turning to Lafayette:
You are connected with both hemispheres and with two generations. Heaven saw fit to ordain that the electric spark of liberty should be conducted, through you, from the New World to the Old; and we, who are now here to perform this duty of patriotism, have all of us long ago received it in charge from our fathers to cherish your name and your virtues. 29
After Webster finished, the choir exploded into song, praising God and America; the cannons boomed, church bells pealed; and, as participants prepared to leave, Lafayette asked for a canvas sack and carefully troweled it full of soil from Bunker Hill to carry back to France. After the huge banquet that followed, Lafayette wrote to his children in La Grange “of the most beautiful patriotic fête ever celebrated. Nothing can compare to it except the
Fédération
of ’90. . . . Nothing can describe the effect of that republican prayer pronounced before an immense multitude. . . . I stood up at the head of all the other Revolutionary soldiers. . . . We sat down at a table with four thousand others, where I said that after celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of freedom in the American hemisphere, the toast of the next such anniversary will be to Europe’s freedom.” 30
Before leaving Boston, Lafayette returned to Quincy to say farewell to John Adams, then went off to Maine and Vermont to fulfill his pledge to visit all twenty-four states. He laid the cornerstone of the University of Vermont at Burlington, then took the midnight steamboat down Lake Champlain, and another down the Hudson from Albany to New York, where he arrived on July 4. He laid the cornerstone of the public library in Brooklyn, where heaps of stones blocked the view of a group of children. Some of the men lifted them up to see, and Lafayette swept one six-year-old boy into his arms, kissed his cheek, and set him down to watch as he laid the cornerstone. The boy’s name was Walter Whitman.
Lafayette spent ten days in New York, returned to Philadelphia, revisited the Germantown and Brandywine battlefields, and went for a month’s stay at the White House in Washington as President John Quincy Adams’s personal guest. They were old friends: Lafayette had known the president when Adams was a winsome boy of fifteen living with his father in Paris and called simply Quincy. Adams allowed his aging friend to rest after his long trip; he scheduled no receptions or banquets and went along with Lafayette when the latter wanted to revisit his three old friends in Virginia—Monroe, Jefferson, and Madison. All knew it was the last time they would ever see each other. Thomas Jefferson died ten months later, on July 4, 1826, as did the president’s father, John Adams, on the very same day, in Quincy, Massachusetts.
John Quincy Adams insisted on Lafayette’s remaining at the White House for an official celebration of the Frenchman’s sixty-eighth birthday on September 6. Although presidents never offered toasts, Adams broke with protocol and raised his glass “to the 22nd of February and the 6th of September, the birthday of Washington and the birthday of Lafayette.” Lafayette responded, “To the 4th of July, the birthday of liberty.” 31
Washington City declared a holiday the following morning to say goodbye to the last living general of the Revolutionary War. A huge, silent crowdencircled the White House; the president and the members of the cabinet all awaited Lafayette’s appearance. Finally he arrived, and the president, his voice trembling, said farewell on behalf of the American people:
“We shall look upon you always as belonging to us, during the whole of our life, as belonging to our children after us. You are ours by more than patriotic self-devotion with which you flew to the aid of our fathers at the crisis of our fate; ours by that unshaken gratitude for your services which is a precious portion of our inheritance; ours by that tie of love, stronger than death, which
You are connected with both hemispheres and with two generations. Heaven saw fit to ordain that the electric spark of liberty should be conducted, through you, from the New World to the Old; and we, who are now here to perform this duty of patriotism, have all of us long ago received it in charge from our fathers to cherish your name and your virtues. 29
After Webster finished, the choir exploded into song, praising God and America; the cannons boomed, church bells pealed; and, as participants prepared to leave, Lafayette asked for a canvas sack and carefully troweled it full of soil from Bunker Hill to carry back to France. After the huge banquet that followed, Lafayette wrote to his children in La Grange “of the most beautiful patriotic fête ever celebrated. Nothing can compare to it except the
Fédération
of ’90. . . . Nothing can describe the effect of that republican prayer pronounced before an immense multitude. . . . I stood up at the head of all the other Revolutionary soldiers. . . . We sat down at a table with four thousand others, where I said that after celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of freedom in the American hemisphere, the toast of the next such anniversary will be to Europe’s freedom.” 30
Before leaving Boston, Lafayette returned to Quincy to say farewell to John Adams, then went off to Maine and Vermont to fulfill his pledge to visit all twenty-four states. He laid the cornerstone of the University of Vermont at Burlington, then took the midnight steamboat down Lake Champlain, and another down the Hudson from Albany to New York, where he arrived on July 4. He laid the cornerstone of the public library in Brooklyn, where heaps of stones blocked the view of a group of children. Some of the men lifted them up to see, and Lafayette swept one six-year-old boy into his arms, kissed his cheek, and set him down to watch as he laid the cornerstone. The boy’s name was Walter Whitman.
Lafayette spent ten days in New York, returned to Philadelphia, revisited the Germantown and Brandywine battlefields, and went for a month’s stay at the White House in Washington as President John Quincy Adams’s personal guest. They were old friends: Lafayette had known the president when Adams was a winsome boy of fifteen living with his father in Paris and called simply Quincy. Adams allowed his aging friend to rest after his long trip; he scheduled no receptions or banquets and went along with Lafayette when the latter wanted to revisit his three old friends in Virginia—Monroe, Jefferson, and Madison. All knew it was the last time they would ever see each other. Thomas Jefferson died ten months later, on July 4, 1826, as did the president’s father, John Adams, on the very same day, in Quincy, Massachusetts.
John Quincy Adams insisted on Lafayette’s remaining at the White House for an official celebration of the Frenchman’s sixty-eighth birthday on September 6. Although presidents never offered toasts, Adams broke with protocol and raised his glass “to the 22nd of February and the 6th of September, the birthday of Washington and the birthday of Lafayette.” Lafayette responded, “To the 4th of July, the birthday of liberty.” 31
Washington City declared a holiday the following morning to say goodbye to the last living general of the Revolutionary War. A huge, silent crowdencircled the White House; the president and the members of the cabinet all awaited Lafayette’s appearance. Finally he arrived, and the president, his voice trembling, said farewell on behalf of the American people:
“We shall look upon you always as belonging to us, during the whole of our life, as belonging to our children after us. You are ours by more than patriotic self-devotion with which you flew to the aid of our fathers at the crisis of our fate; ours by that unshaken gratitude for your services which is a precious portion of our inheritance; ours by that tie of love, stronger than death, which
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