The last French general of the Revolution steps ashore in New York Harbor
Fifty years after he crossed the Atlantic as a twenty-year-old volunteer, the Marquis de Lafayette made the trip again, this time as an invited guest of a nation he had helped create. On August 15, 1824, he landed at Staten Island aboard the merchant ship Cadmus, with his son Georges Washington de La Fayette at his side. President James Monroe had invited him as the nation approached its fiftieth anniversary. The next day, New York gave him a welcome few living men had ever received.
Monroe's invitation came as the Revolution's generation was dying off, and he wanted a living link to the founding for a new generation to see. Lafayette's tour became the country's first shared national spectacle, drawing crowds across all 24 states before railroads or telegraphs existed to organize such a thing.
QWhich future physician gave Lafayette a welcome speech at age eleven?
James McCune Smith, an eleven-year-old pupil at the African Free School No. 2 on Mulberry Street, delivered a short welcome speech to Lafayette during the general's time in New York. Smith would go on to become the first African American to earn a medical degree, studying at the University of Glasgow after being denied admission to American medical schools. Smith would later invoke those same ideals of liberty in his work as a physician and abolitionist.
QWhere did Lafayette sleep on his overnight stops in the Ohio Valley?
In Marietta, Ohio, Lafayette stayed overnight at the private residence of Nahum Ward, a local landowner and one of the town's most prominent citizens. Further downriver in Cincinnati, he lodged at the St. Nicholas Hotel rather than a private home. These stops were part of the grueling logistics of a tour with no railroads or telegraphs to coordinate it; organizers had to rely on whichever homes, taverns, and hotels a given town could offer. The contrast between a private household in Marietta and a commercial hotel in Cincinnati reflected the two towns' different sizes and stages of growth.
QWhat unfinished engineering project did Lafayette inspect in Buffalo?
In Buffalo, New York, Lafayette gave a speech at the Eagle Tavern in what was then named Lafayette Square, then went to inspect a stretch of the Erie Canal while it was still under construction. The canal would not fully open until 1825, the same year Lafayette's tour ended. It would link the Great Lakes to the Hudson River and help make New York the nation's commercial gateway. Lafayette also spent time in Concord, New Hampshire, visiting the smaller towns of Hopkinton and Claremont, part of a schedule that pushed him into rural corners of the country far removed from the grand ceremonies of cities like Yorktown or New York.
