The November meeting of the American Revolution Round Table of Richmond was held on November 19, 2025, in the Gottwald Science Center, at the University of Richmond.
The evening’s presentation was made by Elizabeth Reese, author of Marquis de Lafayette Returns: A Tour of America's National Capital Region published by The History Press (imprint of Arcadia Publishing) in 2024.
Elizabeth is the Senior Manager of Public Programs and Interpretation at Woodlawn plantation and Pope-Leighey House and is completing her Master of Arts in American History from Gettysburg College. She has worked at Hamilton Grange National Memorial and the United States Capitol. She serves as the co-chair for the American Friends of Lafayette Bicentennial Committee for Washington, D.C. Her work has been published in “TIME,” the “Journal of the American Revolution,” the “New York Times,” and can be seen on C-SPAN.
Her presentation was entitled “The Marquis de Lafayette Returns: The Farwell Tour of 1824-1825.” In her presentation, Elizabeth traced Lafayette’s farewell route throughout the United States, highlighting the locations and people the famous General held in high regard.
The Marquis de Lafayette’s “return to America” refers to his celebrated 1824–1825 farewell tour of the United States, when he came back as an elderly hero to visit the nation he had helped win independence. During this thirteen‑month visit, he traveled thousands of miles through nearly every state, drawing huge crowds and being honored as “the Nation’s Guest.”
At age 19, Lafayette defied French orders and family wishes, bought his own ship, and sailed to America in 1777 to volunteer for the Continental Army. Congress made him a major general despite his youth. He quickly bonded with George Washington. As Washington had no biological children, and Lafayette had lost his own father in battle as a child, these circumstances led into a relationship as between a child and parent. Lafayette openly referred to Washington as a father figure and later named his son George Washington Lafayette.
Washington used Lafayette as both a field commander and trusted aide, beginning with his wounding and steady leadership at the Battle of Brandywine in September 1777. After the war he returned to France, where he was deeply involved in the French Revolution and later political struggles, enduring imprisonment, and periods of exile.
Lafayette played a crucial military and diplomatic role in the American Revolution, serving both as a combat commander in the Continental Army and as a vital link to French political and military support. His efforts on the battlefield and in European courts helped secure the French aid that was essential to eventual American victory. Lafayette took part in several major campaigns, including Brandywine, the winter at Valley Forge, Barren Hill, and Monmouth, gaining a reputation for courage and resilience. Between tours of duty, Lafayette returned to France in 1779 and worked with figures like Benjamin Franklin to press King Louis XVI’s ministers for troops, ships, and money for the American cause. His lobbying helped bring the major French expeditionary force under Rochambeau and a powerful fleet, turning the war into a true Franco‑American alliance that shifted the balance against Britain. By 1781, he commanded Continental forces in Virginia, where he shadowed and harassed Lord Cornwallis’s army, helping contain the British until Washington and allied forces could converge on Yorktown. In the Yorktown campaign, Lafayette’s troops helped pin Cornwallis on the Yorktown peninsula and held key ground until Washington and Rochambeau completed the encirclement. The combined Franco‑American siege led to Cornwallis’s surrender in October 1781, and the decisive blow that effectively ended large‑scale fighting and secured American independence.
In 1824, President James Monroe and Congress invited Lafayette to visit the United States on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Revolution, seeing him as the last major general of the Continental Army still alive. He sailed from France in July 1824 and landed near New York City in mid‑August to salutes, parades, and immense public enthusiasm. Lafayette’s tour lasted from August 1824 to September 1825 and covered roughly 6,000 miles across 24 states. He traveled by stagecoach, horseback, steamboat, and canal boat, visiting major cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, and the young capital of Washington, D.C. Lafayette made a point of visiting Mount Vernon and Washington’s tomb, turning these stops into powerful patriotic rituals. He visited the Mount Vernon estate several times during the tour, paying respects at Washington’s tomb. Walking the grounds as the celebrated “Nation’s Guest,” Lafayette helped transform Mount Vernon into a national shrine to Washington’s memory.
Everywhere he went Lafayette was greeted with processions, military salutes, and reviews, dinners, balls, speeches, having his portrait painted, and monuments created. Towns, streets, and counties were named or renamed for him. Americans saw him as a living link to George Washington and the Revolution, and his presence helped revive patriotic feelings and interest in preserving Revolutionary sites and memories. While visiting Boston, Lafayette laid the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument. He met with surviving Founders, such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, reinforcing his status as a symbol of shared Franco‑American ideals of liberty. In September 1825, he departed from the United States aboard the frigate Brandywine, leaving behind a landscape dotted with places bearing his name and a powerful memory of national gratitude.
Lafayette embraced Enlightenment ideas of liberty and later pushed both antislavery measures and broader human‑rights principles, seeing the American struggle as part of a wider fight for freedom. Because he combined military service in America with revolutionary leadership in France, later generations celebrated him as the “Hero of Two Worlds” and a symbol of Franco‑American friendship.
He died on May 20, 1834. He is buried in Picpus Cemetery in Paris, under soil taken from Bunker Hill, in Charlestown, Boston for his grave.
--Fred Sorrell
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