At the Athenaeum, Dearinger told us that many of the likenesses on display date from around 1824, when Lafayette came to America on that final, celebratory visit.

The aging general, at that point, was limping away from years of unsuccessful participation in his own country’s revolution. Inspired by his American experience, Lafayette tried to steer a middle path between monarchists and radicals in France. He wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen with help from Thomas Jefferson, but he was eventually arrested and exiled, falling in and out of French official favor over the next several years. He tried to escape the Terror, was arrested in flight. Napoleon Bonaparte eventually sprung him from prison, and he spent the remainder of his life as a liberal voice in the Bourbon Restoration, a democrat living once more under a king.

But of course, America still received “our marquis” — our last surviving revolutionary hero — with rapture. New York feted him for four consecutive days, and adorers lined the road to Boston. He was always complimentary when he arrived somewhere new, and Americans took joy in noting that he seemed to prefer it here — America, not France, was the Lafayettian ideal where prosperity and personal freedom went hand-in-hand.

In that way, the post-independence generation used Lafayette to confirm feelings of what America was, though people disagreed.

Natural democrats applauded how he regarded all his fellow veterans as “companions”, down to the lowliest footmen. Others noted how he, a true-born aristocrat, showed how superiorities of character could coexist with ideas of political equality. Abolitionists sympathized with his anti-slavery sentiment, and Africans dedicated a poem to him in the Columbia Centinel.

You can’t be contend to us enslav’d, By freemen who laud you for the valor that saved?… If millions to you have surrendered the heart, Direct them, O General; to act the good part, To take off our fetters with wisdom and grace, To treat us as brothers — tho’ sable our race.

But though Lafayette visited Southern slave’s quarters, to the discomfort of his hosts, he held his tongue on the morality of slavery.