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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 October 28, 1824

Lafayette agreed with Peggy Noonan:  one of the ways you pay respect to your audience is to dress nicely.  Lafayette was not prissy, but according to his physician Jules Cloquet, “He was remarkably clean and neat in his person.”  Neat dress expressed for him not only respect but gratitude.  His valet of five years, Bastien Wagner, known as “Bastien,” kept him up to speed.  Wagner was of German descent, a military man to whom a fastidious nature came naturally.  It was Bastien who gathered up Lord Cornwallis’s candles, discovered in the Nelson House during the Yorktown celebration on October 19, and took them back to France.  Bastien was at Lafayette’s bedside when he died May 20, 1834; he set out those wax candles in honor of Lafayette’s role in the American Revolutionary War.  In the funeral procession, records John Becica in “Trail Tales”: “Bastien carried Lafayette’s French National Guard Sword and epaulettes on a black velvet cushion.”

Edgar Allan Poe would not publish “The Raven” until 1845, thirty-six years old; but when he was fifteen he was a lieutenant in the Richmond Junior Volunteers, second in command of the unit tapped to escort Lafayette about Richmond, to places like Richmond Randolph Masonic Lodge #19, and to the oldest house in Richmond, Old Stone House at 1914 East Main Street, today the home of the Poe Museum.  We have no evidence the two ever met in 1824, but Poe was there.

Lafayette was three days at Richmond visiting with Virginia Governor James Pleasants, Chief Justice John Marshall, and Peter Francisco.  Francisco was Portuguese, born in Porto Judeu, Terceira, one of the nine islands of the Azores, a thousand miles off the coast of Portugal.  In a tale well told by Becica, Francisco was kidnapped under unclear circumstances at the age of five.  He was dumped at City Point, the oldest part of what is today Hopewell, where Lincoln visited Grant at the Siege of nearby Petersburg.  Francisco was taken in by Judge Anthony Winston, uncle to Patrick Henry, raised on Hunting Tower Plantation, and likely heard “Give me liberty or give me death” at St. John’s Church, March 23, 1775, at the Second Virginia Convention.  Francisco grew to a massive 6’6” and 260 pounds, earning him the moniker “Virginia Giant.”  He fought at Brandywine, where he and Lafayette likely first met, Germantown, Monmouth, and Stony Point.  Lafayette called him “Luso,” a Latin short for “from Portugal.”  Francisco was a companion throughout Lafayette’s stay in Richmond.

Richmond, City Point, and Petersburg are a scalene triangle, the long leg running from Richmond south to Petersburg, with City Point the shorter leg thirteen miles east of Petersburg.  Lafayette took a side trip to Petersburg on October 29, arrived at 3 PM.  Forty-three years before, on May 9, 1781, Lafayette deployed artillery on Colonial Heights above Petersburg.  He intercepted British Major General William Phillips who was headquartered below in the Bollingbroke House.  This prevented Williams from capturing Petersburg.  Phillips caught typhoid fever, died May 13, buried in nearby Blandford Church cemetery, the grave unmarked intentionally by the British.  Lafayette was unaware that Phillips was the commanding artillery officer at the Battle of Minden, August 1, 1759, in which a British cannonball killed his father; Lafayette was not yet two years old at the time.

From Petersburg back to Richmond.  On to Monticello where he arrived at 3 PM on November 4.