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 4, 1824

Thomas Jefferson and Lafayette reunited on the afternoon of November 4, 1824.  It had been forty years, Lafayette now 67, Jefferson 81.  As he limped across the north lawn of Monticello to embrace his friend, toupee in place to camouflage a balding pate and a paunch to chastise darker days, Lafayette wondered at how much Jefferson had aged.  “God bless you, General!”  “Bless you, my dear Jefferson!”

The two of them fell into easy conversation, their give and take unimpaired by physical frailty.  Conversation, at its best, is an art form.  Our medicinal arsenals notwithstanding, conversation is unmatched as means to forestall memory wrinkles, a do-it-yourself Botox for the crow’s feet of recall.  Eleven days of invigorating leisure, punctuated by sprints of intellectual aerobics.  No scribe, but from later letters we know the content of conversation included, as it must have, slavery.  Lafayette was an abolitionist and that well known.  Jefferson at Monticello had the wolf by the ears and could not maneuver to let go, the vacuum that was his bank account heavily influencing his options. “The abolition of the evil” Jefferson said, “is not impossible, it ought never therefore to be despaired of.”  Jefferson knew.

Jefferson’s great pride was the University of Virginia, known as the “Academical Village.”  Founded five years earlier five miles from Monticello at Charlottesville, he and Lafayette, James Madison in tow, visited the campus.  Everything was designed by Jefferson:  its motto, “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free”; the Rotunda, the centerpiece facing the South Lawn, a scaled version of the Parthenon in Athens, and which housed the library; and the curriculum.  Jefferson held that democracy would not survive without level-headed, informed citizens.  Lafayette later, as a member of the Chamber of Deputies, would call for universal education, a legacy of conversations with Jefferson.  Jefferson wanted. out of all his accomplishments, only three chiseled onto his tombstone:  “Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia,”  George Lafayette had expressed an interest in America’s highly venomous timber rattlesnake, like the one coiled to strike on the 1775 “DONT TREAD ON ME” Gadsden flag; students led George to a side room where a rattler slithered across the floor, defanged:  we do not know if the gift was accepted.

“More than any home in America, Monticello speaks to me as an expression of the personality of its builder,” wrote Franklin Roosevelt.  “In the design, not of the whole alone, but of every room, of every part of every room, in the very furnishings which Jefferson devised on his own drawing board and made in his own workshop, there speaks ready capacity for detail and, above all, creative genius.”  The entrance hall had heads and horns:  elk, buffalo, deer, even a mastodon, curios of the Lewis and Clark Expedition; the dining room with busts of Washington, Franklin, Lafayette, and John Paul Jones; and his library of 7000 books, the acorn from which grew the Library of Congress.  Chevalier de Chastellux said, “Jefferson is the first American who has consulted the fine arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather.”

The breakfast bell rang twice at 8:15 and 9.  Tea, coffee, bread fresh from the oven, cold meats.  At 3:30 Toddy Time, served in silver cups engraved G.W. to T.J.  Supper at 4:  olives, crabs, venison, vegetables, oysters, figs.  Wine after dinner.  Coffee and conversation in the drawing room.  Conversation was as much a part of Monticello as architecture.

Bedtime at 9.