About Search. Speaker, Mr. A century ago President Andrew Jackson, in communicating the melancholy news of the death of Lafayette to the Congress of the United States, called it "afflicting intelligence. It made more than one Nation mourn, none more than our own. The Marquis de Lafayette was referred to in a General Order to our Army and Navy as "the distinguished friend of the United States"; and the Congress, with rare felicity, added to this the phrase, "the friend of Washington, and the friend of liberty.
In this threefold role of friendship we the people of this Nation have enshrined him in our hearts, and today we cherish his memory above that of any citizen of a foreign country. It is as one of our Nation's peerless heroes that we hail him, just as his beloved France enshrined him in the Pantheon of her immortal sons. Many generations later, more than two million American boys, backed by the solidarity of a great Nation, went to France. Those soldiers and sailors were repaying the debt of gratitude we owe to Lafayette and at the same time they were seeking to preserve those fundamentals of liberty and democracy to which in a previous age he had dedicated his life.
There is no higher tribute we can pay to his memory than this we pay today. In communicating his death to the Nation, President Jackson ordered that "the same honors be rendered him as were observed upon the decease of Washington. Jackson was moved by the tenderness of a personal friendshipβmoved as he said, "by personal as by public considerations" to direct that every honor be paid "the last Major General of the Revolutionary Army. We know the exquisite relationship which existed between Washington and Lafayette, and I am indeed pleased that the Ambassador of the French Republic has referred to this friendship.
It was that of father and son. For the great Virginian the Frenchman had a veneration and love which approached homage. To him Washington was an idealβalmost more than human. With Andrew Jackson, the friendship bore perhaps a more personal and intimate cast, because the two were more of an age. Both were mere youngsters at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. Jackson, a boy of ten in , first saw Lafayette when he landed in Charleston and before he started northward to meet the Congress.
The sight of the gallant young Frenchman was so deeply engraved in the heart of Andrew Jackson that half a century later it was as vivid as the day it was etched. Jackson himself, even in boyhood, was to contribute his mite "to shake off the yoke of tyranny, and to build up the fabric of free government.
