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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 14, 1824:

David McCullough, to my mind the best of our popular historians, in his book “The Spirit of America,” hammers home the idea “That nothing ever had to happen the way it happened.”  Contingency is at the heart of history.  “And just as we don’t know how things are going to turn out for us, those who went before us didn’t either.  It’s all too easy to stand on the mountaintop as a historian or biographer and find fault with people for why they did this or didn’t do that, because we’re not involved in it, we’re not there inside it, we’re not confronting what we don’t know—as those who preceded us were.”  Lafayette during this week visited people and places that made hinges of history.

Three days in Washington, D.C., including Arlington and then Alexandria, where Secretary of State John Quincy Adams informed Lafayette of the death on September 16 of King Louis XVIII, whose younger brother Comte d’Artois would now become King Charles X.  The latter’s ultraconservatism, incredibly unpopular, led to his abdication in the July Revolution, 1830.  Lafayette would find himself in the thick of it.

On the 17th Lafayette boarded “The Petersburg,” down the Potomac to Mount Vernon, where one of his companions was Secretary of War John C. Calhoun.  Calhoun would become vice-president under both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, one of only two vice-presidents to resign: the other, Spiro Agnew in 1973.  Calhoun from South Carolina was one of the Great Triumvirate alongside Henry Clay of Kentucky and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts.

At Mount Vernon Lafayette visited the crypt of George Washington, since moved to a new family tomb on account of a failed attempt to steal Washington’s skull.  The key to the Bastille, the one Lafayette had sent in 1790, was on display at the foot of the staircase in the main house, the shipping ticket pristinely preserved.  George Washington Lafayette knew Mount Vernon, had been dispatched by his mother Adrienne to America, for safety’s sake, April 1795, fifteen years old, in the company of his Catholic tutor Felix Frestel.  George stayed at first with Alexander Hamilton in New York, then the President’s House in Philadelphia, and finally at Mount Vernon.  He returned to France in 1798.  While at Mount Vernon young George had been visited by Louis Philippe, the Duc d’Orleans, who would become in 1830, with General Lafayette’s endorsement, the first “King of the French.”  At the beginning of the Reign of Terror Louis Philippe escaped France, lived in Switzerland, England, and two years in Philadelphia, which occasioned his visit to Mount Vernon.

Down the Potomac to Yorktown, where he was greeted by Chief Justice John Marshall, and headquartered at the Thomas Nelson House, where Lord Cornwallis himself had headquartered; cannon balls can be seen today still stuck in the brick.  Thomas Nelson was Governor of Virginia and a brigadier general.  He suggested to Washington that the first cannon fusillade be aimed at Lord Cornwallis, meaning his own home.

To Williamsburg, capital of Virginia 1699 to 1779, when Governor Jefferson moved it to Richmond to frustrate the reach of the British navy.  Later, a banquet in the Apollo Room at Raleigh Tavern on Duke of Gloucester Street, the selfsame spot where Phi Beta Kappa was founded December 5, 1776, and where Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson early on worked on rhetorical skills.