Read The Painter's Chair Online
Authors: Hugh Howard
The Painter's Chair (32 page)
Despite having expired a quarter century before, George Washington seemed to be watching his old friend at almost every stop
of his “Farewell Tour.” In Boston, a Gilbert Stuart portrait of President Washington had been installed at Lafayette’s accommodation
on Park Street.
7
In Quincy, where he visited the eighty-eight-year-old John Adams, the 1790 portrait of Washington that Adams had ordered
from the artist Edward Savage hung in a place of honor, as did a Savage likeness of Martha. In Philadelphia, Lafayette had
embraced his war time comrade Charles Willson Peale at the Pennsylvania State House, then insisted upon going upstairs for
a guided tour of Peale’s gallery of revolutionary worthies (more than one canvas portrayed Washington). Later, Lafayette visited
the artist’s Walnut Street Painting Room, where Peale sketched him once more.
8
In Princeton, as the Frenchman received a doctor of laws degree inside a circular pavilion constructed for the reception,
General Washington looked on, this time the size of life, from one of Peale’s replicas of his
Battle of Princeton.
9
After arriving in Washington, Lafayette had toured the Capitol, where four giant versions of John Trumbull’s history pictures,
including
The Declaration of Independence
, had been contracted for but not yet installed in the unfinished Rotunda. At the President’s House, grandly outfitted in
the French style by President Monroe, Lafayette saw the Gilbert Stuart
Washington
that Dolley Madison had saved from the fire that gutted the mansion during the War of 1812.
With dusk falling that Friday evening, Lafayette heard the rumbling of the wooden roadbed as his carriage crossed the Potomac.
Along with his son, George Washington Lafayette, he anticipated a very different evening from the recent days of grand public
occasions with thousands of hands to shake. The bridge beneath them connected the Federal City with Alexandria, Virginia,
and upon reaching the river’s western shore, the horses soon began the climb to the heights of Arlington, through a parkland
of tall oaks and elms. At the top of a bluff overlooking the city, Wash Custis and other surviving members of George and Martha’s
family awaited the Lafayettes.
10
Decades earlier, the Marquis de Lafayette had delighted in calling the plump little boy, then just three years old, “Squire
Tub,” but the family connection had been renewed in the interim. After the American War of Independence had concluded, Lafayette
had returned to France and played an important role in his own nation’s revolution (in 1789, as commander of the citizen militia,
he had ordered the demolition of the Bastille, a state prison and symbol of tyranny). When more radical factions came to power,
Lafayette had been imprisoned during the anarchic days of the Reign of Terror. His son George, then fourteen, escaped to America,
where he and his tutor found refuge with the Washingtons. The General had treated the boy more as his son than as a guest,
so to George Lafayette, now a man of forty-four, this journey was also a fond return to familiar places and faces. Thirty
years earlier he and Wash Custis, two years younger, had been playmates and friends; Nelly Custis called him “my young adopted
Brother.”
11
When the carriages emerged from the woods, the majestic mansion stood before them. It was an immense Grecian temple, with
light pouring out of the large windows that lined the façade. As the carriages grew closer, the splash of light from the open
front door could be seen, illuminating the interior of the portico. Indoors Mr. and Mrs. Custis and other family members waited.
For Lafayette these people could only bring to mind his old friend. Washington had been a private man whose intimate relationships
were closely guarded. But in twenty years of letters to “My dear Marquis,” he was warmer and more immediate than he was with
most people. As Washington himself had written to Lafayette many years before, “You know it always gives me the sincerest
plea sure to hear from you . . . that your kind letters . . . so replete with personal affection and confidential intelligence,
afford . . . me inexpressible satisfaction.”
12
Washington had been given to strong feelings; he was alive to love and to loss (men of his time, including Washington himself,
unabashedly cried real tears in public); and he was possessed of large hopes. Lafayette was one of few people in his life
with whom he was able to share these feelings and aspirations. Theirs was a friendship, Lafayette sensed, that endured even
in death.
The man who stepped down from his carriage that evening little resembled the reedy nineteen-year-old whom General George Washington
first met at a Philadelphia dinner in 1777. Lafayette had celebrated his sixty-seventh birthday the previous month, and the
years had taken an evident toll on the fresh-faced but grave young nobleman. He had spent half the closing decade of the eighteenth
century in prison. He still mourned his wife, Adrienne, who had died in 1807 of lead and laudanum poisoning, medicaments she
had been given to treat ailments resulting from her own incarceration.
Lafayette walked with a cane; it was both stylish and practical, as an old injury to his knee left him with a pronounced limp.
He maintained the firm, upright posture of the military man, looking taller than his five-foot, nine-inch stature, but he
wore a coat and vest (never a uniform or any military decoration). Despite his simple broadcloth coat, his advancing age and
creeping infirmities, his was an imposing presence. He was, wrote one who saw him that week, “a man of extraordinary attractions;
in face, much changed within thirty years. His complexion, originally clear and white, is now sunburnt; his forehead, which
is very high, is covered very low with a wig; but it is still most attractive . . . All that he says and does is distinguished
by a singular taste and good sense. He never seems for a moment to overstep the modesty of nature.”
13
Wash escorted the Lafayettes into the drawing room to meet Molly, their daughter Mary, and the party assembled there. He was
welcomed as a most honored yet familiar guest; in return, he was courtly and cordial. It was Molly Custis who presented General
Lafayette with a fresh rose, one fetched that morning from Mount Vernon. Once more Lafayette was nearly overcome with emotion
as he pressed the bloom to his heart.
II.
