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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 13, 1825

Travel in nineteenth century America was difficult even when weather cooperated, but it was treacherous in winter, to say nothing of dispiriting.  Lafayette bided much of the winter at Gadsby’s Hotel, his base of operation in Washington, D.C. 

He attended a legislative session at the House of Representatives to hear Henry Clay argue in favor of funding the Cumberland Road.  Clay was from  Kentucky, currently the seventh Speaker of the House, soon to be Secretary of State for John Quincy Adams; some years back, President James Monroe had offered him the position of Secretary of War, but Clay wanted to be Secretary of State, and when Monroe instead gave that position to John Quincy Adams, Clay petulantly pitched a sophomoric pique refusing to allow Monroe’s inauguration celebration in the House and snubbing the outdoor inaugural affair.  His talent for debate made him “The Great Compromiser” and part of the “Great Triumvirate,” including Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun.  He was an amalgam of soaring elegance with, at times, disappointing pettiness.  This day, with Lafayette in the gallery, he was in his element arguing for the United States government to pay for maintenance and extension of the Cumberland Road, also called the National Road, which ranged from Cumberland, Maryland, to St. Louis, Missouri.  He had been instrumental in brokering the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which nearly disunited the country, and he saw roads and internal improvements as means of shoring up a divided nation, a vision he called “The American System.”  Interestingly, a distant relative, General Lucious D. Clay of Marietta, Georgia, known for spearheading the Berlin Airlift after World War II, was charged by President Eisenhower in the 1950’s to develop an interstate highway system.

Ary Scheffer’s life-size portrait of Lafayette was a focal display beginning this week in the Capitol rotunda.  Over the course of his Farewell Tour Lafayette had nearly twenty original life portraits done.  It is a remarkable number given that Thomas Jefferson had only twenty-six during his lifetime.

Lafayette hobnobbed with once and future presidents, eleven in total, although there is conflict about James K. Polk.  Chris Ruli, in “Brother Lafayette,” says Lafayette and Polk met at a Masonic event in Nashville.  The list includes names well-known and closely associated with the Revolutionary War—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—and those with less such claim:  John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, and Polk. 

On January 19 he left Washington, D.C., and arrived at 8 PM at the Fountain Inn in Baltimore, on his way to Richmond.  While at Baltimore he visited John Carroll of Carrollton, the only Catholic and the longest surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence.  At the time of the American Revolution Carroll was the wealthiest man in America with an estimated worth which today would translate to $350,000,000.  He owned 10,000 acres, including “Carrollton,” bequeathed to him by his father John Carroll of Annapolis, and on which he built a manor house called “Tuscarora.”  He was criticized for signing only “John Carroll” to the Declaration of Independence on grounds that there were so many “John Carrolls” that he put nothing at risk.  Angrily, he grabbed the pen on John Hancock’s desk and added “Of Carrollton.”  He was also the largest slave holder, at 300, and yet: “Why keep alive the question of slavery?  It is admitted by all to be a great evil; let an effectual mode of getting rid of it be pointed out, or let the question sleep forever.”  He introduced a bill for gradual emancipation in the Maryland Senate; it failed to pass.  Moral clarity tripped up by the nuts-and-bolts of the day-to-day.