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, 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 November 11, 1824

Frances Wright arrived at Monticello.  Friends called her Fanny.

Forty years his junior—Lafayette 67, Fanny 29—she was an awkward, if welcome, tag along, accompanied by her younger sister Camilla.  Born in Scotland to parents enamored of the Enlightenment, her father a correspondent with the likes of Jeremy Bentham and Lafayette himself, she became an outspoken and unshy advocate for emancipation, sexual freedom, and rights for women.  She opposed marriage and organized religion.  Her book, “Views of Society and Manners in America,” published after her visit to America 1819-1821, and recommended to Lafayette by Jeremy Bentham, prompted her to seek a Parisian publisher.  In the process she met Lafayette, found in him a kindred spirit, and spent time at Chateau de LaGrange.  She wanted to accompany him on the Farewell Tour, and he wanted her to go, but it would be awkward.  Fine, she said:  marry me; but this option obviated by his promise to Adrienne not to remarry.  Fine, she said:  adopt me; but daughters Anastasie and Virginie were redoubts of objection.  Fine, she said:  Camilla and I will shadow, at a distance.  So it was.  Fanny and Camilla followed to New York and Philadelphia, came out of the shadows at Monticello, Lafayette having forewarned his host.  Fanny became one of the first females in America to address an audience where men and women mingled; to take a public platform to speak of sensitive subjects; and to be vilified by press and clergy.  Within a year of Monticello she would pursue her own bold emancipation project, launched by conversations with Jefferson and Lafayette.  It failed.  Despite it all she became a U.S. citizen in 1825, eventually moved to America permanently, and died from complications from a broken hip in 1852, buried in Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati, Ohio.

On a rainy November 15 at 9 AM Lafayette and James Madison loaded a landau, said farewell to Monticello, and rode thirty miles to Montpelier, Madison’s home in Orange County; George, Levasseur, and the rest followed.  A brief stop for lunch at Thornton’s Tavern, Gordonsville, arriving that evening to spend four days with Dolly and James Madison.

Lafayette enjoyed strolling elegant gardens and grounds, the whole maintained largely by 100 slaves.  Paul Jennings was the best known.  Jennings was to James Madison what Billy Lee had been to George Washington, an indispensable valet.  After Madison died in 1836, Jennings stayed on with Dolly, who was financially destitute.  In 1845 Senator Daniel Webster paid Dolly to free Jennings.  Webster asked Jennings to check in on her, do odds and ends as she might require.  Her poverty was such that Jennings “occasionally gave her sums from my own pocket.”

James Madison was the Father of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights; the author of 29 of the 85 Federalist Papers, Hamilton having written 51 and John Jay 5; and the fourth President of the United States.  What Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel were to “the abstract world of mathematics,” to use Jim Holt’s phrase, Madison and Jefferson were to American political philosophy.

Evening conversation, said Levasseur, turned to subjects demanding concentration.  They spoke of “spiritual slavery,” imposed by European levies of state religion; that “tolerance” of other religions “is without doubt preferable to persecution,” but implies one religion good, the others less good.  Religious freedom in America replaces an arrogant “toleration.”  Writes Levasseur:  “General Lafayette, who, while understanding fully the troublesome position of the slave owners in the United States, and not being able to disregard most of the obstacles that stand in the way of a more speedy emancipation of the Blacks, nevertheless, never missed the occasion to defend the rights that “all men without exception” have to liberty, and to raise in the midst of Mr. Madison’s friends the question of slavery.”  Lafayette’s visit was a showcase for civil discourse in the interest of persuasion and understanding.