Day: November 25, 2025

A provocative thesis underlies Joe Jackson’s Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of the American Empire. The author argues the Spanish-American War was a pivotal moment in US foreign policy that ushered in an age of American interventionism. It became the “template” for every so-called small war ever since­—“from the Bay of Pigs to Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.” The war, Jackson argues, is not only history but a cautionary tale.

Splendid Liberators is a work of modern narrative nonfiction that covers the Pacific and Caribbean theaters of that war. At the time, US Secretary of State John Hay called the conflict a “splendid little war.” To his credit, Jackson has reached beyond traditional US sources, materials, and perceptions. He uses archival materials in the Philippines and Cuba and interviews with scholars in those countries. This material and firsthand accounts gleaned from diaries, letters, and unpublished reminisces add genuine depth to this account. The result is a broad, sweeping work that captures America on the eve of empire building, replete with revealing insights that sometimes sink under the weight of tangential narrative and uneven writing.

Unrest, War, and Insurrection

Jackson begins his narrative by recounting the decades of unrest created by exploitive Spanish colonialism in the nineteenth century. The vestiges of a once vast overseas empire in the New World and the Pacific were island possessions that included Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, and “Spain was a parasite sucking them dry.” Spanish policy bred unrest, years of armed rebellion, and revolution that was met with terrible force. The Cuban rebellion, Jackson notes, lasted nearly thirty years and was not quelled by military action, arrests, executions, or the establishment of reconcentrados­—concentration camps created to separate rural populations from rebels.

Splendid Liberators describes the outsized role the American press had in publicizing and then exaggerating Spain’s heinous efforts to suppress unrest and crush rebellion. Symbolic images of “Cuba as a starving woman with sunken eyes and fleshless ribs” in a reconcentrado first appeared in print in 1896. American correspondents were imprisoned and deported. Nothing outraged Americans more, however, than lurid stories of defiled Cuban maidens, trumpeted with banner headlines asking: “Does Our Flag Shield Women?” Eventually, “coverage reached an unprecedented level of shrillness and cascading cries for intervention became the new norm,” as correspondents flooded Cuba and yellow journalism took hold of New York City’s penny press and midwestern weeklies.

Although previous works explore this coverage more fully (for one, Charles Henry Brown’s The Correspondents’ War), Jackson is on solid ground with claims that the popular press of that day shaped American foreign policy. The author describes how pressure built on the McKinley Administration—especially on the president himself, “a man trapped between two unmoving rocks of belief” between peace and humanitarianism—to intervene in Cuba and ultimately declare war on Spain.

Even in this well-grounded beginning of Splendid Liberators, what should be a tight narrative thread begins to unravel. Jackson first loses his narrative focus here and writes pages about Stephen Crane, just one of the famed correspondents in Cuba. Then the author segues into an out-of-place discussion on the “roots of twentieth century American literature,” in which “suddenly, no higher meaning or old truths intercede, only the lonely struggle to survive amidst a revelatory rage.”

This will not be the last time Jackson writes maudlin prose in this book. Jackson can write vividly and with a keen eye for description. For instance, in describing the public reaction to yellow press accounts of Spanish assaults on Cuban women, Jackson writes that “America hummed like an angry hive.” At other times, he is mawkish, as when he describes American war fever making “the young and the restless want to be a part of it. The winds tremble. The distant thunder rolls.” 

More troubling for the reader is the author’s decision to cast bit players in recurring roles. In the book’s front matter, Jackson lists no fewer than 96 “Dramatis Personae” with narrative roles to play. These include infantry soldier Carl Sandburg (later poet and author) and nurse Clara Maass (a victim of voluntary yellow fever trials), and others who are only on the margins of the story here. Dozens of these minor actors come and go throughout Splendid Liberators, and what should be a crisp, lively narrative becomes at times stodgy and sluggish reading.

Race and Remembrance

Splendid Liberators is a book of social and political narrative history, as well as one of military history. While Brian McAllister Linn’s The Philippine War, 1899-1902 and G. J. A. O’Toole’s The Spanish War: An American Epic,1898 are standard military histories of these wars, Jackson does a credible job writing military accounts. He covers, in sound detail, military actions from fleet engagements to land battles—including the poorly planned assault on the San Juan Heights. The author is at his best, however, when he gleans from individual accounts the suffering and privations of the men and women caught up in this conflict.

