Marquis de Lafayette landed in Manhattan from Paris on August 16, 1824, accompanied by a festive flotilla powered by steam and sail. An honor guard of elderly veterans saluted the last living Continental Army general as he disembarked. And a crowd of 80,000 people—two-thirds of the city’s population—waved flags, welcoming “The Nation’s Guest” as he paraded up Broadway past buildings festooned with patriotic banners.
President James Monroe had invited the French Revolutionary War hero on behalf of the U.S. Congress for an all-expenses-paid return to the United States.
Lafayette had first come to America’s shores in 1777 as a teenaged aristocrat who convinced the Continental Army to commission him as a major general despite his lack of battle experience and fluent English. The American public still fondly recalled Lafayette for the role he played in securing French troops, money and ships to support the rebels.
Lafayette and the Spirit of 1776
Nearly a half-century after the war, however, memories of the American Revolution were shifting from the personal to the historic as the number of veterans dwindled. “The Era of Good Feelings” had dissolved into divisions over slavery and tariffs amid the contentious 1824 presidential election. Lafayette’s return promised to rekindle the Spirit of ’76 as the United States faced its first presidential election without a Founding Father on the ballot.
“Lafayette is this living, circulating exhibit of the revolutionary spirit,” says Julien Icher, founder and president of The Lafayette Trail, a nonprofit that documents and marks stops on the Frenchman’s historic visit. “His job is to make sure the spirit of the Revolutionary War and the republican principles upon which America are established are not lost because there is a change in generation.”
Lafayette hoped the tour would not only give him a chance to renew old friendships but revive republican ideals stifled in France by the Bourbon Restoration. Although Lafayette was a divisive figure in his home country, the reception he received after his four-week crossing of the Atlantic showed he remained universally beloved in America.
A 13-Month Tour in 24 States
Both Lafayette and the United States had undergone considerable physical transformations since their prior meeting 41 years earlier. The Frenchman had left a country in its infancy that had now come of age and quadrupled in population and territory. Friends noticed that the 67-year-old widower had also grown bulkier with time and now limped with the help of a cane and sported a brown wig to conceal his balding pate.
After a week in New York, Lafayette began a 13-month journey that took him to all 24 states. His arduous itinerary, which included 170 stops in New England alone, required occasional nighttime travel to stay on schedule. In addition to being honored at balls, banquets and parades, Lafayette visited landmarks such as West Point, Independence Hall and historic battlefields from Yorktown to Brandywine, where he had been shot in the calf.
He met presidents both past (Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Adams), present (Monroe and John Quincy Adams) and future (Andrew Jackson and William Henry Harrison). At Mount Vernon, Lafayette made a tearful visit to the tomb of the country’s only late president and a man he considered to be a surrogate father, George Washington.
Lafayette spent most of the fall and winter in and around Washington, D.C., which had been mere wilderness during his first trip to America. In December he addressed Congress, which granted him $200,000 and land in Florida to ease his strained finances.
He also witnessed the conclusion of the tempestuous presidential race when the House of Representatives elected John Quincy Adams on February 9, 1825, after no candidate received an electoral majority. Lafayette couldn’t help but be struck by America’s democratic spirit when the runner-up, Jackson, offered the victor, Adams, a handshake and congratulations at a White House dinner that evening.
Lafayette Visits the Slaveholding South
In February 1825, Lafayette began a swing through the South where he came face-to-face with slavery, which he fervently opposed. “Lafayette was an abolitionist, but during the tour he becomes the embodiment of national unity,” Icher says. “Lafayette is a national guest, and he doesn’t want to offend his hosts.”
While he minded his words in public, Lafayette didn’t shy away from denouncing slavery in private conversations during his extensive stays at the Virginia estates of slaveholders Madison and Jefferson, with whom he had drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Following riverboat voyages up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers and a visit to Niagara Falls, Lafayette traveled the nearly completed Erie Canal en route to laying the cornerstone for a monument at Bunker Hill on the battle’s 50th anniversary.
Six-Year-Old Walt Whitman Meets Lafayette
Spending the Fourth of July at a library dedication in Brooklyn, the Revolutionary War hero picked up a six-year-old boy and carried him down into the excavation site for the groundbreaking ceremony. “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 reminiscence since,” future poet Walt Whitman later recalled.
On September 7, 1825, a day after President Adams hosted a state dinner in honor of Lafayette’s 68th birthday, “The Nation’s Guest” bid a final goodbye to his hosts at a White House ceremony: “God bless the American people, each of their states, and the federal government. Accept this patriotic farewell of an overflowing heart; such will be its last throb when it ceases to beat.” After tearfully embracing Adams, Lafayette boarded a coach that paraded to the Potomac River where the newly christened frigate USS Brandywine awaited to take him home after his 6,000-mile journey.
The Legacy of Lafayette's Tour
Although Lafayette never returned to America, his name has endured on cities, streets and public spaces including the one across the street from the White House that was renamed Lafayette Square during the general’s visit.
Icher says Lafayette’s trip also left another legacy. “He confirmed to Americans that they were a great people and that they had a great revolutionary experiment at a time when they really needed it,” he says. “An endorsement from Lafayette in 1824 went a long way to reassure Americans about the viability of their country.”
Lafayette returned to France with numerous gifts, renewed memories and a bag full of earth shoveled from Bunker Hill. When the 76-year-old Marquis died in 1834, his son scattered that dirt atop his coffin in a Paris cemetery so that “The Hero of Two Worlds” could be laid to rest in both American and French soil as he had requested.
