He was the most famous man in America, but he wasn’t even an American. The United States was a young country, but he was an old man. Many of the key figures of the Revolution and the early Republic were gone, most 
Many who are familiar with this era are aware at least in passing of Lafayette’s visit, but journalist Ryan L. Cole has put the spotlight on what will certainly be ranked as the definitive study of this event with The Last Adieu: Lafayette’s Triumphant Return, the Echoes of Revolution, and the Gratitude of the Republic [2025], a meticulously researched, well-written, if sometimes dull chronicle of a singular moment in American history. I used to marvel at what it must have been like for Lafayette to reconnect with the likes of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson at the very twilight of their long lives, but in this fine work the author demonstrates that these colorful episodes, while worth dwelling upon, are the least important parts of his story. Instead, cleverly positioning Lafayette as a kind of Rip Van Winkle character, Cole treats the reader to a series of snapshots of thirteen colonies that in a half century have grown into a mature nation now comprised of twenty-four states (and vast unorganized territories), as seen through the eyes of the indefatigable Frenchman as he spends more than a year traversing thousands of miles and stepping at least once on the soil of each and every one of those two dozen states!
Despite the heritage myths that have long clung to textbooks, American independence could never have been achieved without the decisive military and economic support of the French, still smarting over their disastrous loss of North American territory to their ancient enemy, the British, in the Seven Years War, known as the French and Indian War on this side of the pond. Lafayette became the face of French intervention here. An idealistic young nobleman chasing military glory when he volunteered to assist the colonists in their rebellion, he became at nineteen the youngest major general of the Continental Army, incurred a serious leg wound, and served courageously and with great distinction throughout the course of the war. Along the way, he bonded with Washington, who came to treat him like a son.
Back in France, Lafayette, through a remarkable sequence of maneuvers and astonishingly good luck, managed over the years to survive taking a leading role in the French Revolution as well as dodging the guillotine when the Revolution turned against him, enduring five years in Austrian and Prussian prisons, then tiptoeing through Napoleon’s tenure and the Bourbon Restoration, and finally navigating fierce political crosscurrents and clandestine conspiracies during the reign of Napoleon III. Through it all, he conducted himself with great dignity and remained loyal to his ideals. Still, by 1824, when President James Monroe extended his invitation, Lafayette was at sixty-seven—an old man in those days—widowed, broke, and recently defeated for reelection in the Chamber of Deputies. But he did not hesitate to embark on yet another adventure!
For the reader, it is slow-going before that adventure gets underway, as Cole devotes nearly one hundred pages—about a quarter of the entire book—to Lafayette’s storied biography and the long preparations for the voyage, before “The Nation’s Guest” finally reached the nation’s shores. The United States Lafayette encountered upon his return was almost another universe compared to the one he had departed decades before. From his arrival in New York, cheering crowds and celebrations accompanied him everywhere, and he was poignantly greeted again and again by the white-haired thinning ranks of Revolutionary War veterans. Cole is at his best as he brilliantly recreates the cities and towns and hamlets of 1820s America and, through Lafayette’s own sharp recollections, contrasts these with an earlier time when the notion of the United States was but an uncertain dream that blood—including Lafayette’s own—was once spilled in fond if tenuous hopes for success. Students of American history will savor these moments.
But as the great man’s journey proceeds, the blur of repetition in a succession of strikingly similar welcomes from place to place can grow tedious, especially as Cole has deemed no detail, no matter how trivial, worthy of omission. Moreover, while we naturally crave to learn more about the famous lives that are met in his travels—such as Jefferson and Madison and Adams—the author frequently devotes a page or even a page-and-a-half to minor characters who cross Lafayette’s path, sometimes wearying tangents that can feel like footnotes in a David Foster Wallace work that are here tangled up in the narrative.
But if there are weak points, there are a host of strong ones, as well. My favorite chapter is devoted to Lafayette’s time in Alabama among the indigenous Creek, whose dwindling numbers attempt to strike an impossible balancing act by clinging to much of their traditional ways while struggling to safeguard their independence through awkward attempts at assimilation with the rapacious Americans, hungry for their lands and all too eager to defraud them. Alas, like their kin in Georgia, most would lose it all in the not-too-distant future, forced West as Indian removal became a popular mechanism for the expansion of white settlement.
This is a reminder, as Cole underscores elsewhere, that Lafayette’s excursion also coincided with the end of another era, as Monroe—with one foot still in the eighteenth century—presided over the final months of his presidency against the backdrop of the 1824 election that would pit the old guard of John Quincy Adams against the emerging rough brand of new politics attached to Andrew Jackson. Lafayette refused to take sides here, but elsewhere he was adamant about something that continued to appall him: the human chattel slavery that was fading in the north just as it had become inextricable from the economic engine of the southern states. He made no secret of his disgust at the peculiar institution, particularly during his tearful reunion at Monticello with his old friend Jefferson, who, long reconciled to the moral contradictions, served up eloquent platitudes tempered with hope that the next generation would devise a way to deal with this unfortunate wolf-by-the-ears conundrum. In retrospect, we know that they will: at Fort Sumter and Appomattox. Of course, these days historians acknowledge that what we usually celebrate as triumphs for the new nation were at the same time tragedies for the indigenous and the enslaved.
But for white Americans at the time, looking back a half century to the Revolution and peering ahead at whatever uncertainties might loom in their future, Lafayette’s presence further cemented a national identity and stoked a peacetime patriotic revival that was perhaps like nothing ever seen before or since in the United States. It was to be a real positive for Lafayette, as well: not only for the mountains of accolades that boosted his self-esteem, which had in recent years declined along with his fortunes, but also as a grateful nation found ways to restore his financial health. Reinvigorated, he returned to France and in the coming years became again—incredibly—another leading figure in yet another revolution that led to the overthrow of King Charles X. When he passed away in 1834, Lafayette had outlived every American Founder except James Madison. Despite my quibbles, The Last Adieu deserves high marks for its significant contribution to the historiography and its thought-provoking analysis of an America that once was.
NOTE: I received this book as part of an Early Reviewer’s program.