Jackson uses some of these accounts to buttress his argument that racial animosity was a key factor in events leading up to and during the Spanish-American War and especially so during the Philippine Insurrection (1899–1902). For example, he ascribes McKinley’s failure to intervene in Cuba as early as 1897 to his fear that a free Cuba would be “a racial Utopia compared” to the United States, although the author’s assessment is based only on one obscure source.

He also describes the indignities heaped upon black units in the regular army, an indictment of the bigotry and racial animus of the times. For example, Jackson brings to light the little-known race riots in Tampa, Florida. It was, he writes, “one of the worst racial clashes in an army camp during the war, a culmination of all the hatred that had grown between blacks and whites,” not only in Florida but throughout the post-Reconstruction South and during the start of the Jim Crow era.

It was, however, only a harbinger of worse things to come. Splendid Liberators recounts outrages perpetrated on the Filipino people during the insurrection after the Spanish cession of the Philippines to the US. In retaliation for gruesome Filipino guerrilla tactics, Americans carried out reprisals and executed a scorched-earth policy against people they called “n*****s” and dehumanized as “gugus.” “The war that resulted transformed the archipelago into a post-apocalyptic wasteland of famine, disease, ecological disaster, and hundreds of thousands dead.”

American troops’ atrocities are cited in this book—the execution of unarmed prisoners and civilians, torture (including infamous waterboarding, called the “water cure” then), the wholesale destruction of crops and livestock, razed villages, targeted attacks on non-combatants, murder, and rape. Given these horrific and widespread war crimes, Splendid Liberators is mistitled. There was nothing splendid about one of the most shameful episodes in American history.

Jackson’s unflinching account of the Philippine Insurrection is the best of what narrative history can offer readers. Still, this book is not without flaws. Splendid Liberators is flecked with errors that should have been corrected by the author or a careful editor. Jackson, for example, describes the Krag-Jørgensen rifle carried by some American troops as a “30 shot, 5 caliber” weapon; it is a 30-caliber rifle with a five-round magazine. In another instance, Jackson claims an officer graduated “number 3,616 in West Point’s class of 1894—the ‘goat.’” That graduating class numbered 54. These errors are not confined to the text. The 43 historic photos in the book include a picture of Frederick Funston, a pivotal figure in the conflict who fought in Cuba and the Philippines. The caption claims Funston is wearing the uniform of a junior officer of volunteers, but, in fact, this is a photo of Funston as a brigadier general in the US Army. The cover art, ostensibly illustrative of the American war with Spain that began in 1898, is a depiction of the Battle of Desmayo between Cuban insurgents and Spanish forces in 1896.

Beyond annoying errors of fact, the book can be difficult to read. Jackson sometimes skips forward and back, writing broken chronological accounts. This is distracting, especially when the author suddenly shifts from the past to the present tense when he writes not only about the same event, but even in the same paragraph. The notes, organized by page numbers, are a confusing jumble that don’t always provide a direct citation for quoted text. It’s difficult to reconcile attribution and specific claims in Jackson’s work with either a primary or a secondary source.

Jackson also makes acerbic comments throughout his book, wholly out of place even in writing a narrative history. He writes, for example, that various American presidents looked to the Philippines and “hoped to recast the archipelago ‘in our image.’ Considering America’s current number of mass killings, they succeeded.” In another instance, he claims to have found a “frequent fixture in the American character: patriotism that allows malice at home, and … murder overseas.”

In the end, Jackson’s Splendid Liberators is a bitter commentary on the onset of the age of American empire and especially on the nation’s first wars overseas. On many levels, then, this is a difficult book to read; but its critique of American exceptionalism and the nation’s little wars cannot be ignored.

