Lafayette insisted Adams sleep on a bed in his chamber did Adams accept better accommodations?

If there be any aristocracy in American manners, Lebesseur recorded, it must be confessed that the great officers of the government partake in no such privileges.

It frankly blew his European mind.

Upon entering Washington, D.C., they were greeted by President James Monroe, now known to Lafayette and Georges most especially, as the revered savior of Audrey, but whom Lafayette also knew from their days together together as young officers in the Continental Army.

A few days later, they attended a dinner hosted by John Quincy Adams, when the American Secretary of State rose and revealed momentous news just arrived from France.

Old Louis XVIII died on September 16th.

When Lafayette and his companions returned to France, the Comte d'Artois would be reigning as King Charles X,

the third and last of the Bourbon brothers to be king of France.

Washington, D.C., was only a temporary stopover, as Lafayette was eager to move quickly to his most anticipated destination, Mount Vernon.

Georges actually knew the plantation better than his father did, having lived there for two years.

It was an emotional return for both of them.

Georges felt his heart sink, Lavasseur said, to no more find him whose paternal care softened his misfortunes.

They were immediately taken on a private visit to Washington's tomb.

As we approached, the door was open.

Lavasseur recorded.

Lafayette descended alone into the vault, and a few minutes after reappeared, with his eyes overflowing with tears.

He took his son and me by the hand, and led us into the tomb, where, by a sign, he indicated the coffin of his paternal friend.

We knelt reverently near the coffin, which we respectfully saluted with our lips.

Rising, we threw ourselves into the arms of Lafayette and mingled our tears with his.

Back inside the house, Lafayette found the key to the Bastille he sent Washington in 1790, which still sits in Mount Vernon to this day.

From Mount Vernon, they made a short trip to Yorktown for the annual commemoration of Lord Cornwallis' surrender on October 19th.

Organizers erected a triumphal arch on the spot of the critical redoubt Lafayette's comrades stormed in the daring night raid so many years ago.

During the ceremony, organizers placed a wreath on Lafayette's head, which Lafayette passed to Nicholas Fish, one of the officers who fought that night.

Lafayette finished the ceremony by paying tribute of gratitude to the officers who directed the attack upon the redoubt, and among them named Hamilton, Gima, Lawrence, Fish, and added it was in their name that he accepted the proffered wreath.

As they moved deeper into the southern states, Lafayette's company confronted the unavoidable contradiction of American liberty and American slavery.

Levasseur, as much an abolitionist as Lafayette and Wright, was not comfortable with the things he now saw.

When we have examined the truly great and liberal institutions of the United States with some attention, he wrote, the soul feels suddenly chilled and the imagination alarmed in learning that at many points of this vast republic the horrible principle of slavery still reigns with all its sad and monstrous consequences.

As Levasseur published his journals under Lafayette's general editorial direction, and whose political views the journal was meant to promote, we can take Levasseur's observations as bearing Lafayette's stamp of approval.

When they met a community of French émigrés in Norfolk, Le Vasseur described meeting a great number of French families, immigrants from Saint-Domain.

These families made their choice of asylum here because of its proximity, but were induced to fix themselves because they had permission to retain and work the unfortunate slaves they brought with them.

It appeared the families supported themselves by renting their slaves to others, which Levasseur called a sad and revolting spectacle.

Reflecting back on his travels, Le Vasseur remained hopeful emancipation was inevitable, partly because everyone agreed slavery was terrible.

For myself, he wrote, who have traversed the twenty four States of the Union, and in the course of a year, have had more than one opportunity of hearing long and keen discussions upon this subject, I declare that I never have found but a single person who seriously defended this principle.

This was a young man whose head, sufficiently imperfect in its organization, was filled with confused and ridiculous notions relative to Roman history, and appeared to be completely ignorant of the history of his own country.

It would be a waste of time to repeat here his crude and ignorant tirade.

But Levasier did acknowledge, in this part of the United States, the prejudices against the blacks, it must be confessed, keep a great number of slave owners blindfolded.

It is in vain that some individuals, blinded by their prejudices, exclaim that there is no hope of improving the African race, which is only intermediate to man and the brutes in the scale of being.

Numerous facts have long since refuted this absurd assertion, and moreover, may it not be asked of those who are so proud of the whiteness of their skin, and who judge the blacks only by what they are, not what they are capable of, if they know well what would be the condition of their descendants after several generations, were slavery suddenly transferred from the blacks to the whites.

