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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 December 9, 1824

On December 9 Lafayette climbed into a carriage at 12:30 PM, to be taken to the Capitol.  At exactly 1 PM, as directed by the Committee of Invitation, the Senate doors opened and James Barbour, senator from Orange County, Virginia, and chair of the committee, escorted Lafayette to the center of the chamber, senators all around standing and “bareheaded,” and announced, “We present General Lafayette to the Senate of the United States.”  Lafyette was then seated at the right of President Pro Tem John Gaillard of South Carolina.  Each senator in turn gave respects to the Nation’s Guest.  The next day the House of Representatives followed in like manner, but a much more public affair.  The Senate was invited to attend; Senators Andrew Jackson of Tennessee and Martin van Buren of Massachusetts were in the gallery.  Daniel Webster was there, chair of the House Judiciary Committee; five years hence, in the Webster-Hayne debates, his “second reply to Hayne” would be considered “the most eloquent speech ever delivered in Congress.”  This whole event being special, says Levasseur, “the part of the hall that the Representatives did not occupy had been given over to the ladies invited to the session for this time only.”  Speaker of the House Henry Clay offered a rousing rhetorical welcome.  Lafayette replied, the first foreign dignitary to address the American Congress.

Lafayette was a unifying influence in an atmosphere politically charged.  The winner of the November presidential election had not yet been determined.  Andrew Jackson won 42% of the popular vote, but only 99 electoral votes of the 131 required.  John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, whom some say was the most intelligent of all our presidents, and the son of John Adams, garnered 84 electoral votes.  Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford of Georgia, stroke burdened but supported by James Monroe and Thoms Jefferson, won 41; and Speaker of the House Henry Clay of Kentucky, 37.  Lafayette knew them all.  William Crawford had been James Madison’s minister to France 1813-1815, during Napoleon’s First French Empire.  The Twelfth Amendment made this a “contingent election,” thrown to the House of Representatives.  It would not be resolved until February 9, 1825, when Henry Clay, considering Jackson a derailed demagogue, threw his support to John Quincy Adams.  When Adams named Clay Secretary of State, Jackson supporters claimed a “corrupt bargain,” the first of three in our political history to be so labelled by academicians (the other two being the Compromise of 1877 and the Nixon Pardon in 1974).  

Of the eight people made Honorary Citizens of the United States—Winston Churchill, Raoul Wallenberg, William Penn, Hannah Penn, Mother Teresa, Lafayette, Casimir Pulaski, and Bernardo de Galvez—only Lafayette (August 6, 2002) and Mother Teresa (October 1, 1996) were by direct acts of Congress; the others by presidential proclamation with congressional authorization.  Lafayette, however, was already a citizen of the United States by virtue of a resolution by the Maryland General Assembly, December 28, 1784, saying he and his male heirs “forever shall be natural born citizens” of Maryland.  When the United States Constitution took effect March 4, 1789, Section One of Article Two, extended U.S. citizenship to all natural born citizens of the states.

Lafayette attended the Washington Theater to see an original production, “Lafayette or the Prisoner of Olmutz,” followed by a reception hosted by John Qunicy Adams. 

He attended the first commencement at Columbia College.

President Monroe had suggested that Congress consider an appropriate gift for Lafayette, as a token of the nation’s esteem.  Congress had formed a committee.  It would render its report the following week.  De Tocqueville, on his nine-month swing through the United States in 1831, accompanied by his good friend Gustave de Beaumont, marveled at how we were a land of committees.