New York, August 16, 1824. The guns had scarcely fallen silent when the bells began. Bunting unfurled; apprentices scrambled onto rooftops; veterans pinned sun-faded cockades. A steamboat shrieked past Staten Island as ferries veered in for a glimpse of the man the papers called the Nation’s Guest. Then the figure who had once ridden beside Washington—older now but unmistakable—stepped ashore at Castle Garden: Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette, Marquis de La Fayette. At the subsequent reception, “In they came, rich and poor, Black and white … old veterans, young soldiers.” For thirteen months and more than six thousand miles, through all twenty-four states, variations of that scene replayed: processions, banquets, tears, toasts. Ryan L. Cole’s The Last Adieu invites us to follow Lafayette’s Farewell Tour—and asks why it mattered.

Cole, a former speechwriter to Governor Mitch Daniels and author of Light-Horse Harry Lee, writes with a journalist’s eye for municipal pageantry: arches and illuminated decorations, menus and militia drills, the civic theater of a republic tidying itself because a hero is coming. He is superb at showing how towns rehearsed gratitude until welcome became a national language, even if the interpretive spine sometimes lags behind the scenes. Published to mark the tour’s bicentennial this year, The Last Adieu doubles as commemoration and lens: a timely reminder that Lafayette’s persona—so steeped in Revolutionary ideals—could briefly knit a fractious nation together, and a mirror for our own moment.

The timing was perfect. In 1824, the United States was noisy, expanding—and divided. The presidential race splintered over who would succeed James Monroe: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, or William H. Crawford. The economy lurched; slavery’s westward push darkened debate; and the Revolution’s living witnesses were fading, their ideals dimmed in a more partisan, commercial age. With the Declaration of Independence’s fiftieth anniversary approaching, Americans looked backward with yearning. The Founding Fathers had become figures of near-mythic unity, even as that unity had always been fragile. Few of them remained alive—only John Adams and Thomas Jefferson still survived among the great names. In this atmosphere of nostalgia and uncertainty, one man embodied the living memory of that heroic age: the Marquis de Lafayette, the last surviving major general of the Continental Army and George Washington’s self-proclaimed “adopted son.”

President James Monroe recognized the symbolic power of inviting Lafayette to return from France for the approaching semicentennial. The results of the Tour were extraordinary. As a foreign hero above domestic factions, visiting hundreds of cities and counties, Lafayette indeed became a unifying emblem in a season of division. Cities and towns staged vast civic rituals, and political opponents stood side by side to cheer “the last general of the American Revolution.” The tour turbocharged early American celebrity culture—portraits, ribbons, crockery, songs, and endless newspaper coverage—and it catalyzed commemoration: monuments rose, Revolutionary sites were restored, and local histories flourished. In celebrating Lafayette, Americans rediscovered the Revolution itself.

As Cole explains in The Last Adieu, Monroe’s invitation arrived alongside private letters from old comrades who wished to see the marquis “before it was too late.” Lafayette needed little persuading: he longed to embrace his brothers-in-arms—and he had other reasons to come. Under the Bourbon Restoration, he was admired by some but sidelined by many, criticized from the right for his liberalism and from the left for his moderation. He longed—not unreasonably—for the public affection he had once known in America. Materially, he needed relief: years of imprisonment and confiscations during the French Revolution had damaged his fortune. The American visit promised not only honor but concrete support: Congress would ultimately vote him a substantial cash grant ($200,000) and a land grant of 24,000 acres in Florida—welcome help to a man whose finances had been battered. He also wished to see how the republic had grown since 1784. And ideologically, he hoped that his reports and writings on a thriving American experiment might rekindle liberal confidence abroad, especially in France.

Cole opens the story at La Grange, Lafayette’s château, moving readers past portraits and objects that summarize a long life—a gallery-like prelude that orients without claiming to be a full biography. Swift and effective, it still raises background questions that would enrich the opening: why did contemporaries judge his wartime role crucial? What shifted between Washington’s caution in the 1790s and the adoration of 1824? How did Adrienne de Noailles shape his life? And why was his standing so battered amongst his French countrymen, and yet he achieved a kind of apotheosis in America? The next chapter’s survey of US politics and growth is informative but long for material not tightly tied to Lafayette; much of the content could have been braided into the itinerary.