October 17, 1824 . . . The Tomb of Washington . . . Mount Vernon
T
HE TECHNOLOGY OF transportation having advanced since they last visited America, the Lafayettes boarded a vessel powered by
steam, the
Petersburg
, for the next leg of the journey. As the ship prepared to leave Alexandria, a large party joined the father and son on board
the
Petersburg
, including more than a dozen American military officers, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, members of Congress, and other
notable citizens. The Tent of Washington awaited them in Yorktown (it was indeed the late General’s own campaign tent, from
the Custis collection) but even by steamship, Yorktown would be an overnight passage. The passengers settled in below decks
as the ship steamed south toward the Chesapeake Bay.
Barely two hours after losing sight of the Capitol, the travelers heard a cannon salute fired, and the ship slowed. The echoing
of the guns from Fort Washington, Mary land, was a signal that the ship was approaching another destination, and, on cue,
a military band on deck began to play a dirge. Slowly the passengers made their way on deck and gazed westward to the Virginia
shore. Atop a gentle rise, a substantial white mansion soon came into view. “We were approaching the last abode of the Father
of his Country,” Lafayette’s secretary Auguste Levasseur noted in his account of the day, “. . . [and] the venerable soil
of Mount Vernon was before us.”
After forty years, the sight of Mount Vernon, home of the man he had come to regard as his spiritual father, brought Lafayette
to his knees in “an involuntary and spontaneous movement.”
14
The
Petersburg
dropped anchor and a barge ferried the crowd to the shore—this was a scheduled stop on the tour—where the Lafayettes
père
and
fils
were given seats in a carriage. While the other guests climbed the slope to the Mansion House, the Nation’s Guest was greeted
by Washington’s nephew Lawrence Lewis, husband of Martha’s granddaughter Nelly, and one of the General’s great-nephews, John
Augustine Washington. (Another nephew, Mount Vernon’s owner, Supreme Court Associate Justice Bushrod Washington, was in Philadelphia
tending to court duties.) The younger Lafayette quickly reconnoitered the house where he had been welcomed as a teenage exile
and declared it little changed. His father stood on the piazza—the wide covered porch that overlooked the Potomac with the
vista of the Mary land hills beyond—a place where, on his last visit, he had drunk tea and shared remembrances with his “adoptive
father” during Washington’s period of retirement between the Revolution and his call to service as president.
The visit was another family affair, and G. W. P. Custis guided the visitors. He led Lafayette and a handful of others—the
larger crowd remained at the Mansion—to the family tomb some two hundred paces from the house. Nearly hidden by overhanging
cypress trees, the unmarked wooden door was opened. As Lafayette descended alone into the Washington vault (he bumped his
head on the door lintel as he disappeared from sight), the cannon thundered again.
Lafayette reappeared a few minutes later, his eyes full of tears. Taking the hands of his son George and Levasseur, he descended
a second time into the tomb, where the three Frenchmen knelt and kissed the coffin. When they emerged, Wash Custis presented
Lafayette with a large gold ring that contained a lock of the General’s chestnut hair, along with a few strands of Martha’s.
15
W
UPON RETURNING TO the Mansion House, the visitors noticed the key to the Bastille hanging in the central passage. Sent by
Lafayette to his “Beloved General,” it had arrived in 1790 along with a drawing of the “fortress of despotism” that Lafayette
had ordered demolished. The key, Lafayette had written to Washington, “is a tribute Which I owe as A Son to My Adoptive Father,
as an aid de Camp to My General, As a Missionary of liberty to its Patriarch.”
16
Elsewhere in the house the Houdon bust remained (in the inventory taken at Mount Vernon in 1800, it was listed as “1 Bust
of General Washington in plaister from the life,” with an appraised value of $100). But little else that had belonged to the
General was still there. Like milkweed seed carried by the wind, the contents of the house had gone in many directions.
The visitors toured the house, including Lafayette’s old bedchamber at the head of the stairs. They walked the grounds, and
as they returned to the shore, they cut cypress branches from the trees by the tomb. The travelers returned to the
Petersburg
in silence. Only after Mount Vernon disappeared from sight did the time of quiet meditation end. Lafayette, settled on the
steamboat’s quarterdeck, talked until evening, recollecting Washington as the ship steamed toward Yorktown.
LAFAYETTE WAS AMONG the last survivors of a great generation. He had expected his American sojourn would last four months;
instead, the triumphal tour required thirteen months, covered five thousand miles, and encompassed visits to all twenty-four
states. His contribution to the American War of Independence was celebrated: he had, after all, risked his life, accepted
no salary, paid the expenses of his men, and helped persuade Louis XVI to support the American cause with more money, men,
and matériel.
An adoring American public saw in the Nation’s Guest the personification of what the revolutionary generation had accomplished.
Few of the Founding Fathers survived, and Lafayette visited most of them, including John Adams, infirm and nearly blind, and
Thomas Jefferson, hopelessly in debt, suffering with dysuria, but still mentally sharp (though Lafayette’s English was virtually
flawless, Jefferson insisted they speak French). In addition to renewing his acquaintance with the old guard, Lafayette dined
with presidential candidates John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. He was still in the United States when Adams, whom Lafayette
had known as a fifteen-year-old in France during his father’s diplomatic service, became president in 1825 (it had fallen
to the House of Representatives to decide the election when no candidate won a majority of the electoral vote). Lafayette
thus bore witness to the constitutional process by which Americans chose their leaders by democratic means, demonstrating
that the system worked, even in the absence of the Found ers. The nation Lafayette revisited had been transformed. The economy
was booming, the currency was sound, and a network of passable roads linked the spreading nation.