The Marquis de Lafayette sailed from Natchez to Carondelet, Mo., between April 18 and April 28, 1825, on the steamboat Natchez. The Revolutionary War hero was on his return tour; when he arrived in Manhattan on Aug. 16, 1824, he was greeted by 80,000 people. (The Beatles were greeted by 4,000.)
Over the next 13 months, he visited all 24 states. I can't find any claim that he set foot in the Arkansas Territory, but he certainly would have seen it from the Mississippi River. And we honored him by naming Lafayette County for him in 1827 and changing the name of Washington Courthouse to Fayetteville in 1829.
Lafayette has been on my mind because in the park named for him in Washington, D.C., vandals-with-a-cause have defaced his statue twice in the space of four years. Others (Andrew Jackson, for example) have taken hits, but spray-painting and stickering Lafayette with jihadist slogans and other obscenities seems particularly ungracious because he was a foreigner and a friend. He was our guest.
The lingering sense that Lafayette deserves to remain an honored guest in our collective memory made me realize how little I know about the man. So I ordered a recent biography, "The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered" by Laura Auricchio.
As a child being raised by his grandmother, Lafayette yearned to encounter and fight the Beast of the Gevaudan, a creature of his obscure province blamed for the deaths of people and livestock. "I recall nothing in my life that preceded my enthusiasm for glorious tales or my plans to travel the world in search of renown," he wrote.
He loved ancient history (Herodotus) and biography (Plutarch). A series of deaths left him a rich orphan. At age 19, he left his pregnant wife and sailed to America, landing near Georgetown, S.C., on June 13, 1777. Among the 44 men he brought with him was a cynic, the Vicomte de Mauroy. Auricchio calls him "the very model of a mercenary officer." Mauroy tried to poison Lafayette's belief that Americans "are unified by the love of virtue, of liberty ... that they are simple, good, hospitable people who prefer beneficence to all our vain pleasures."
The haters have been among us since the beginning of the American experiment. They've given us some observations, some good writing, some terrible graffiti; but the great writing comes from the ones who love this country, even if they're ill at ease. Cheever comes to mind. The narrator's dream in "The Death of Justina." He's in a supermarket. "There were all kinds, this being my beloved country. There were Italians, Finns, Jews, Negroes, Shropshiremen, Cubans--anyone who had heeded the voice of liberty--and they were dressed with that sumptuary abandon that European caricaturists record with such bitter disgust."
Lafayette, wild optimist, heeded the voice of liberty. He came. He helped us win. And what about the bad part of our greatest paradox? What about slavery? He hated it. He applied his fortune and intellect to try and find ways out, ways to liberty for all.
Bizarre oversights? "The manners of this world are simple, polite, and worthy of in every respect of the country where the good name of liberty resounds." A few days later: "in America, there are no poor, and none that one could even call peasants." He was writing from South Carolina.
Did some of his attempts fail? He tried to draw George Washington into "Purchasing a Small Estate Where We May try the Experiment to free the Negroes, and use them only as tenants." It didn't take, but Lafayette bought a plantation and slaves in the French colony of Cayenne with the intent to free the enslaved people and give them lots to work. He didn't free anyone there because he had money problems during the French Revolution.
But he tried. We'll get to his relationship with James Armistead later.
Auricchio writes of a curator at Versailles who asks, "Why should we have a bust of Lafayette?"
She replies not to the curator but to the reader: "Not because he was infallible or superhuman or endowed with gifts the rest of us lack," she writes. "We should have a bust of Lafayette precisely because he was all too human. He lived in treacherous times and made imperfect choices. He failed at more ventures than most of us will ever attempt and succeeded at efforts that stymied countless men, but he never abandoned the belief that he could change the world, and he never despaired of success. Of all of his accomplishments, these might be the most extraordinary."
Let's hang on to this man.