The heart of the book traces the Farewell Tour almost day by day: six thousand miles by steamboats and canals, stagecoach and horseback. Cole draws on an impressive trove of newspapers, correspondence, municipal records, invitations, and speeches to paint New York’s delirium; Philadelphia’s pageantry; receptions in Washington City and Lafayette’s remarks to Congress; the hushed pilgrimage to Mount Vernon; Yorktown’s anniversary; a push west to the frontier; and the spill and scare when the Mechanic sank near Louisville. Towns refurbished Revolutionary landmarks; souvenirs proliferated; a young consumer republic learned to monetize—and memorialize—its gratitude. The landing’s emotional temperature is “the return of the Revolution … the perfect confluence of feeling, history and time.” No faction could monopolize him; Lafayette became “the object of the entire nation’s admiration.”

Read alongside the itinerary, the book doubles as a brisk portrait of a republic transformed in half a century. Canals and steamboats collapse distances; print culture and civic associations thicken public life; towns balloon into cities with new markets, professions, and tastes; party structures harden even as civic rituals try to soften them. Without pausing the narrative, Cole lets readers feel how different 1824 looks from 1776—an America more populous, commercial, infrastructural, and self-conscious about its past. That lightly threaded backdrop is one of the study’s most engaging contributions.

One of Cole’s other signal contributions is staging the tour as a traveling theater with a marvelous ensemble. Closest to the star are his son, Georges Washington de Lafayette—who lived with the Washington family during his parents’ imprisonment during the French Revolution—and Auguste Levasseur, the indefatigable secretary-publicist whose 1829 account helped shape memory of the journey. In city after city appear elderly veterans, Masonic lodges in full regalia, merchants turning admiration into handkerchiefs and medallions, poets and bandmasters minting odes, politicians like Andrew Jackson and orators like Daniel Webster, French émigrés, and the Custis family at Arlington and Mount Vernon. John Quincy Adams toasts him; Jefferson and Madison receive him; schoolgirls crown him with garlands; printers sell broadsides by the ream. Cole is at his best when he lets this cast bustle across the page.

The blow-by-blow gives texture and momentum, but at times repetition creeps in—the long streak of parades, crowds, balls, dinners, veterans, Freemasons, political notables, and miles traveled on horseback. Within a single volume, Cole understandably privileges pace; even so, a few added scaffolding beams would steady the interpretive frame.

A firmer thematic spine—veterans’ culture, municipal boosterism, Masonic networks, the press as promoter, preservation and philanthropy, celebrity and politics—would more directly test whether Lafayette truly “united” the nation amid serious political and economic strains. That newspapers wrote less about party while he was in town does not, by itself, mean that minds reconciled. Cole notes grumbles about “too much adulation” and cites Lafayette’s confidence in a “reconciliatory effect,” but dissenting voices and partisan readings would sharpen the question. Likewise, historians trying to understand the mechanics of nineteenth-century fame—how adoration is constructed and to what ends—could profit from modern celebrity studies.

Another thread could have been Lafayette’s evolving ideas. What precisely did he believe by 1824, and how had his views shifted since wartime and the 1784 tour? The book offers flashes—on emancipation, religious liberty, representation, women’s education—but little synthesis. A comparative glance at 1777–81, 1784, and 1824–25 would illuminate constancies and adjustments and show how his principles met the realities of a more populous, commercially ambitious, infrastructural America.

Subjects that surface in anecdotes could also use fuller treatment. Slavery appears repeatedly—in cityscapes, in encounters (Cole notes an old acquaintance from 1777, “Pompey,” with whom Lafayette shares champagne), and through Frances Wright—yet Lafayette’s antislavery program (his experimental plantation, his advocacy in France, the through-line of his views) receives only brief attention. Native nations appear at the margins: the Creek predicament is sketched, as are the effects of expansion and industrialization on Indigenous life, but we hear little of Lafayette’s responses to Native Americans, a topic close to his heart—he collected indigenous artifacts at La Grange after the tour. Women beyond Wright are mostly belles at balls; there are richer ways to see them as shapers of memory culture in academies, civic philanthropy, trades, and commemorations, and to bring forward Lafayette’s views on women’s education and rights.

