Lafayette will arrive on a horse and carriage. He will be greeted at the Newburyport Public Library, the older part of which is the Tracy Mansion where Lafayette slept during his Farewell Tour visit to the town.

Mayor Sean Reardon will welcome Lafayette in front of the Library and read a proclamation declaring August 30, 2024, to be Newburyport Lafayette Day. Lafayette interpreter, Ben Goldman, will reply to the mayor’s speech. He will then perform and solicit questions from the assembled citizenry.

At 4:00 pm, we will enter the library to hear a lecture by a leading historian of abolition, Manisha Sinha. The title of Dr. Sinha’s talk is “Lafayette in the Abolitionist Imagination.” Dr. Sinha is the author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, which won several book prizes. Her latest book, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920, was recently the subject of a favorable review in the New York Times Book Review.

This program is a collaboration of the American Friends of Lafayette, Massachusetts Lafayette Society, the Newburyport Public Library, and the Friends of the Newburyport Public Library.