This summer, the National Park Service ordered the removal of quotes referring to abolitionism, immigration and the Vietnam War at Bunker Hill, part of Boston National Historic Park. The grassy slope where America first glimpsed independence is now a front in a healthy fight over how its story is told.
Broadly, the debate is over whether interpretation at monuments and museums and in classroom curriculums should concentrate on celebrating achievements or reckoning with unfulfilled promises. At first glance, this is another symptom of a larger national divide. It need not be. Spirits from the past can spark national reconciliations. For proof, look to the towering monument at Bunker Hill. Or more specifically, see the example of the man who helped lay its cornerstone: The Marquis de Lafayette.
Best remembered as the 19-year-old French aristocrat who crossed the Atlantic at his own expense in 1777 to fight for the American colonists’ right to self-government, Lafayette performed a second, lesser-known service to the American republic. At 66, he returned to his adopted country in 1824, during a time of turmoil, reminding a new generation of citizens what they had inherited, what it had cost and what it still required of them.
It is the aging Lafayette who now speaks most urgently to a nation whose freedom he helped win.
The America he traveled across is not entirely unlike today’s, despite historians’ naming it the “Era of Good Feelings.” The years coinciding with James Monroe’s presidency were marked by economic depression in 1819 and a sectional crisis preceding Missouri’s entrance into the Union in 1821. New technologies, such as steam navigation and advancements in newspaper printing, sped the flow of goods and the proliferation of news, but disrupted America’s economy and altered its landscape.
Amid this change and strife, Americans deliberated on Monroe’s successor in a presidential election so divisive that some contemporary commentators worried it spelled the Union’s end. Then came an astonishing turn: At the invitation of the president and Congress, Lafayette appeared on Staten Island in August 1824. What followed was one of the greatest civic celebrations in American history.
Over thirteen months, “the Nation’s Guest” (as his hosts affectionately called him) traveled to all 24 states while Americans slipped into a delirium, pulling the old hero into their towns at the center of elaborately choreographed parades, honoring him with sumptuous galas and thundering orations. Men wept. Women fainted. Children scattered flowers at his feet. Entrepreneurs peddled Lafayette merchandise. Towns, landmarks, charities and newborns were named in his honor.
It would be easy to dismiss this as an early episode of American celebrity culture. That overlooks a deeper meaning.
His reappearance did not simply stir up unifying nostalgia. It reminded Americans that self-government was an experiment not guaranteed to succeed, while drawing a flattering contrast to the ruined attempt to establish it in France. Reflecting on the precious nature of their liberties, citizens recommitted to opposing those who would abridge them. When Lafayette visited Philadelphia, the city’s printers carried a mobile press and handed out broadsides reading “Freedom of the press protects all other freedoms.”
“Memories of the Revolution have come back to life,” Lafayette observed in the midst of the jubilation. As the nation approached its 50th anniversary, the Frenchman represented a living bridge across time, inspiring citizens to curb their partisan passions and honor a shared past. “I have the satisfaction of thinking that my presence has had a great reconciliatory effect between the two parties,” he wrote, “men who have not spoken to each other for over 20 years are brought together.”
Other Americans engaged in a useful philosophical exercise when it came to Lafayette himself. Observing some of their compatriots hurl themselves at his feet, or propose skirting the Constitution and naming him vice president, they questioned how public figures ought to be honored, even for the most valuable services. There was a fine line between saluting and idolizing Lafayette. Some of the festivities, the publisher Hezekiah Niles observed, were “hardly to be restrained within the bounds of propriety — as if it would cause many to forget what was due to themselves and the general.”
But tributes were due. Not only to Lafayette. Early Americans were well aware of a centuries-old adage that republics were ungrateful. In their vigilance over liberty, self-governing people were prone to forgetting their benefactors. Americans were determined to disprove the ancients.
To do so, Congress gave Lafayette, whose finances were in disarray, a gift of $200,000 (about $7 million today) and a township of land in Florida for his services in the Revolution. Other veterans, many of whom went without pensions, settled for the roar of the crowds as they stood alongside Lafayette. The dead were honored, too, as communities capitalized on Lafayette’s visit to raise funds for building monuments to Revolutionary heroes. The inception of the largest of these is what brought Lafayette to Bunker Hill in the summer of 1825.
Drawing donations and spectators from across the country, the project was one of the first national memorials to America’s fallen soldiers, a reminder of what they had died for: equality, representative government and popular sovereignty.
Though not the conclusion of Lafayette’s tour, Bunker Hill was the culmination. The granite obelisk begun that day, and finished in 1843, was a means of using history to provide civic instruction and emphasize union for future generations.
Here, Lafayette marveled at great advancements — a spreading population, rising arts and industry — made possible by the Revolution. “It surpasses my imagination,” he wrote to a friend shortly after arriving in New York. But Lafayette took note of and made clear his displeasure where the ideals he fought for were suffocated. “There is only one issue for which I am less resigned than ever,” he wrote from New Orleans, “and that is slavery and anti-black prejudice,” He admired what America had accomplished without pretending the revolutionary promises had been fully realized.
This is a useful aperture through which to view our current debates over history. A national narrative stressing successes fosters an important sense of civic pride. But only by examining its inconsistencies and mistakes can the Republic live up to its founding principles. That citizens feel passionately about their respective sides is evidence they still value the ideals fought for at Bunker Hill. And rather than mutually exclusive, the two approaches are linked and essential for shared understanding of the past. After all, the resolution, often through incredible struggle, of seemingly intractable contradictions — like those that worried Lafayette — are among the greatest parts of America’s story.
No Lafayette will appear to us today, but the story of his last service to America still offers timely reminders to its citizens. Our rights must be exercised lest they atrophy, our institutions safeguarded, even when they frustrate our goals. Gratitude is owed those who won and protect both. Recollections of a common past can temper current passions, if we eschew the notion that American history is either all progress or all oppression.
Ryan Cole is the author of “The Last Adieu: Lafayette’s Triumphant Return, the Echoes of Revolution, and the Gratitude of the Republic.”
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