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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 September 30, 1824:

We are plagued with cynics, snarky debutantes of dark doubt.  Optimists say things will get better; hopefuls, things can get better; and cynics, things won’t get better.  The cynic sees no hope, agrees with Thomas Hobbes that our nature is “nasty, brutish, and short.”  But hope is a skill, says Jamil Zaki in “Hope for Cynics,” burnished by habits of mind and heart.  Americans warmed to Lafayette not because of his looks, his wit, or his accent.  He was an avatar of Hope.  Five years a prisoner of state, partly in solitary confinement, all his lands confiscated by the state and his accounts tapped out, financially bankrupt, and yet he never lost hope. 

The morning after thousands of Philadelphians turned out to celebrate Lafayette’s arrival, the mayor, all excited, came to see Lafayette, police reports in hand.  “See how free men conduct themselves!” he said.  “More than 40,000 outsiders have come to take part in the festivities,” and not a single offense reported.  “And joy shone in the eyes of this virtuous administrator, all of whose success had its source in the prudence of his citizens,” recorded Lafayette’s Secretary Auguste Levasseur, adding that a similar celebration in Europe “would have been marked by murder, thefts, and accidents of all kinds.”

Lafayette was in Philadelphia eight days, stationed at Independence Hall where he received delegations from the American Philosophical Society, the Library Society, and the University of Pennsylvania, each of which traced its origin to Benjamin Franklin and his republican public philosophy:  cultivate citizens who promote the common good.

Lafayette was pleased to greet Francois Duboismartin, now eighty-three years old.  He was the inspiration for Lafayette’s motto, “Cur Non?” or “Why Not?’  It was Duboismartin who suggested that he, Lafayette, buy his own boat and sail to America, to which Lafayette, nineteen at the time, replied, “Why not?” and changed the motto on his coat of arms accordingly.

On October 3rd Lafayette had occasion to weigh in on prison reform.  He toured what was at the time the most modern and most expensive prison in the world, Eastern State Penitentiary, on Fairmont Avenue.  Seven spokes of cells radiating from a central hub.  Its distinguishing feature, however, was not its architecture but its philosophy.  “The Philadelphia System” argued for reform as opposed to punishment, penitence as opposed to “doing time,” from whence comes “penitentiary.”  The means to this end was solitary confinement, to give inmates undistracted moments to ponder misdeeds.  Lafayette was five years a political prisoner, a year of it in solitary confinement.  Companionship is necessary to sanity, he said.  Isolation invites madness, which he escaped only by way of his disposition to Hope.  What’s more, he said, solitary confinement does not reform:  he remained an apostle of liberty despite the solitary confinement intended to reform that sentiment out of him.  Civil but direct, Lafayette made his case.  In 1929 Al Capone and Willie Sutton added notoriety, the latter escaping through a 97 foot tunnel dug over a year’s time.  The prison still stands, as a tourist attraction.

On to Chester, Pennsylvania, where he visited the house to which he had been taken for refuge once wounded at the Battle of Brandywine and attended by Washington’s personal physician Dr. John Cochran.

To Wilmington, New Castle, and then Frenchtown, where he boarded “The United States” to Baltimore.