Swamped: Marquis de Lafayette's Indiana Dunking

The sidewheel steamboat SS Mechanic was a familiar sight on the Ohio River in the 1820s. On Sunday, May 8, 1825, the shallow-draft craft used its best asset—its speed—to quickly transport a French aristocrat and his traveling companions to a celebration in Louisville, Kentucky.

The boat never reached its destination. Around midnight, approximately 125 miles from Louisville near the present-day Indiana town of Cannelton, the ship struck a submerged log and started taking on water. Although the Mechanic’s crew and passengers all managed to make their way safely to shore, Captain Wyllys Hall was distraught. The next morning, Hall stayed behind, sadly telling Auguste Levasseur, the French nobleman’s private secretary: “Never will my fellow citizens pardon me for the peril to which Lafayette was exposed last night.”

The foreign visitor who came close to losing his life on that pitch dark, rainy night was Marquis de Lafayette. Hero of the American and French revolutions, the sixty-seven-year-old Lafayette had been visiting southern and western states at the time of the shipwreck as part of his triumphal grand tour of the United States. Cities (including Lafayette, Indiana), towns, villages, counties, and streets were named in his honor and communities throughout the nation competed for the pleasure of Lafayette’s company at extravagant parties. Just four days after his near disaster on the Ohio River, Lafayette stopped in Jeffersonville, Indiana, for a reception that Governor James B. Ray said would be “marked by posterity, as the brightest epoch in the calendar of Indiana.”

For Lafayette, harassed in France by government agents and nearly penniless, the invitation to visit the country he had once fought for in its struggle for liberty was an opportunity too good to pass up. In his letter of invitation, President James Madison informed the marquis that Congress had “passed a resolution on this subject, in which the sincere attachment of the whole nation to you is expressed, whose ardent desire is once more to see you amongst them.” Lafayette and his small party, which included his son, George Washington Lafayette; his secretary, Levasseur; and his valet, Bastien, left France on July 13, 1824, aboard the Cadmus, an American merchant ship. After a smooth voyage, Lafayette arrived in New York on August 14.

Lafayette received an enthusiastic greeting as a “Hero of Two Worlds” for his fight on behalf of Republican government in the United States and France. The old soldier also discovered early on during his more than year-long visit that he would not have to worry about expenses. On December 22 a grateful Congress passed a bill giving Lafayette $200,000 and a large tract of land in what is now Tallahassee, Florida (he later sold the property for $100,000).

After visiting New York and Washington, D.C., Lafayette left to tour the rest of the country, meeting such illustrious Americans as AndrewJackson, whom he visited in Nashville, Tennessee, at his home, The Hermitage. On May 8, after attending a dinner in Shawneetown, Illinois, Lafayette and his traveling party boarded the Mechanic for the trip to Louisville. At about 10 p.m., according to Levasseur, George Lafayette came below after being up on deck and remarked to his father’s secretary that he was surprised “that in so dark a night, our captain did not come to, or at least abate the speed of the vessel.” Accustomed by now, however, to traveling in all kinds of adverse conditions, the two men turned their conversation to other matters.

Shortly after midnight, the ship’s passengers were jolted awake “by a horrible shock” that stopped the vessel dead in the water on the Kentucky side of the river approximately fifty yards from shore. Running up on deck to learn why the boat had stopped, Levasseur was greeted by cries from fellow passengers that they had run aground on a sandbar. Seizing a light, Levasseur, joined by the captain, opened the hold and found that the ship had “half filled with water, which rushed in torrents through a large opening. ‘A snag! A snag!’ cried the captain, ‘Hasten Lafayette to my boat! Bring Lafayette to my boat!’”

Returning to his cabin, Levasseur found Lafayette awake and beginning to be dressed by his valet. “What news?” Lafayette asked his secretary. “That we shall go to the bottom, gentlemen, if we cannot extricate ourselves, and we have not a moment to spare,” Levasseur quickly responded. Lafayette, however, remained unruffled by the danger. Upon leaving his cabin, he halted on the stairs when he remembered that he had left behind on his table a snuffbox ornamented with George Washington’s portrait. Levasseur and George Lafayette managed to convince the marquis to proceed while Levasseur went back and retrieved the item.

According to Perry County legend, Lafayette, as he eased into a small lifeboat, slipped, fell into the river, and nearly drowned. But Levasseur paints an entirely different picture in his account. Noting that the dark night and the small boat’s instability made it difficult to step off the already listing steamboat, the secretary reported that he got into the craft and “while the captain was keeping it as near the vessel as possible, two persons helped him [Lafayette] in, holding him by the shoulders, while I received him in my arms.” As soon as Lafayette found a safe seat, the yawl pushed off from the sinking Mechanic and steered its way to the left [Indiana] shore, reaching land in less than three minutes.

