Читать книгу Thirty Years' View (Vol. I of 2) - Benton Thomas Hart - Страница 15

In the summer of this year General Lafayette, accompanied by his son, Mr. George Washington Lafayette, and under an invitation from the President, revisited the United States after a lapse of forty years. He was received with unbounded honor, affection, and gratitude by the American people. To the survivors of the Revolution, it was the return of a brother; to the new generation, born since that time, it was the apparition of an historical character, familiar from the cradle; and combining all the titles to love, admiration, gratitude, enthusiasm, which could act upon the heart and the imagination of the young and the ardent. He visited every State in the Union, doubled in number since, as the friend and pupil of Washington, he had spilt his blood, and lavished his fortune, for their independence. His progress through the States was a triumphal procession, such as no Roman ever led up – a procession not through a city, but over a continent – followed, not by captives in chains of iron, but by a nation in the bonds of affection. To him it was an unexpected and overpowering reception. His modest estimate of himself had not allowed him to suppose that he was to electrify a continent. He expected kindness, but not enthusiasm. He expected to meet with surviving friends – not to rouse a young generation. As he approached the harbor of New-York, he made inquiry of some acquaintance to know whether he could find a hack to convey him to a hotel? Illustrious man, and modest as illustrious! Little did he know that all America was on foot to receive him – to take possession of him the moment he touched her soil – to fetch and to carry him – to feast and applaud him – to make him the guest of cities, States, and the nation, as long as he could he detained. Many were the happy meetings which he had with old comrades, survivors for near half a century of their early hardships and dangers; and most grateful to his heart it was to see them, so many of them, exceptions to the maxim which denies to the beginners of revolutions the good fortune to conclude them (and of which maxim his own country had just been so sad an exemplification), and to see his old comrades not only conclude the one they began, but live to enjoy its fruits and honors. Three of his old associates he found ex-presidents (Adams, Jefferson, and Madison), enjoying the respect and affection of their country, after having reached its highest honors. Another, and the last one that Time would admit to the Presidency (Mr. Monroe), now in the Presidential chair, and inviting him to revisit the land of his adoption. Many of his early associates seen in the two Houses of Congress – many in the State governments, and many more in all the walks of private life, patriarchal sires, respected for their characters, and venerated for their patriotic services. It was a grateful spectacle, and the more impressive from the calamitous fate which he had seen attend so many of the revolutionary patriots of the Old World. But the enthusiasm of the young generation astonished and excited him, and gave him a new view of himself – a future glimpse of himself – and such as he would be seen in after ages. Before them, he was in the presence of posterity; and in their applause and admiration he saw his own future place in history, passing down to the latest time as one of the most perfect and beautiful characters which one of the most eventful periods of the world had produced. Mr. Clay, as Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the organ of their congratulations to Lafayette (when he was received in the hall of the House), very felicitously seized the idea of his present confrontation with posterity, and adorned and amplified it with the graces of oratory. He said: "The vain wish has been sometimes indulged, that Providence would allow the patriot, after death, to return to his country, and to contemplate the intermediate changes which had taken place – to view the forests felled, the cities built, the mountains levelled, the canals cut, the highways opened, the progress of the arts, the advancement of learning, and the increase of population. General! your present visit to the United States is the realization of the consoling object of that wish, hitherto vain. You are in the midst of posterity! Every where you must have been struck with the great changes, physical and moral, which have occurred since you left us. Even this very city, bearing a venerated name, alike endearing to you and to us, has since emerged from the forest which then covered its site. In one respect you behold us unaltered, and that is, in the sentiment of continued devotion to liberty, and of ardent affection and profound gratitude to your departed friend, the father of his country, and to your illustrious associates in the field and in the cabinet, for the multiplied blessings which surround us, and for the very privilege of addressing you, which I now have." He was received in both Houses of Congress with equal honor; but the Houses did not limit themselves to honors: they added substantial rewards for long past services and sacrifices – two hundred thousand dollars in money, and twenty-four thousand acres of fertile land in Florida. These noble grants did not pass without objection – objection to the principle, not to the amount. The ingratitude of republics is the theme of any declaimer: it required a Tacitus to say, that gratitude was the death of republics, and the birth of monarchies; and it belongs to the people of the United States to exhibit an exception to that profound remark (as they do to so many other lessons of history), and show a young republic that knows how to be grateful without being unwise, and is able to pay the debt of gratitude without giving its liberties in the discharge of the obligation. The venerable Mr. Macon, yielding to no one in love and admiration of Lafayette, and appreciation of his services and sacrifices in the American cause, opposed the grants in the Senate, and did it with the honesty of purpose and the simplicity of language which distinguished all the acts of his life. He said: "It was with painful reluctance that he felt himself obliged to oppose his voice to the passage of this bill. He admitted, to the full extent claimed for them, the great and meritorious services of General Lafayette, and he did not object to the precise sum which this bill proposed to award him; but he objected to the bill on this ground: he considered General Lafayette, to all intents and purposes, as having been, during our revolution, a son adopted into the family, taken into the household, and placed, in every respect, on the same footing with the other sons of the same family. To treat him as others were treated, was all, in this view of his relation to us, that could be required, and this had been done. That General Lafayette made great sacrifices, and spent much of his money in the service of this country (said Mr. M.), I as firmly believe as I do any other thing under the sun. I have no doubt that every faculty of his mind and body were exerted in the Revolutionary war, in defence of this country; but this was equally the case with all the sons of the family. Many native Americans spent their all, made great sacrifices, and devoted their lives in the same cause. This was the ground of his objection to this bill, which, he repeated, it was as disagreeable to him to state as it could be to the Senate to hear. He did not mean to take up the time of the Senate in debate upon the principle of the bill, or to move any amendment to it. He admitted that, when such things were done, they should be done with a free hand. It was to the principle of the bill, therefore, and not to the sum proposed to be given by it, that he objected."