Lafayette and Levasseur shared a concern this racist ignorance threatened the standing of the United States in the world for its ongoing violations of fundamental human rights.

If slave owners do not endeavor to instruct the children of the blacks, to prepare them for liberty, if the legislatures of the southern states do not fix upon some period, near or remote, when slavery shall cease, that part of the Union will be, for a still longer time, exposed to the merited reproach of outraging the sacred principles contained in the first article of the Declaration of Rights, that all men are born free and equal.

And as Lafayette had written in his own Declaration of Rights, violation of this sacred principle always left open the right of the victims of tyranny to exercise another fundamental right, resistance to oppression.

The next stop on the official itinerary was a visit to Thomas Jefferson at his slave plantation, Monticello.

Lafayette and Jefferson had not seen each other since 1789, during the hopeful days after the fall of the Bastille.

Lafayette's party spent a week at Monticello, and Jefferson escorted them to Charlottesville to tour his pride and joy, the University of Virginia.

James Madison made an appearance and then took them to visit his home in Montpelier for four days.

They made plans for a final reunion the following year before Lafayette departed the continent for good.

Levasseur noted while Lafayette stayed with his Virginian friends, all of them members of the plantation slave aristocracy, Lafayette did not shy away from bringing up emancipation.

Lafayette, who, though perfectly understanding the disagreeable situation of American slaveholders, and respecting generally the motives which prevent them from more rapidly advancing in the definite emancipation of the blacks, never missed an opportunity to defend the right which all men without exception have to liberty, broached among among the friends of Mr.

Madison the question of slavery.

It was approached and discussed by them frankly.

It appears to me that slavery cannot exist a long time in Virginia, because all enlightened men condemn the principle of it.

And when public opinion condemns a principle, its consequences cannot long continue to subsist.

Levesseur, however, was far too optimistic about the noble sentiments of the Virginians and the future prospects of slavery.

Condemning something in principle has little bearing on whether it is allowed to persist in reality.

Lafayette and company spent the winter of 1824-1825 in Washington, D.C., and thus witnessed the finale of the hotly contested presidential race.

The November election produced no clear results.

Andrew Jackson won the popular vote, but no candidate secured a majority of the Electoral College.

For the second time in the nation's young history, the House of Representatives decided the presidential election.

While Congress geared up to settle the matter, they hosted the nation's guest on December 9th and 10th, which required all the candidates and their bitterly partisan supporters to come together in the same place at the same time.

Henry Clay took the opportunity to show off his oratory by delivering the keynote speech.

The people of the United States, he said, have ever beheld you true to your old principles, ready to shed the last drop of that blood which, here, you freely and nobly spilt in the same holy cause.

He went on to say it was a rare and special gift for someone so consequential to witness the fruits of his life's work.

You are in the midst of posterity, Clay exclaimed.

Everywhere you must have been struck by the great changes, physical and moral, which have occurred since you left us.

But, Clay said, said, in one respect, you behold us unaltered, and that is in the sentiment of continued devotion to liberty.

They remained in Washington as partisans on all sides wrangled to secure a majority of the votes in the House of Representatives.

Finally, on February 9, 1824, Clay's electors pledged themselves to Adams, and he won the vote.

This left Jacksonian partisans steaming over a corrupt bargain when Adams subsequently appointed Clay Secretary of State.

Earlier in the trip, Levasseur met some hardcore Jacksonian partisans in the Pennsylvania militia who threatened to take up arms if their man lost.

After Adams won, he ran into them again.

Well, Levasseur said, the great question is decided, and in a manner contrary to your hopes.

What do you intend to do?

How soon do you lay siege to the capital?

They laughed.

You recollect our threats, one said.

We went, in truth, to great lengths, but our opponents disregarded it and acted properly.

Now that it is settled, all we have to do is obey.

We will support Adams as zealously as if he were our candidate, but at the same time shall keep a close watch on his administration, and, according as it is good or bad, we will defend or attack it.

Four years is soon passed, and the consequences of a bad election are easily obviated.

On February 23, 1825, the party departed Washington, D.C.

and headed south, traveling first to Fayetteville, North Carolina, one of the hundreds of cities, towns, counties, colleges, squares, townships, streets, and parks named after Lafayette in America.

North Carolina's Fayetteville boasts the honor of being the first to take his name when it first incorporated in 1783.

The most recent site to take his name was the open space across from the White House, which was renamed Lafayette Square in his honor.

As Lafayette continued his tour of the United States, the pattern followed.