Lafayette, who had remained calm throughout the disaster, lost his coolness when he discovered that his son was not among the nine people on the lifeboat. “He was filled with anxiety,” Levasseur said of Lafayette, “and in a state of the most violent agitation. He began to call, ‘George! George!’ with all his strength.” On a second trip back to the Mechanic, which had a small portion of its roof and wheelhouse sticking out of the water, Levasseur discovered George Lafayette tranquilly waiting to be rescued.

The approximately fifty crew and passengers all managed to make their way to safety, either by being rescued by the lifeboat or by swimming to shore. The survivors lit fires to dry themselves, and even found a mattress, dry on one side, on which Lafayette slept. At daybreak, the passengers searched through the wreckage that the covered the shoreline for their belongings, some “mournfully recounted the extent of their losses, others could not avoid laughing at the nakedness of costume in which they found themselves; this gaiety soon became prevalent . . . and at last smoothed the visages of the most sorrowful, and almost transformed our shipwreck into a party of pleasure,” noted Levasseur.

Lafayette’s unexpected appearance on Hoosier soil helped to inspire years of storytelling in Ohio River communities. After the shipwreck, according to a 1916 Perry County history, “only the simple log cabin of a sturdy pioneer, James Cavender, offered shelter to the highborn nobleman who had slept under the palace-roof of Versailles, yet Hoosier hospitality gave of its best.” Also, the history claimed that the next morning news of Lafayette’s unexpected visit had spread like wildfire through the region, bringing several farmers and their children to the scene to catch a glimpse of the hero. Lafayette supposedly received his “rustic visitors” in a cleft between two rocks where a spring flowed—a site known today as Lafayette Spring.

Legend has it that Lafayette also made stops in the Indiana communities of Madison, Lawrenceburg, and Vevay. Charles N. Thompson, trying to unravel the mystery in a 1928 issue of the IndianaMagazine of History, concluded that the Frenchman “never visited any other part of the state of Indiana than the place in the woods where he involuntarily spent the night on the shore of the Ohio River near the present site of Cannelton, and later, Jeffersonville.” Thompson also cast doubt on Lafayette’s stay overnight in the Cavender cabin and subsequent entertainment of local visitors.

Evidence may be speculative for Lafayette’s other purported visits to Indiana communities, but the young state did pull out all the stops in its reception for the Revolutionary War hero in Jeffersonville on May 12. Lafayette’s visit was not a spur-of-the-moment affair. On January 29, 1825, Indiana governor William Hendricks wrote Lafayette informing him that the state legislature had passed a joint resolution inviting him to visit the nineteenth state. The resolution, transmitted to Lafayette by Hendricks in his letter to the general, exhibited the lawmakers’ pride in their state. The legislators noted that on his trip west of the Allegheny Mountains Lafayette would “behold extensive communities of freemen which, within the period of his own recollection, have been substituted for the trackless wilderness. Where forty years ago primeval barbarism held undisputed sway over man and nature, civilization, liberty and law wield the mild scepter of equal rights; it is here, that our illustrious friend will find his name, his services, and, we trust, his principles flourishing in perennial verdure.”

The young state of Indian provided Lafayette quite an elaborate welcome on May 12 when he visited Jeffersonville. At 11 a.m., Lafayette stepped off the steamboat General Pike and received a twenty-four-gun salute, shot three times, noted a dispatch by a Hoosier printed in the Louisville Public Advertiser. Under escort from three artillery companies, Lafayette journeyed to the home of the late Governor Thomas Posey, located on the west corner of Front and Fort streets overlooking the river.

Upon reaching the Posey mansion, Lafayette received formal greetings from acting Indiana governor James B. Ray, who had been thrust into the job following Hendricks’s election to the U.S. Senate. After a welcoming speech by Ray, and remarks form Lafayette, the general attended a reception where he met a few local citizens, including some Revolutionary War veterans.

At 3 p.m., Lafayette attended a dinner in the woods just above Posey’s home. Following dinner, a number of toasts were made, including those to the memory of Washington, the Continental Congress, the Congress of 1824, the president of the United States, and to “Major General Lafayette, united with Washington in our hearts—We hail his affectionate visit with a heart-cheering welcome.”  Lafayette offered his own toast: “Jeffersonville and Indiana—May the rapid progress of this young state, a wonder among wonders, more and more evince the blessings of republican freedom!”

Three hours after the dinner started, Lafayette left the table and was taken back to the General Pike for the return trip to Louisville, where he was to be the guest of honor at a ball that evening. “Never again did Lafayette set his foot on the soil of Indiana and never again has Indiana entertained a more noble or a more distinguished guest,” Thompson concluded.