134 / 239
133
“The most important ceremony commemorating the Revolution
brought Lafayette back to Boston to mark the 50
th
anniversary
of the Battle of Bunker Hill. On June 17, 1825, an estimated
200,000 onlookers lined the roads leading to this venerated
place where patriots besieging Boston had demonstrated they
could stand and fight and hold their own against regular British
troops. The ceremonies on Bunker Hill that day began with the
dedication of a monument memorializing the battle. Lafayette
was called upon to lay the cornerstone. Then the famed orator,
Congressman Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, delivered a
long and stirring speech before 15,000 spectators seated in a
wooden amphitheater built around the crest of Bunker Hill. After
paying tribute to the old veterans of the battle, Webster turned
to Lafayette. “You are connected with both hemispheres and
with two generations,” he intoned. “Heaven saw fit to ordain
the electric spark of liberty should be conducted, through you,
from the New World to the Old.” Lafayette and some 4,000
others then sat down at a banquet under an enormous wooden
canopy. It was, he wrote to his children in France, “the most
beautiful patriotic fete ever celebrated.” To this assemblage he
offered a toast with a provocative hope that resonated back
home in Europe”. (Levasseur,
Lafayette in America
, II, p. 205)
5 000 / 8 000
€
- Toast -
249