In the spring of 1824................

 

     Congress, in issuing the invitation Monroe transmitted, reflected a national willingness to see the young hero, now old, one more time.  In looking at Lafayette, Americans could look back.  When men invented calendars they invented anniversaries, with all the mental freight that anniversaries carry.  The Battles of Lexington and Concord had been fought in April 1775, the Battle of Bunker Hill that June.  Their fiftieth anniversaries were approaching.  Congress had commissioned John Trumbull, America's most eminent artist, to decorate the Rotunda of the Capital with four huge paintings celebrating the Revolution; Lafayette would appear in one of them.  Only three signers of the Declaration of Independence—Adams, Jefferson, and Charles Carroll of Carrolton—still lived.  Only one major general of the revolutionary army still lived—Lafayette.  Revolutionary War veterans survived in every city and many towns, but now they were all gray.  If one wanted to see and celebrate the Revolution as a living event, now was the last opportunity.

-Richard Brookhiser, The Hero Returns: Lafayette and the Legacy of Revolution

The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis
John Trumbull    oil on canvas  1819-20