Every Heart Throbs

Before Beatlemania, there was Marquismania! 200 years ago this August, the Marquis de Lafayette returned to these shores after an absence of 40 years. In his 13-month 'farewell tour' of the 24 United States, the nation he helped to found, the Marquis was cheered and celebrated by grateful crowds in the hundreds and thousands. As the 50th anniversary of Independence loomed, nostalgia burned hot for heroes of the Revolution like the Marquis, whose generation was vanishing too quickly into memory by 1824. James Madison hadn't seen the Marquis since 1784, when he shared his first impression of the Marquis with Thomas Jefferson. And Madison was there when the Marquis ruffled the feathers of Stratford-born Arthur Lee, an event Lee recalled in the months before his death in 1792. Join us this month as we explore memories of the fabled and fabulous Marquis de Lafayette!   

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Transcript

Stratford Mail 2:5: Every Heart Throbs

Intro

This month memories of the Marquis de Lafayette as we commemorate the 200th anniversary of his farewell tour of the nation he helped to found.

When the Marquis de Lafayette returned to the United States in August 1824 for a 13-month tour of the 24 states of the Union, much had changed since his visit in the final third of 1784 [4 August - 21 December 1784]. Lafayette himself had changed. He had just turned 67 when he reunited with his old friend James Madison at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello on 5 November 1824. The 72-year-old Madison wrote home to Dolley at Montpelier: 

My old friend embraced me with great warmth. He is in fine health & spirits but so much increased in bulk & changed in aspect that I should not have known him.

His increased bulk would be explained by an engineer stationed at Fort Monroe, a Captain Rufus Baker, in a letter to his mother: 

Lafayette visited our post and stayed all night with us … He eats like our doberman and always has a keen appetite for duplicate dinners, suppers, and breakfasts.

The elder Lafayette’s appetite nevertheless paled by comparison to the American appetite for Lafayette. Apart from old friends and VIP cronies like Jefferson and Madison, ordinary folk turned out in droves to celebrate the return of a national friend and hero; and tales of meeting the Marquis would become part of treasured family lore for decades. In Virginia, they were counting the minutes until ‘the General’ arrived: 

At 27 minutes of one o clock, pm, on Saturday, General Lafayette stepped upon the soil of the “ancient dominion,” at the old Virginia line. 

In that 27th minute the power of description seemed to fail the reporter as he fell back on the incantatory repetition of the man’s name: 

We should in vain attempt to portray the generous feeling which appeared to pervade every breast, from the highest to the lowest, upon the approach of this inestimable man. Every eye seemed to beam Lafayette–every countenance seemed to express Lafayette–every tongue seemed to lisp Lafayette–every heart seemed to throb Lafayette–every look seemed to convey Lafayette–every cannon, from its fiery mouth, seemed to proclaim Lafayette–every breeze seemed to whisper Lafayette (Alexandria Herald, 18 October).

Long after Lafayette’s 1824 visit, American poet Walt Whitman recalled meeting the celebrity Frenchman during that final visit, when Lafayette laid the cornerstone for a new school in Brooklyn: 

Lafayette … took me up–I was five years old, pressed me a moment to his breast–gave me a kiss and set me down in a safe spot. 

Lafayette’s farewell tour coincided with the final breaths of the presidency of James Monroe, who had in February 1824 invited America’s favorite Frenchman to return to his adopted country as the Nation’s Guest. Perhaps Monroe thought to use this living icon of the Revolutionary generation and its last living military General to rekindle the patriotic feeling and sense of national unity that characterized America most recently in the aftermath of the war of 1812 and mythically during the heady days of Revolution and Independence. Lafayette was an object lesson for younger generations in the value of personal sacrifice, but he would be unable to exorcise here the looming demons of factionalism and financial crisis.  

In 1824 James Madison hadn’t seen Lafayette in 40 years, since a chance encounter in Baltimore in September 1784 made the two travelling companions. On 6 September 1784, Madison wrote to his father:

I fell in with the Marquis … He is proceeding Northward as far as Boston from whence he goes to the Indian Treaty at Fort Stanwix & from thence returns to Virginia. about the same time that I must be there. He presses me much to fall into his plan, and I am not sure that I shall decline it. It will carry me farther than I had proposed, but I shall be rewarded by the pleasure of his company and the further opportunity of gratifying my curiosity. 

After a month spent with the Marquis, gratifying his curiosity, Madison offered in coded form this assessment of Lafayette to Thomas Jefferson: 

The time I have lately passed with the Marquis. has given me a pretty thorough insight into his character. With great natural frankness of temper he unites … with very considerable talents, a strong thirst of praise and popularity. (17 October 1784)

In short, Lafayette combined ability with vanity, and it was surely vanity, not prudence, that motivated Lafayette to swan into negotiations between agents of the Haudenosaunee confederacy and federal commissioners of the United States in the first week of October 1784. His presence was awkward. In Madison’s letter to Jefferson from amid the Marquis’ entourage, he framed the problem of Lafayette’s presence this way:   

The question will probably occur how a foreigner and a private one could appear on the theatre of a public treaty between [the] United States and the Indian nations and how the Commissioners could lend a sanction to it. (17 Oct.)

