New Book by Chris Ruli: 'Brother Lafayette' Available for Presale

by Christopher Hodapp

It's Bastille Day today, so I think it's appropriate to post this story. Macoy Publishing has announced the pre-sale of Brother Christopher Ruli's newest book, Brother Lafayette: the Marquis de Lafayette's Masonic Travels in America 1824-25 (Macoy, 2024, $24.95) now through September 24th, when it's expected to begin shipping. 

UPDATE 7/23/2024: Chris is also offering to personalize and autograph copies of Brother Lafayette for $27. CLICK HERE TO ORDER YOURS. NOTE: please include signature instructions, with preferred name, in the "add a note to seller" box while at checkout.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of Major General Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette’s triumphant goodwill tour of America between 1824-25. Fewer and fewer Americans these days have been taught about Major General Lafayette and his role in the American Revolution, and even fewer know of just how dedicated he was to the cause of liberty, before he arrived in America, and long after he returned home to France where he was swept up in its own revolution. But in addition to his long career as a military figure, statesman, revolutionary, protector, political prisoner, and so much more, he was also a Freemason.

In 1824, Lafayette visited America at the invitation of President James Monroe, and began traveling the country. The American Revolution’s 50th anniversary was approaching, and Lafayette was the last of George Washington's major generals who was still alive. During his whirlwind goodwill tour, he spoke in many places, including several Masonic lodges. He was treated with much the same sort of awe and adoration that had been reserved for George Washington himself, which never ceased to astonish him. Everywhere Lafayette went, adoring crowds followed him through the streets. Balls, dinners, tours, concerts, parades, and public honors of every kind were arranged to honor him, and what started out to be a three-month trip lasted over a year. It was during that visit that the park north of the White House was renamed to honor him. Literally hundreds of other parks, towns, cities, and counties throughout the United States are named after him. And there were more than a few Masonic lodges chartered in his name.

Lafayette's famed American tour took him to all 24 of the United States at that time – 6,000 miles in all – and in the decades following his visit, it seemed as though every Masonic lodge in the country wanted to claim their members had some kind of meaningful contact with the legendary general and Freemason.

Ironically, despite the high-profile visitations and associations with Freemasons while he was here, just a year later, William Morgan would disappear in Western New York, allegedly murdered by Brother Masons, and the most vehement period of American anti-Masonic persecution would erupt throughout the country.

Now, author and Washington DC Mason Christopher Ruli has done a deep dive into the itineraries, letters, diaries, minute books, and press reports of the time to create a full and definitive account of Brother Lafayette’s Masonic contacts and travels throughout his famed trip. The result is Brother Lafayette: the Marquis de Lafayette's Masonic Travels in America 1824-25, a detailed, fascinating, and eminently absorbing travelogue with a uniquely Masonic focus. 

Similar in nature to Chris' previous Masonic history of the Presidential Mansion in Washington, DC, (The White House & the Freemasons, Macoy, 2023, $29.95-39.95) Chris has meticulously tracked down every known instance of Lafayette visiting Masonic lodges, grand lodges, and individual Freemasons. Through diaries, newspaper accounts, even lodge minute books, he has provided the best documented evidence of Lafayette's interactions with Masons all along the route. And they were considerable in number!

You'll find letters, transcripts of speeches, tributes, toasts, diplomas, songs written for the occasion, descriptions of medals and other gifts given to Lafayette. He was granted honorary memberships in lodges and grand lodges. When the weather turned cold in November 1824, he wintered at Alexandria, Virginia's famed Gadsby's Tavern. In January of 1925, halfway through the trip, he wrote to his friend Thomas Jefferson, "I contemplate to set out for the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, New Orleans, and the western states, upwards of 5,000 miles to be performed in 99 days with only 13 days rest...and 300 miles through a sort of wilderness. We will do the best we can." 

He was 69 years old, and the trip would have been grueling for men half his age.

(Typically for my own state of Indiana, which had only been granted statehood less than 10 years before, our legislature, our governor, and our grand lodge made no effort to issue Lafayette an invitation, and the only reason he set shore here was when his steamboat ran aground—the 19th century version of only stopping at an Indiana truck stop on the way someplace else.)

Macoy's is offering the book for pre-sale now for $24.94, and delivery is expected in September. CLICK HERE TO ORDER.

Just as an added aside, the American Friends of Lafayette have been preparing for celebrating the bicentennial of Lafayette's farewell tour, erecting historical markers, arranging for events all along the 6,000-mile route of his original trip. Festivities will begin August 16, 2024 in New York City and wind up at Mount Vernon in September 2025. If you live or belong to a lodge in an area that Lafayette actually visited, you should consider erecting a permanent historical marker describing the visit. Or if your city or town is already doing so this year, be sure your lodge contacts the local group arranging for the marker and ask if your lodge or grand lodge can take part in the dedication and other festivities.

If you don't know much about Lafayette or can't fathom why he was so adored by Americans at the time, read the excerpt below adapted from my 2005 book, Solomon's Builders:

Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette, had joined the French military at just 14, eager to follow in his father's footsteps as a military officer. He was 19 when the war broke out in America in 1775, and he and his friend, German mercenary John Baron de Kalb, enthusiastically arranged through diplomatic channels to be allowed to leave French service and join the Continental Army. Like Lafayette, hundreds of French officers were lining up to leave for America, and Lafayette was assured by American recruiting agents that he would be given the rank of major general when he arrived in Philadelphia. The war was not going well for the American colonists, and though the French king Louis XVI had approved of helping them at first, he began to contemplate the unsettling notion of French soldiers winding up on the losing side of a war with the British. The French and Indian War had been an expensive enough defeat on American soil, and the odds were not really in favor of the rebelling American colonists against the greatest military power the world had ever known.

