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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 20, 1825

The Farewell Tour

After visiting John Carroll of Carrollton, Lafayette boarded the steamboat “Petersburg” at Baltimore, into Chesapeake Bay to Norfolk, and up the James River to Richmond, the whole of it a two-day trip.  Lafayette was a prolific letter writer, and he used time on the water to good effect.  He wrote a letter to banker James Gallatin, son of Albert Gallatin who served as the fourth Secretary of the Treasury and said to possess or exceed Hamilton’s financial wizardry.  James and his father were at Cannes on the French Riviera when Napoleon arrived on March 1, 1815, having escaped exile on Elba, on his way to Paris and the One Hundred Days; the two Gallatins followed Napoleon’s entourage into Paris.  James and father Albert there met the most well-known French portraitist at the time Jacques-Louis David.  David had been the official painter for Napoleon, who had given David the commission for “Napoleon at the St. Bernard Pass,” in which Napoleon is garbed in dazzling regalia mounted on a stunning white stallion, when in fact he crossed the Alps on a mule; Napoleon, like Lafayette, knew the value of symbol.  David asked James to pose nude for “Cupid and Psyche.”  With his father’s consent, he agreed.  “Cupid and Psyche” now hangs in the Cleveland Museum of Art.  The mischievous smirk on Cupid’s face belongs to eighteen-year-old James Gallatin.     

Lafayette arrived at Richmond at 2 PM to an artillery salute.  He stayed at Mrs. Richardson’s Boarding House and attended a ball that evening at the Eagle Hotel.  Lafayette attended many a ball during the Farewell Tour, but for him balls were social occasions only.  For one thing, his broken left femur, incurred on a patch of ice in 1803, healed incompletely and angularly such that dancing became untenable; for the other, his hearing was impaired, and background chatter would ricochet everywhere, interfering with his ability to hear.  He would see lips move and reply with a stock-phrase riding on a smile.

Lafayette wrote Friedrich List on January 22 inviting him to emigrate from Germany to the United States where he could express his contrarian ideas without fear of government sanction.  List would become one of the gallery of little known notables velcroed to the Farewell Tour.  In Germany he argued for free trade among the German states and for protective tariffs for infant manufacturing industries.  He was also a constitutional liberal arguing for trial by jury and making public the proceedings of trials.  List has had more influence on economic theory than anyone save Adam Smith whose “Wealth of Nations” was published in 1776; he foreshadowed the likes of John Maynard Keynes.  For his ideas he was imprisoned and exiled.  He and Lafayette first met in Paris in 1823.  Lafayette now wrote to encourage him once again to come to America.  List did not receive the letter until March, but by April he was at La Havre headed for America.  He arrived in New York City on June 20, caught up with Lafayette and stayed with the Farewell Tour until its end.  Aboard the “Brandywine,” returning to France, September 7, 1825, Lafayette wrote yet another letter of encouragement to List, applauding his dedication to liberty, democracy, and economic welfare.  Subsequently List settled in Reading, Pennsylvania, where he was a journal editor until his return to Germany in 1831.

Lafayette received a formal invitation from the legislature of Louisiana to visit its state, which he accepted.

The Virginia legislature held a banquet in his honor at the Union House, followed by a state ball at the Eagle Hotel.

On January 26 Lafayette boarded the “Petersburg” to return to Baltimore by way of Norfolk.  He wrote Thoms Jefferson to give an update on his itinerary.