Historical Society's founding is itself an example of memory revived

The Delaware River waterfront has been striking a billowy silhouette. Wafting in the wind are the unfurled sails of 13 tall ships, a voluminous homage to the city's former maritime glory.

Crowning this flotilla holiday is the 145-foot French frigate L'Hermione (air-me-OWN), easily spotted by the tricolor streaming at its stern. The vessel is a replica of the ship responsible for shuttling the debonairly daring Marquis de Lafayette to the United States in 1780.

The "Hero of Two Worlds," Lafayette made three trans-Atlantic trips in his lifetime. None was marked by more celebration than his final voyage in 1824, arguably the grandest welcome ever given to a foreign national in the United States.

The Frenchman's trip catalyzed a historical consciousness-raising in Philadelphia and the rest of the country, directly inspiring the founding of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette, or "Our Marquis," as Americans knew him, needs little introduction. In spite of

an aristocratic birth, a red-hot republican fervor drove the otherwise blue-blooded marquis to join the American cause as a 19-year-old major general.

The country's reception of the aging Frenchman was something never before seen. By all accounts it was Marquis-mania. Or, as he may have put it, jouissance. The very name Lafayette may as well have been French for Washington, so synonymous were the two in the public's eye.

"Everything is Lafayette, whether it be on our heads or under our feet," the Saturday Evening Post enthused. "We wrap our bodies in Lafayette coats during the day, and repose between Lafayette blankets at night. We have Lafayette bread, Lafayette butter, Lafayette beef, and Lafayette vegetable. . . . Even the ladies distinguish their proper from common kisses, under the title "Lafayette smooches.' "

Considered lucky were those Lafayette saluted in the French manner: on each cheek.

Public orations, cotillions, and general jubilation marked every stop on his 14-month patriotic pilgrimage. Feted by officials and cheered by crowds from Lexington, Ky., to Lexington, Mass., Lafayette visited each of the 24 states then in the Union - far more than the 13 colonies he had last known 40 years before. Via stagecoach, horseback, canal barge, and steamboat, Lafayette covered nearly 6,000 miles during his tour, including a stop at the site of the Brandywine Battlefield, where he had been wounded decades earlier.

In Philadelphia, Lafayette received the grandest welcome. "Never could it be more truly said, that a whole population came out to meet Lafayette," observed Auguste Levasseur, Lafayette's secretary, who formed the Frenchman's entourage along with his son, George Washington Lafayette.

Philadelphia's mayor invited Lafayette to Independence Hall for an official welcome. It was during preparations for Lafayette's visit that many started referring to the former Pennsylvania State House as the "Hall of Independence." A nighttime parade of more than 160,000 enthralled citizens followed the oration.

For a city that trades so heavily on its past, it is confounding to imagine a Philadelphia without its myriad museums, libraries, and other public attics for local and national history. But as Lafayette passed under a triumphal arch erected by William Strickland for his visit in 1824, the city was just that: on the verge of forgetting its own historic past.

A few repositories did exist in the city, but theirs were collections more cosmopolitan in scope. Objects of natural history, man-made artifacts, and published volumes from all over the world filled their private vaults. The diaries, letters, portraits, pamphlets, and curios documenting much of our history as a colony, commonwealth, and city found neither steward nor sanctuary.

The fate of these manuscript materials mirrored that of the human witnesses of the "Spirit of '76." A fading few remained - the aging founders John Adams and Thomas Jefferson would die 10 months after Lafayette's final U.S. tour ended. As they passed, recollections of the American Revolution transferred from "the realm of memory to that of imagination."

By 1824, a new generation had grown up in a free United States disconnected from British America and the struggle for independence. President James Monroe, the last of the Founding Fathers to serve as chief executive, recognized the country's crossroads of conscious. Monroe invited Lafayette, thought then to be the last living Revolutionary general, to remind Americans of the sacrifices of their mothers and fathers.

Lafayette's visit particularly animated a clutch of 13 friends. Distraught by the disappearance of much of Philadelphia's documentary heritage, they decided to do something about it. Civic pride propelled the group of middle-class men as much as a productive pessimism: If they weren't going to collect these items, who would? The Historical Society of Pennsylvania came into being later that same year.

"We are not historians; our station, though respectable, is of an humbler degree," asserted the society's second president, Peter S. Du Ponceau, a Frenchman who, like Lafayette, had sailed to America during the War for Independence. "Our first duty is to collect and preserve materials for future history, and to elucidate historical facts, which become obscure by the operation of time."

From its initial cache of 16 items in 1824, the Historical Society's collection now numbers nearly 21 million. Through its active adoption of records from the country's most recent immigrants, the society continues to honor Lafayette's legacy.

Lafayette is buried in the Cimetière de Picpus in Paris, under soil collected from Bunker Hill during his final visit to the United States.

Vincent Fraley is communications manager for the Historical Society of Pennsylvania