Upon his arrival, Lafayette's prearranged entry into the Continental Army as a major general was at first rejected by Congress, who felt that commissioning a foreigner with no battlefield experience would be an insult to American officers who had proved their mettle. He had not been the first foreign officer who showed up in Philadelphia demanding a commission and other enticements. Lafayette countered the objection by offering to take the position for no pay, and that he should be regarded as a volunteer. His startling offer, combined with his enthusiasm, his family connections, and his personal fortune, convinced them to honor his negotiated rank.

Honorary Congressional appointment or not, it was up to Washington to assign the young man. They met on August 1, 1777, and the general took to him at once. He quickly became part of Washington’s inner circle, and the two men became lifelong friends. Lafayette was wounded almost immediately at the Battle of Brandywine in Pennsylvania, just a month after joining up with Washington. But what he lacked in experience, he made up for in passion for the American cause. And Washington saw in the teenaged officer an important role model for the young American soldiers he was commanding.

Such was the young officer's regard for George Washington that his son, born in 1779, was named George Washington Lafayette.

Lafayette would return home briefly to intercede with King Louis to assist the American cause once Britain had declared war on France. When he returned to America in 1781, he was placed in command of forces charged with defending all of Virginia, and he spent his own fortune to outfit his troops when the Congress could not. He played an important part in the battle of Yorktown and the capture of the British commander, George Cornwallis.

For many years, it was commonly told and retold that Lafayette became a Freemason in the military lodge, American Union No. 1, either at Valley Forge or at Morristown, New Jersey. Many accounts written long after the war say that he made this claim himself. Similar claims were made for Washington Military Lodge No. 10 of New York, St. John’s Regimental Lodge of New Jersey, and Military Lodge No. 19 in Morristown, New Jersey. But French records claim that he became a Mason in France before the war, in Saint-Jean d’Ecosse du Contrat Social Lodge on December 15, 1775, with the encouragement of his commanding general, Charles-François, comte de Broglie.

After the American Revolution, he returned to France and freed the slaves on his estate. He established an estate for them in Cayenne, French Guiana, which he also offered as a haven for Washington’s slaves. There, he prohibited the sale of slaves, set up schools for the children, paid workers a fair wage, and enforced plantation rules that applied equally to blacks and whites.

During this period, Lafayette became a member of Paris' Saint Jean d'Ecosse du Contrat Social Lodge in 1782, andserved as Master of Les Amis de la Vérité in Rosay en Brie in 1806.

As a French patriot, he joined their National Assembly, where he was instrumental in the adoption of the French red, white and blue flag. He fought for the formation of a constitutional monarchy, and in 1789, he proposed a Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, patterned after America’s example and written with the help of Thomas Jefferson.

It is a tragic irony that the debt incurred by Louis XVI in assisting America in its revolution helped bring financial ruin to France. This, along with crop failure and crushing inflation, led to the bloody French Revolution in 1789. Lafayette had been placed in command of the National Guard of Paris, where he helped protect both commoners and aristocrats, including the royal family. Yet, he himself helped lead the storming of the Bastille—in later years he would send a key from the prison to his friend Washington. He straddled the line between the radical philosophy that fueled the revolution and his own more moderate politics, while doing what he could to prevent the madness and murder that would place even his own life in danger. He eventually denounced the Jacobins when it became clear that their goal was to behead the king and queen. In 1792, the Jacobin-controlled National Assembly declared him to be a traitor.

He fled to Belgium, but as one of the early revolutionaries, he was captured and imprisoned by the Holy Roman Empire in Austria. Meanwhile at home, The Terror was killing every aristocrat it could find. Lafayette’s son fled to New York, but Adrienne and their two daughters were imprisoned, eventually securing their release only because of pressure from the American government. The rest of her aristocratic family was executed just five days before the Terror collapsed with the death of Robespierre.

Immediately, Adrienne went to Austria with her children to beg for Lafayette’s release. When the Holy Roman Emperor refused, she and the girls joined him in his prison cell for the next two years. New York Representative Gouverneur Morris finally negotiated the release of the entire family in 1797.

Throughout his life, Lafayette’s popularity in France came and went with the waves of political unrest. He would be hated one year as the head of the National Guard for putting down a riot and killing fifty protesters. He would be offered as a candidate for mayor the next. His commissions would come and go. Yet he survived both the American Revolution and the worst period in France’s history, and like his father figure Washington, in the end he would retire to his plantation, La Grange, with his wife. Adrienne’s health never fully recovered after the many years of confinement in France and Austria. She died in 1807 at the age of forty-eight. Lafayette, heartbroken, would never remarry.

Over the course of his long and tumultuous life, Lafayette would know and dine with the first seven presidents of the United States: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and the future president Andrew Jackson.

During his trip across the United States, he stopped at Bunker Hill in Massachusetts and took a small amount of American soil from the base of the monument there back to France with him. He died in 1834, and was buried next to his wife in the tiny Picpus Cemetery in Paris. Since his death, the American flag has flown over his grave, undisturbed even during the Nazi occupation of Paris in World War II.

According to his last wish, when his body was laid to rest next to Adrienne, the little bit of soil that he had brought home from America was sprinkled over his grave.