Memoirs of General Lafayette: With an Account of His Visit to America and His Reception by the People of the United States; from His Arrival, August 15th, to the Celebration at Yorktown, October 19th, 1824.

In 1824, the last living hero of the American Revolution returned to the nation he helped create. The Marquis de Lafayette, now 67 years old and the only surviving general from that distant conflict, embarked on a triumphal journey across all twenty-four states, and Samuel Knapp captures the extraordinary spectacle of a people welcoming their nearly-forgotten savior back home. This memoir chronicles Lafayette's arrival in August 1824 and follows him through the endless parades, the tears of widows who knelt at his feet, the feasts thrown in his honor, and the quiet pilgrimages to Revolutionary War graves. Knapp records the meetings with aged veterans who remembered him as a young Frenchman riding beside Washington, the visits to Mount Vernon where Lafayette stood alone before Martha Washington's tomb, and the mounting anticipation leading to the grand finale at Yorktown in October. There, on the very ground where he had helped secure American independence forty-three years earlier, the nation gathered to honor the man who had become flesh and blood proof of their revolutionary past. This is not merely a travelogue but a portrait of a young country engaged in the urgent work of remembering itself, and the unlikely Frenchman who embodied its founding ideals.