By Elizabeth Chew
During the American Revolution, a wealthy French teenager was willing to risk his fortune and his life for people he had never met who lived an ocean away. Why? Because of their stirring fight for freedom from British colonial rule.
Against the wishes of his family and the French crown, Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de LaFayette (1757-1834), financed a ship and crossed the Atlantic to join our cause. He was 19 years old.
He was commissioned as a major general in the Continental Army, became an influential member of General George Washington’s staff, endured the brutal winter at Valley Forge, and befriended Alexander Hamilton and South Carolinian John Laurens. He encouraged French King Louis XVI to send critical military support and led a division at the Battle of Yorktown, where the British surrendered in 1781.
As I have talked with people over the last year about the Marquis de Lafayette’s role in the American Revolution, colleagues have had to remind me to explain who he was. Despite his 21st-century reappearance with Hamilton and Laurens in the blockbuster Broadway musical “Hamilton,” Lafayette is no longer a household name. That is a shame. He remains a hero.
More than 40 years after the Revolutionary War ended, Lafayette certainly was a household name. In March 1825 during a 13-month return visit to the United States, he spent just less than two weeks in South Carolina, stopping in Cheraw, Camden, Columbia, Charleston, Edisto Island and Beaufort.
As the nation he helped to establish approached its 50th birthday, Lafayette, the last surviving Revolutionary War general, had written to President James Monroe expressing his longing to “seek those friends of my youth with whom I may still enjoy the most pleasing recollections, to revisit the happy shores of an adopted country, which has so well fulfilled our early and most sanguine expectations, and where I find, in a third and fourth generation, testimonies of benevolence that fill my heart with the most affectionate and devoted gratitude.”
Lafayette may have invited himself, but President Monroe and the U.S. Congress readily obliged. In January 1824, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution requesting President Monroe, himself a Continental Army officer and friend of Lafayette, to provide a ship to convey Lafayette to our shores.
Lafayette and his party arrived in New York on August 16. Greeted and feted as a rock star or Hollywood icon in all (the then) 24 states of the union, Lafayette attracted rapt public attention and overwhelming hospitality—processions, artillery salutes, speeches, dinners and balls — from aging Revolution veterans, military and civic leaders, the press and Americans of every stripe. He visited Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon, laid the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill monument, and participated in ceremonies marking the anniversary of the Battle of Yorktown.
This month’s bicentennial of Lafayette’s 1825 visit to Charleston and Beaufort provides us with an opportune moment of reflection as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Revolution. Why was the American cause so attractive to the young Frenchman in 1776 and the memory so important in 1824-5? Why should we care about his visit today?
In short, we should care about Lafayette’s visit because of the way Lafayette saw us.
During the Revolutionary era, Lafayette made it clear that while he championed the cause of American liberty from Britain, he also supported the manumission of slaves. In the 50 years between the Revolution and his return, he participated in abolitionist activities in the United States and France.
During his return trip, Lafayette was accompanied by his son, George Washington Lafayette, and his secretary, Auguste Levasseur. In 1829, Levasseur published a two-volume account of their journey. Of their visit to James and Dolley Madison’s Montpelier plantation in Virginia, Levasseur wrote that Lafayette “who never fails to take advantage of an opportunity to defend the right which all men, without exception, have to liberty, introduced the question of slavery among the friends of Mr. Madison.”
Of their time in South Carolina, Levasseur wrote “the state of things in relation to slavery in South Carolina, is the more distressing from its singular contrast with the character of the inhabitants of that state. The Carolinians are particularly distinguished for the cultivation of their minds, the elegance of their manners, their politeness and hospitality towards strangers.”
Throughout his time in America, Lafayette emphasized that though he loved the United States, he opposed slavery. He loved and respected Americans and he wanted them to live up to the founding edict that liberty is a natural human right for all people.
Lafayette’s ability to see America for better and for worse should still be a model for us today.
Elizabeth Chew has degrees from Yale University, the University of London and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is CEO of the S.C. Historical Society. More can be found at https://schistory.org/.
