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September 9-16, 1824

“The most brilliant and magnificent scene ever witnessed in the United States,” said Lafayette of the celebration held in his honor at Castle Garden, Manhattan, September 14, 1824. Six thousand guests paid an astonishing three dollars apiece to get a glimpse of Lafayette. At 10 PM when he arrived, a huge transparent banner illuminated from behind projected Chateau de LaGrange. Lafayette was the living symbol of the ideals that launched the American Revolution; he was a unifying influence.

The New York French community three days before, celebrating the forty-seventh anniversary of the Battle of Brandywine where he had been wounded, saw in Lafayette America’s potential. On display was the future incarnate in a seventy-foot mockup of the Erie Canal connecting the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, universally acclaimed as an outstanding engineering feat.

Lafayette was not tone deaf. He recognized the incongruity in the Land of Liberty. Years ago, he asked Alexander Hamilton, a founding member, to enroll him in the New York Manumission Society. The Society founded African Free School #2, on Mulberry Street, which Lafayette visited on September 10, 1824. Eleven-year-old James McCune Smith memorized welcoming words. Smith would become the first African American to earn a medical degree, and he would become mentor to an icon of the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass.

Later that week Lafayette boarded the steamboat “James Kent,” up the Hudson to West Point, Newburgh, and Poughkeepsie. He was sixty-seven. Most of us would be limp and onery, but his energy did not flag, and his smile did not fade.