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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 January 6, 1825

The Farewell Tour

Lafayette spent two days at the beginning of the week at Arlington, visiting George Washington Parke Custis, step-grandson of George Washington, whose daughter would marry Robert E. Lee.

The rest of the week in Washington, D.C., where the average temperature during January huddles at 37.5°F and rainfall populates ten days out of thirty-one, if we presume to extrapolate backwards records kept since 1872.  Washington was capital through what some believed to be underhanded slight-of-hand.  “The room where it happened,” the so-called “dinner-table bargain” where the “Compromise of 1790” took place, June 20, was Thomas Jefferson’s residence in New York City.  Between Jefferson and James Madison on one hand, and Alexander Hamilton on the other, there came an agreement to locate the United States capital in the South, as Jefferson and Madison favored; in return, the federal government would assume state war debt, part of Hamilton’s grand scheme to put standing in a national fiscal policy.  George Washington chose Pierre Charles L’Enfant to design the capital.  L’Enfant trained at the Louvre as a painter; was recruited to America by “Barber of Seville” and “Figaro” playwright Beaumarchais; and arrived in America in 1777, same year as Lafayette, at the age of 23.  He was at Valley Forge where Lafayette commissioned him to paint a portrait of George Washington, and where Lafayette and L’Enfant translated, together with Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens, Von Steuben’s tongue-in-cheek cursing from French into English, for the benefit of raw recruits.  L’Enfant died June 14, 1825, in Maryland, forty-six dollars to his name, now buried in front of Arlington House, Arlington National Cemetery, overlooking the city he designed.  I have been unable to find out if Lafayette and L’Enfant reunited on the Farewell Tour.

Lafayette attended the Washington Theater to see “The Apostate,” a tragedy by Irish playwright Richard Lalor Shields, which claims no note of notoriety today except for the fact that its cast included Junius Brutus Booth, whose son John Wilkes would assassinate Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater, Good Friday, April 14, 1865.  Interestingly, John Wilkes made his last acting appearance at Ford’s Theater, March 18, 1865, when he played the lead in “The Apostate.”

Lafayette wrote a letter to a correspondent in Easton, Pennsylvania, whose identity is unknown.  Easton is the home of Lafayette College and perhaps the letter had connection to James Madison Porter, a lawyer from Easton who led a delegation to meet Lafayette in Philadelphia at Independence Hall, September 28, 1824.  Porter’s father was a captain in the Continental Army at the Battle of Brandywine, whom Lafayette vividly recalled.  Porter, inspired by his visit with Lafayette, had occasion to visit the Military Academy at Norwich and Dartmouth College, which prompted him to suggest a college for Easton named after Lafayette.  An organizational meeting December 27, 1824, at 6:30 PM, at “Chippy” White’s Easton Hotel, says John Becica in “Trail Tales,” resulted in a charter from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania March 9, 1826; Lafayette College opened its doors in 1832.

On January 12 Lafayette had dinner with Martin Van Buren, United States Senator from New York, who would become the eighth President of the United States; Representative Stephen Van Rensselaer of New York, who would cast the deciding vote on February 9, 1825, to make John Quincy Adams President, having initially sided with Georgia’s William Crawford; and Representative Louis McClane from Maryland, Chair of House Ways and Means, and one of William Crawford’s staunchest advocates, for a while at least.

That same day, the Kentucky legislature commissioned Matthew Harris Jouett to paint a life-size portrait of Lafayette for display in Representatives Hall at Frankfort.  Matthew was the son of Jack Jouett, nicknamed “The Paul Revere of the South,” for his dashing forty-mile ride the night of June 3, 1781, to inform Thomas Jefferson at Monticello that Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton was on his way to capture him, orders given by Lord Cornwallis, whom Lafayette was chasing across Virginia at the time.  Matthew Jouett arrived in Washington February 25 expecting Lafayette to sit for the painting; Lafayette had departed two days earlier.  They worked out another time.