March, 1825: Lafayette’s Visit to South Carolina

During the American Revolution, a wealthy French teenager was willing to risk his fortune and his life for people he had never met who lived an ocean away, based on their stirring fight for freedom from British colonial rule. Against the wishes of his family and the French crown, Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de LaFayette (1757-1834) financed a ship and crossed the Atlantic to join our cause.  

He was commissioned as a major general in the Continental Army, became an influential member of George Washington’s staff, and befriended Alexander Hamilton and South Carolinians Henry and John Laurens and Benjamin Huger. He encouraged French King Louis XVI to send critical military support and led a division at the Battle of Yorktown, where the British surrendered in 1781. 

Despite his 21st-century reappearance, alongside Hamilton and John Laurens, in the Broadway musical Hamilton, he is no longer a household name. He certainly was a household name in March 1825, however, when—during a 13-month return visit to the United States—he spent just under two weeks in South Carolina, stopping in Cheraw, Camden, Columbia, Charleston, Edisto Island, and Beaufort.  

As the nation he had helped establish approached its fiftieth birthday, Lafayette, the last surviving Revolutionary general, wrote to President James Monroe expressing his longing to “to revisit the happy shores of an adopted country, which has fulfilled so well our early and most sanguine expectations.”   

President Monroe readily obliged. Lafayette and his party arrived in New York on August 16, 1824. Greeted and feted as a rock star in all (then) 24 states, Lafayette attracted rapt public attention and overwhelming hospitality from aging Revolution veterans, military and civic leaders, the press, and Americans of every stripe. He visited Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon and laid the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill monument and the monument to Baron de Kalb in Camden. 

South Carolina retained a special place in Lafayette’s heart as the first place he landed when he arrived to join the Revolution in 1777. His ship Victoire had anchored at North Island near Georgetown. Huguenot Benjamin Huger welcomed the French party, including Johann de Kalb, to his nearby plantation, where Lafayette met Huger’s young son Francis Kinloch. Benjamin Huger would die in the Revolution by friendly fire in 1779. 

Lafayette’s group proceeded to Philadelphia to seek out General Washington. During his American military career, Lafayette would come to know South Carolina elder statesman Henry Laurens and work on Washington’s staff alongside Laurens’ son John. In a crazy twist of fate, years later, when Lafayette was imprisoned in Austria for defying Napoleon, Francis Kinloch Huger would help him attempt to escape.  

When Lafayette was welcomed in Charleston on March 15, 1825, his secretary, Auguste Levasseur, wrote “amidst all these expressions of public affection, that which penetrated the general’s heart most was the touching and generous plan adopted by the citizens of Charleston to share the honours of his triumph with his brave and excellent friend Colonel [Francis] Huger. . . .  At the feast, at the theatre, or ball, everywhere, in fact, the name of Huger was inscribed by the side of that of Lafayette, upon whom the citizens of Charleston could confer no greater favour, than by testifying such a high degree of gratitude for one who had formerly exposed himself in attempting to restore him to liberty.”  

For events commemorating the bicentennial of Lafayette’s 1825 visit to South Carolina see:

https://lafayette200.org/events/category/sc/