Suffice it to say: sanction was difficult to withhold. This was Lafayette, the name whispered on every breeze, our nation’s guest and a war hero. We’ll return to this, but first a quick take on the treaty in question: During the Revolutionary war, 4 nations of the indigenous Haudenosaunee confederacy allied with Great Britain, and 2 allied with the Colonists. The terms of peace negotiated between Great Britain and the United States in 1783 did not include their indigenous allies. A treaty was therefore negotiated in October 1784 by federal commissioners at Ft. Stanwix (also called Ft. Schuyler). In short it stipulated the release of patriot hostages from the British-allied Haudenosaunee and as a penalty for picking the wrong side the surrender of their traditional lands in western New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. The right of Haudenosaunee negotiators to cede that land was later disputed by other indigenous peoples with claims to it and by other Haudenosaunee, with the consequence that the treaty was never ratified by the confederacy. The treaty also affirmed the right of the American-allied Oneida and Tuscarora peoples to their traditional lands, though land-hungry states soon exploited the distressed conditions of their former allies in the wake of the war and gnawed away at their traditional lands. Despite making common cause with Washington at Valley Forge and bleeding with Lafayette at the Battle of Barren Hill in May 1778, these indigenous allies received scant compensation for their support of the American cause. 

As to Lafayette turning up, Madison explains to Jefferson that some folks thought that Haundenosaunee affinity for the French and for Lafayette especially might grease the gears of diplomacy. The idea was pitched to Lafayette (by federal commissioner Oliver Wolcott of CT, among others), whether in sincerity or as a courtesy Madison does not decide. In any case, the idea took root. For his part, Lafayette was eager to reunite with his Oneida friends and allies, a desire he later expressed when he found them absent from their traditional lands during his visits to western New York in 1825. Griffith Evans, a secretary traveling with the federal commission, noted in his journal the arrival of the Marquis and his retinue (including Madison) at Ft. Stanwix on October 3, 1784. Madison reports to Jefferson that the Marquis was “embarrassed” by the “reserve” with which he was received by the federal commissioners, and though Lafayette took pains not to step on their toes, the toe-trampling was done and dusted the moment he turned up. Some Haudenosaunee negotiators at Ft. Stanwix held what Madison called an “enthusiastic idea of the Marquis.” The scene was awkward. Once there, all eyes were on the Marquis, and the commissioners (likely grudgingly) consented to him making a speech to the assembled company. Evans records in his journal:   

The Marquis arose and delivered his speech to them with much oratory and elegance calculated to serve the interest of his king and much to promote the continental business. He upbraided those that joined the enemy in the late war with reprehensive conduct and praised those that stood for their country against its unjust invaders very freely.    

Madison suggests that the Marquis was motivated by the prospect of doing his adopted country some service and by the prospect of news of that service lighting up the gazettes of Europe [Oct. 17]. In fact, Lafayette’s speech and Haudenosaunee reactions appeared in the Pennsylvania Journal in late November, ill-advisedly before the commissioners made their official report to Congress. Madison explained to Jefferson:

During the whole stay of the Marquis he was the only conspicuous figure. The Commissioners were eclipsed. All of them probably felt it. Lee complained to me of the immoderate stress laid on the influence of the Marquis and evidently promoted his departure. [Oct. 17] 

Madison refers here to federal commissioner Arthur Lee of Virginia, a son of Stratford, who might well have been chafed by the intrusion of political theater and sentimentality in the serious and official business of a fledgling nation treating with other sovereign nations. To be fair, the business of the commission was beset by intrusions, including the presence of a New York delegation steered by Major Peter Schuyler, acting under instructions from New York’s Governor to put State above nation:

Where you find they have in view anything that may eventually prove detrimental to the State, you are to use your best endeavours to counteract and frustrate it [Qtd. in F.B. Hough, Proceedings of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs (Albany: J. Munsell, 1861), I. 63]

Upstaged by the Marquis and obstructed by the myopia of fellow Americans, the commissioners struggled to stamp their authority on the treaty proceedings. Days later Griffith Evans recorded in his journal that when Arthur Lee delivered the commission’s terms it was “in a language by no means accommodating or flattering; quite unlike what they used to receive.” Arthur executed a tone shift. Negotiations ensued, and on October 20th Evans noted: “Mr. Lee delivered in Council a most spirited grand speech. It alarmed us very much but had a very good effect and deserves great  credit, describing the … terms of the peace offered.” The Oneida chief known as ‘Good Peter’ accepted the commission’s terms on behalf of the Haudenosaunee the following day.

Months before his death in December 1792, when France was astir with its own Revolution, Arthur Lee remembered the Ft. Stanwix treaty in a letter to his longtime friend and British statesman, the Marquess of Lansdowne. His memory of Lafayette was mixed and conformed to a stereotype Arthur had formed of the French: 

They must be meddling. At a treaty I held with the six Nations, the Marquis Lafayette made a long journey to the place, with a chest of feathers, and asked leave to make a speech to the Indians and give them the feathers in the name of the King of France. A man of character, of any other country, could not have been guilty of such a piece of impertinence. And yet the Marquis is as decent and modest a man as that country ever produced. But this disposition to meddle, is so potent, that it domineers over every other quality [10 May 1792].  

Here was one American unimpressed by the spectacle of the Marquis. After years spent abroad as a co-commissioner of the Continental Congress to the French court during the American Revolution, Arthur had developed a cynical outlook on French diplomacy. Even as Arthur shared this memory of Lafayette and feathers with Lord Lansdowne, the Marquis himself was in France, under pressure from Maximilien Robespierre to resign his military command, and by August 14 was fleeing an arrest warrant issued by new minister of justice, Georges Danton, but that is a story for another day.

Outro  

Sound effects courtesy of Pixabay
Music is William Ross Chernoff's "In Shadows"
AI voices courtesy of Play.ht (except Dr. Steffey)

© Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey, 2024