Wherever one travels in the United States, there is bound to be a Lafayette something close at hand.

Fanny and Camilla did not join them for this leg of the tour.

As a committed abolitionist, Fanny found the endless soliloquies to liberty sung by a bunch of slave owners a bit much.

The enthusiasm, triumphs, and rejoices exhibited here before the countenance of the great and good Lafayette have no longer charms for me, she wrote.

They who sin against the liberty of their country, against those great principles for which their honored guest poured on their soil his treasure and his blood, are not worthy to rejoice in his presence.

My soul sickens in the midst of of gaiety and turns almost with disgust from the fairest faces for the most amiable discourse.

Wright began to dream her own dreams.

Over the winter, she attended a series of lectures by the progressive socialist Robert Owen, who arrived in America to launch his utopian project called New Harmony in Indiana.

Wright disengaged from Lafayette's tour and headed west to meet and interview the Owenites.

She now dreamed of creating her own utopian colony serving as a model for emancipation and racial equality in the American West.

Meanwhile, Lafayette and company moved deeper south.

In Camden, South Carolina, local Freemasons invited Lafayette to lay the cornerstone for a monument to Baron de Kalb.

Lafayette was honored, and when he laid the cornerstone on March 8th, he said,

Even on unlucky days, Actions have been performed which reflect the highest honor on the name of which we are so justly proud, the name of an American soldier.

Such have been, sir, the able conduct as a commander, the noble fall as a patriot of General DeKalb.

I gratefully acknowledge your kindness in associating me to the tribute paid to the memory of a friend who, as you observe, has been the early confidant and companion of my devotion to the American cause.

Plenty of communities asked for Lafayette to dedicate monuments and memorials to the American War of Independence, but the monument to DeKalb was special.

Were it not for the Baron, Lafayette might have lived and died as an obscure and inconsequential son-in-law of the Noah.

As Lafayette continued south into Georgia, the party encountered the other great original sin of the United States.

Entering the territory of the Muscogee Nation, They found the native population living through their final days in their ancestral lands.

The Muscogee recently reached the end of a long, losing campaign to resist encroachment by white settlers.

Just a few months earlier, tribal leaders admitted defeat and signed the Treaty of Indian Springs.

They agreed to move their people to the far side of the Mississippi River in exchange for monetary payments and future guarantees of autonomy.

The year 1827 was scheduled for their eviction, Lavasseur said, and it was not without sorrow that the Indians find that it is drawing near.

But not everyone was willing to to give up.

When he returned to his people with the treaty in hand, Muscogee leader William McIntosh was promptly arrested and executed for treason.

On March 31st, Lafayette and his party met the first large assemblage of Muscogee at the Chattahoochee River.

They were greeted by a young leader of the group speaking perfect English who knew Lafayette and praised him for not distinguishing blood or color in his defense of liberty.

This young man turned out to be the son of the recently executed McIntosh.

He did not like the treaty his father signed either, but appreciated the real situation of his nation.

He saw it gradually becoming weaker and foresaw its speedy destruction, their vicinity to civilization having been of no service.

The young McIntosh joined the party as a guide and translator as they moved towards Mobile, Alabama.

Before leaving his new Native American friends, Lafayette gave one of his perfunctory and overly sanguine speeches.

Le Vesseur said, He again counseled them to be prudent and temperate, recommended their living in harmony with the Americans, and to always consider them as their friends and brothers.

Levasseur could not help but disagree with Lafayette's appraisal as he personally witnessed mistreatment of the native population by encroaching whites.

They came to one recently established village, almost entirely inhabited by persons who, in the love of gain, had assembled from all parts of the globe, to turn to their own profit the simplicity and above all the new wants of the unfortunate natives.

These avaricious wretches, who without scruple poison the tribes with intoxicating liquors and afterwards ruin them by duplicity and overreaching, are the most cruel and dangerous enemies of the Indian nations, whom, at the same time, they accuse of being robbers, idlers, and drunkards.

They said goodbye to the younger Macintosh and continued to Mobile, Alabama, which marked the beginning of a new phase of their travels.

They boarded the riverboat Natchez, which ferried them along the Gulf Coast to New Orleans.

They stayed in the city for about a week, mingled with the large French community, and briefly reunited with Fanny and Camilla, who rejoined the company after their journey to New Harmony.

During the various celebrations, a company of black soldiers who served in the recent War of 1812 presented themselves, and Lafayette greeted them with esteem and affection.

