Ryan

🇺🇸 The United States gave the Marquis de Lafayette the funeral honors ordered for George Washington. No one has received them since. The guns came first. At every military post and every ship, twenty-four guns fired at daybreak, one for each state, then a single gun every half hour until the sun went down. Flags dropped to half-mast. Congress draped its halls in black and invited a grateful nation to mourn for thirty days, while military officers bound their left arms in crepe for six months. The orders came directly from President Andrew Jackson. He had been a boy in the Revolution. He declared that America’s debt to the Marquis was deeply personal, a sentiment he knew was mirrored in the heart of every American citizen. Then Jackson wrote Lafayettes son, Georges. Not only Congress’s words. His own. He called Lafayette the great benefactor of the American republic, promising the grieving son that he would forever watch over his family. From La Grange, Georges wrote back that he could only answer as a son. A whole nation, he said, had wept with them. The resolutions would be kept in the room where he and his boys used to sit with his father and take from him lessons of patriotism and the love of liberty. The affection of a free people, he said, was the finest reward on earth. No other nation has ever been blessed with a friend like the Marquis, and in his passing, America wept for him as though he were her own son.