Farewell Tour
Lafayette’s last visit to the United States was a fourteen-month odyssey in 1824-25 that took him to every one of the twenty-four states then in the union. Everywhere he went during the “Farewell Tour,” as it became known, he was met with an outpouring of affection from the American people on an unprecedented scale—thousands turned out to see him at every stop and he was regaled with parades, ceremonies, balls, dinners, and toasts in his honor. Lafayette’s status as the “Guest of the Nation,” made it awkward for him to speak publicly against slavery. Instead, he chose to make more symbolic gestures that conveyed his interest in the welfare of African Americans. He insisted on visiting the African Free School in New York City and publicly greeted a delegation of black War of 1812 veterans in New Orleans, shaking hands with each. In Virginia he stopped to visit in the homes of some slaves and free blacks, and he renewed acquaintances with at least two slaves in Richmond and Savannah that he had known during the American Revolution. He also attended a meeting of the American Colonization Society (an organization promoting the return of freed slaves to Africa) in Washington D.C., where he was made a perpetual vice president. In private, however, Lafayette had frank discussions about slavery with his old friends Thomas Jefferson and James Madison as well as other Virginia planters.
landing in America, greeted by
both blacks and whites, ca. 1824
Visit to the African Free School, New York City, September 10, 1824
Greeting the African American War of 1812 Veterans, New Orleans, April 18, 1825
Annual Meeting of the American Colonization Society, Washington, D.C., February 19, 1825
Interview with Lafayette in the African Repository and Colonial Journal, November 1825