He made a point of shaking each one of their hands, saying, I have often, during the War of Independence, seen African blood shed with honor in our ranks for the cause of the United States.

On April 15th, they reboarded the Natchez and began a thousand-mile trip up the Mississippi River to St.

Louis.

For the next two weeks, They steamed through near total wilderness, with Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri on their left, and Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky on their right.

On April 29th, they were welcomed to St.

Louis by Governor William Clark, famous for his joint leadership of the Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the Louisiana Territory.

Outside St.

Louis, Lafayette's company toured the great mounds that were becoming the cause of scientific and ethnographic speculation.

Levasseur was told residents around the Mississippi River often meet with much more interesting traces of the greatest antiquity, antiquity, indicating that this world which we call new was the seat of civilization, perhaps long anterior to the continent of Europe.

The party backtracked down the Mississippi River to Kaskaskia, Illinois, formerly the seat of French colonial administration in the region.

They were greeted by Illinois Governor Edward Coles, who moved to Illinois from Virginia specifically to free his slaves.

Lavasseur reported, His liberated Negroes are perfectly successful, and afforded a conclusive argument against the adversaries of emancipation.

While in Kaskaskia, they also met a young Oneida woman speaking fluent French who was eager to show Lafayette a relic very dear to me, which turned out to be a letter written by Lafayette to her father in June 1778, thanking him for his service, her father almost certainly being one of the Oneida warriors who fought with Lafayette during his handsome retreat from Barron Hill.

Departing Kaskaskia, Lafayette's party backtracked further down the Mississippi, then turned left up the Ohio River before turning right on the Cumberland River towards Nashville.

On May 5th, they visited Andrew Jackson.

Jackson hosted them for a reception and showed off a pair of pistols Lafayette once gave Washington and which Washington subsequently gifted to Jackson.

At the reception, they heard a toast saying, The present age encourages the reign of liberal principles.

Kings are forced to unite against liberty and despotism to act on the defensive.

Lafayette, tyrants have oppressed him, but freemen honor him.

This toast would have been heard with a tinge of regret by Lafayette, Georges, and Levasseur, three recently defeated Carbonarist revolutionaries, for whom these words were not just empty rhetoric.

After departing Nashville, they returned to the Ohio River and continued on toward Louisville, Kentucky.

But suddenly, at around midnight on May 8, 1825, their ship lurched to a crashing halt.

Lafayette and the others rushed out on deck and were told the boat ran aground.

The situation was dire.

Water flooded the hull, and the boat was probably going to sink.

They must abandon ship.

Georges and Levesseur put Lafayette on a lifeboat, then attempted to save what they could from his cabin.

Levesseur carried the salvaged baggage to shore, while Georges remained on board to help others get away.

As passengers safely reassembled on the banks of the river, Lafayette realized he could find no trace of Georges.

He was filled with anxiety and in a state of the most violent agitation, Levasseur said.

He began to call Georges, Georges with all his strength, but his voice was drawn by the cries which arose from the vessel, and by the terrible noise made by the steam escaping from the engine.

But happily Georges scurried to an exposed part of the half sunk ship and was finally retrieved along with the last remaining passengers.

The whole party spent the night beside huge bonfires as they attempted to dry off and stay warm.

In the morning they flagged down a passing boat, which, by sheer coincidence, happened to be owned by one of the stranded members of Lafayette's American escort.

The owner ordered the vessel to abandon its scheduled itinerary and take General Lafayette and his companions to Louisville.

By now it was the end of May, and they were going to have to hurry if they wanted to be back in Boston in time for the 50th anniversary celebrations at Bunker Hill.

They hustled through Kentucky and Ohio on their way to Buffalo, New York.

In Lexington, they stopped at another school dedicated to the education of women, which renamed itself the Lafayette Female Academy in his honor.

Lafayette was thrilled.

by the association of my name with this so very interesting academy.

In Buffalo, they beheld the uniquely American coexistence of natural and man-made wonders.

They paid a visit to Niagara Falls, which they described as a sublime spectacle.

But they turned their attention to the equally impressive Erie Canal, a feat of engineering under construction since 1818, now linking the Great Lakes to the Hudson River.

The canal was not yet officially open, but Lafayette's party was allowed to take a canal boat to speed their journey east.

Lafayette made it back to Boston just in time for the Bunker Hill celebrations on June 17, 1825.

After being escorted to the site in a carriage drawn by six white horses, he laid the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument.