The ardent Mr. Hayne, of South Carolina, reporter of the bill in the Senate, replied to the objections, and first showed from history (not from Lafayette, who would have nothing to do with the proposed grant), his advances, losses, and sacrifices in our cause. He had expended for the American service, in six years, from 1777 to 1783, the sum of 700,000 francs ($140,000), and under what circumstances? – a foreigner, owing us nothing, and throwing his fortune into the scale with his life, to be lavished in our cause. He left the enjoyments of rank and fortune, and the endearments of his family, to come and serve in our almost destitute armies, and without pay. He equipped and armed a regiment for our service, and freighted a vessel to us, loaded with arms and munitions. It was not until the year 1794, when almost ruined by the French revolution, and by his efforts in the cause of liberty, that he would receive the naked pay, without interest, of a general officer for the time he had served with us. He was entitled to land as one of the officers of the Revolution, and 11,500 acres was granted to him, to be located on any of the public lands of the United States. His agent located 1000 acres adjoining the city of New Orleans; and Congress afterwards, not being informed of the location, granted the same ground to the city of New Orleans. His location was valid, and he was so informed; but he refused to adhere to it, saying that he would have no contest with any portion of the American people, and ordered the location to be removed; which was done, and carried upon ground of little value – thus giving up what was then worth $50,000, and now $500,000. These were his moneyed advances, losses, and sacrifices, great in themselves, and of great value to our cause, but perhaps exceeded by the moral effect of his example in joining us, and his influence with the king and ministry, which procured us the alliance of France.

The grants were voted with great unanimity, and with the general concurrence of the American people. Mr. Jefferson was warmly for them, giving as a reason, in a conversation with me while the grants were depending (for the bill was passed in the Christmas holidays, when I had gone to Virginia, and took the opportunity to call upon that great man), which showed his regard for liberty abroad as well as at home, and his far-seeing sagacity into future events. He said there would be a change in France and Lafayette would be at the head of it, and ought to be easy and independent in his circumstances, to be able to act efficiently in conducting the movement. This he said to me on Christmas day, 1824. Six years afterwards this view into futurity was verified. The old Bourbons had to retire: the Duke of Orleans, a brave general in the republican armies, at the commencement of the Revolution, was handed to the throne by Lafayette, and became the "citizen king, surrounded by republican institutions." And in this Lafayette was consistent and sincere. He was a republican himself, but deemed a constitutional monarchy the proper government for France, and labored for that form in the person of Louis XVI. as well as in that of Louis Philippe.

Loaded with honors, and with every feeling of his heart gratified in the noble reception he had met in the country of his adoption, Lafayette returned to the country of his birth the following summer, still as the guest of the United States, and under its flag. He was carried back in a national ship of war, the new frigate Brandywine – a delicate compliment (in the name and selection of the ship) from the new President, Mr. Adams, Lafayette having wet with his blood the sanguinary battle-field which takes its name from the little stream which gave it first to the field, and then to the frigate. Mr. Monroe, then a subaltern in the service of the United States, was wounded at the same time. How honorable to themselves and to the American people, that nearly fifty years afterwards, they should again appear together, and in exalted station; one as President, inviting the other to the great republic, and signing the acts which testified a nation's gratitude; the other as a patriot hero, tried in the revolutions of two countries, and resplendent in the glory of virtuous and consistent fame.