Lafayette's Liberty Speech: Bond Between France and America

Lafayette was sixty-seven years old and had not seen America in forty years when Congress invited him back for a grand farewell tour in 1824. He had left as a young French aristocrat chasing revolutionary glory, arriving in 1777 at nineteen to fight alongside George Washington. He was wounded at Brandywine, survived Valley Forge, and commanded forces at Yorktown. He returned to France, played a leading role in the early stages of the French Revolution, presented the key to the Bastille to Washington as a gift, and then spent years imprisoned during the Terror. Now, in the summer of 1824, he returned to a country of twenty-four states that barely existed when he bled for it. Buffalo was barely a city, incorporated just two years before his visit. But thousands showed up anyway on June 4, 1825, packing the public square to hear the old general speak. The tour lasted sixteen months and covered all twenty-four states, making Lafayette the most-traveled person in the country. He traveled by steamboat, carriage, and horseback through cities that named streets, parks, and public squares after him before he even left town. Congress awarded him $200,000 and a township of land in Florida as thanks for his service. The farewell tour was the young republic's first experience of national celebrity culture: a single figure whose presence united Americans across regional and political divisions. He returned to France in September 1825 aboard a ship named the Brandywine, after the battle where he had been wounded forty-eight years earlier. He died in Paris in 1834. American soil from Bunker Hill was spread over his grave, at his request.