After a day of mutually admiring speechmaking, Lafayette requested a bag full of the dirt from the excavation site so he could take it home with him and always keep soil from the birthplace of American liberty.

After Boston, Lafayette ensured he completed his quest to visit all 24 American states by making a rapid-fire circuit through New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine in the span of just a few days.

Then he headed south, passing through New York City, where he celebrated the 4th of July.

One young attendee later recalled, I remember I was taken up by Lafayette in his arms and held a moment.

I remember that he pressed my cheek with a kiss as he sat me down.

The childish wonder and nonchalance during the whole affair at the time, contrasting with the indescribable preciousness of the reminiscent sense.

The boy was Walt Whitman.

Lafayette's party departed New York for the last time and headed for Philadelphia.

On July 25th, an entourage of Continental veterans escorted Lafayette to the site of the Battle of Brandywine, where his own legendary career began.

On arriving at the field of battle, Le Vesseur recorded, General Lafayette recognized successively and pointed out to us himself all the principal points on which the two armies had maneuvered and fought on the 11th of September 1777.

He arrived at the spot where the first attack was made and where he had been wounded.

He paused for a moment, his ancient companions pressed around, amid the loudest acclamations and the cry a thousand times re-echoed, Long live Lafayette.

Then they went back to Washington, D.C., and used used it as a base for the planned reunion at Monticello with Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.

They spent the week reminiscing about old times, knowing this would be the last time they ever saw each other.

I shall not attempt to depict the sadness which prevailed cruel separation, Levasseur said, which had none of the alleviation which is usually left by youth, for in this instance, the individuals who bade farewell had all passed through a long career, and the immensity of the ocean would would still add to the difficulties of a reunion.

Back in Washington, D.C., President Adams prevailed on Lafayette to stick around at the White House to celebrate Lafayette's birthday on September 6th, which involved the final toast to the nation's guest from the President of the United States.

When the contest of freedom, to which you had repaired as a voluntary champion, had closed by the complete triumph of her cause in this country of your adoption, you return to fulfill the duties of the philanthropist and patriot in the land of your nativity.

There, in a consistent and undeviating career of forty years, you have maintained, through every vicissitude of alternate success and disappointment, the same glorious cause to which the first years of your active life had been devoted.

The improvement of the moral and political condition of man.

Adams said Lafayette's devotion to France would mark him as a great man man in his country.

For if, in after days, a Frenchman shall be called to indicate the character of his nation by that one individual during the age in which we live, the blood of lofty patriotism shall mantle in his cheek, the fire of conscious virtue shall sparkle in his eye, and he shall pronounce the name of Lafayette.

But he said America would never forget him.

We too, and our children, in life and after death, shall claim you for our own.

Before Lafayette departed once and for all, George Washington Park Costas conceived of sending a present to another liberty-loving American, Simón Bolívar.

Bolívar recently completed a series of campaigns ending Spanish rule in Venezuela and Colombia and now campaigned in Peru.

Citizens of the United States cheered the exploits of the liberator, and Lafayette agreed Bolívar was the Washington of South America.

The gift package included a pair of Washington's pistols, a portrait of the late president, and a letter from Lafayette.

Lafayette offered the President Liberator personal congratulations from a veteran of the common cause and said of the enclosed gifts, I am happy to think that of all the existing men and even of all the men of history, General Bolivar is the one whom my paternal friend would have preferred to offer them.

What more can I say to the great citizen whom South America hailed by the name of Liberator, a name confirmed by both worlds, and who, endowed with an influence equal to his disinterestedness, carries in his heart the love of liberty without any exception and the Republic without any alloy?

Lafayette departed for home, proud the great work of liberty, continued its inexorable march through the Americas.

It took months for Bolivar to receive the package, but when he did, he replied, How can I express how much, in my heart, I attach importance to such a testimony of a scheme so glorious for me?

The family of Mount Vernon honor me beyond my hopes, for the image of Washington, given by the hands of Lafayette, is the most sublime of the rewards that a man can aspire to.

Washington was the courageous protector of social reform.

You are the citizen hero, the athlete of freedom in America and in the old world.

By the time he received Bolivar's reply, Lafayette was already back in France.

On September 8th, 1825, a new naval frigate recently christened the Brandywine, in Lafayette's honor, set sail for Europe with Lafayette aboard.

He never returned to the United States, and while he sailed away content in the knowledge the legacy of his past glories would live forever in the New World, he hoped a few final future glories still lay ahead in the old world.

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