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, this is the fourth of five contributed columns by Richard Ingram, a longtime resident of LaGrange and Chair of Friends of Lafayette.

September 2-9, 1824

Lafayette had a limp, left leg, walked with a cane.  At the Battle of Brandywine, September 11, 1777, just after his twentieth birthday, he was shot in his left calf, a through-and-through musket ball from which he fully recovered.  People naturally assumed his limp originated on the battlefield:  it did not.  In Paris, on February 23, 1803, age 45, exiting the Ministry of Marine he slipped on a patch of ice.  He fractured the neck of his left hip.  He endured for weeks the pain of a new-fangled contraption that splinted the leg, recommended by physicians Deschamp and Boyer.  It left him limping, unable to mount a horse and relegated to transport by carriage.  He was assisted on the Farewell Tour by his son George Washington Lafayette, his secretary Auguste Levasseur, and his valet Bastien Wagner.  They left Boston on September 2, 1824, to Hartford, Connecticut and a reception by Governor Wolcott before boarding the steamboat “Oliver Ellsworth,” down the Connecticut River, into Long Island sound, docking at Fulton Pier.  Lafayette stayed at City Hotel in New York City; visited Columbia College; on September 6 celebrated his 67th birthday.  Two days later, aboard the “Chancellor Livingston,” steamed out to Fort Lafayette, a fortification off the Brooklyn shore.  Completed in 1822 on Hendrick’s reef, christened Fort Diamond, renamed Fort Lafayette in 1823, it was known as the “American Bastille.”  Benjamin Harvey Hill, of Lagrange’s Bellevue Mansion, was imprisoned there May-June 1865.  The tower of the Brooklyn side of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge replaced it in 1960.  Go figure:  Lafayette-LaGrange-Benjamin Harvey Hill triangulate at Fort Lafayette.