Another shortcoming is that Cole leaves Lafayette’s companions on the journey under-drawn. Auguste Levasseur, Lafayette’s private secretary, appears mainly as a source rather than a presence. Yet Levasseur was far more than a stenographer: his Journal of a Voyage to the United States of America (published in 1829) became the official narrative of the tour, shaping how Americans and Europeans alike remembered it. A skilled propagandist and liberal journalist, Levasseur helped craft the marquis’s public image as the “nation’s guest,” curating newspaper coverage, organizing appearances, and controlling access. Through his pen, Lafayette’s passage became a model of transatlantic republican virtue—part travelogue, part political lesson, and part mythmaking.

Lafayette’s son, Georges Washington de Lafayette, likewise receives only passing notice. His very name—bestowed in honor of his father’s American mentor—embodied the symbolic bridge between the two republics. Georges had once taken refuge at Mount Vernon during the darkest years of the French Revolution, and his return to America in 1824 alongside his father closed that emotional circle. His impressions of a vastly transformed United States, and his role as both filial companion and emblem of youth in the public ceremonies, could have deepened the narrative. The father-son dynamic—aged hero and heir, memory and renewal—offered a human dimension to the tour that remains largely latent in Cole’s telling.

Cole deserves real credit, though, for weaving Frances (Fanny) Wright into the story. A Scottish-born writer, freethinker, feminist, abolitionist, and later a US citizen, Wright addressed diverse audiences on politics and reform, advocated universal education, women’s legal rights and liberal divorce laws, birth control, and emancipation, and in 1825 founded the Nashoba commune to model a path from slavery to freedom. She traveled alongside parts of the tour, visited Monticello with Lafayette, and moved within reform networks he admired. Cole’s inclusion of her perspective is a real strength of the book, even if the material invites even more examination of Wright and Lafayette together. We should understand their ideas in dialogue rather than in parallel.

One further question—apt for the bicentennial of Lafayette’s farewell tour—is how the tour itself shaped the telling of Revolutionary history: did schoolbooks, local histories, and national narratives accord Lafayette a larger place after 1825, just as towns and counties took his name? Answering that would round out the story Cole has begun.

Because Lafayette was profoundly transatlantic, the clearest opportunity for expansion is the French side of the story. The book notes his divergent standing in France but rarely lets French sources speak. Was the tour followed in Parisian papers? Did Lafayette or Levasseur write home to seed the “reviving [of] moribund liberal spirits in France”? How did the journey affect his position under Louis XVIII and Charles X, and the energies that would break in 1830? Given the American rejoicing rendered here, the comparative shadow feels faint.

Accuracy matters in a history book. The Metz dinner occurred in 1775, not 1776. Washington’s physician was James Craik, not “John Cochran.” Lafayette did not “found” the French branch of the Society of the Cincinnati; he was a prominent member, not its founder. None is fatal; all are easy to fix.

To its credit, the book’s insights travel well to the present. Cole shows how public ritual and shared memory can, at least for a season, quiet partisan tempers. Editors who had dined on faction turned to parade routes and ball menus; rivals cheered side by side as the “Nation’s Guest” passed. Whether that harmony outlasted the fireworks is harder to prove, but the aspiration is recognizable. He also reminds us that commemoration is constructed. The 1820s did not simply “discover” Lafayette—they made him through souvenirs and songs, orations and schoolbook stories, and the christening of towns.

Many moments of the Tour are beautifully rendered, too many to list, but three scenes especially linger. At Mount Vernon, Lafayette emerges from the vault “with his eyes overflowing with tears,” and George Washington Parke Custis presents him with a ring containing Washington’s hair, creating a genuinely moving moment for the reader; later, as Lafayette glimpses Mount Vernon for the last time from the deck of the ship carrying him back to France, the farewell is all the more poignant. On the Ohio River, Lafayette and his party face the greatest peril of their journey when the steamboat Mechanic sinks near Louisville on the night of May 8. Cole’s account lingers on the chaos in the dark, the drowning of a beloved dog, the terrifying uncertainty over whether Lafayette’s son has survived, and the loss of clothing, keepsakes, and money gathered along the way, before the party regroups and continues on through Indiana and Kentucky to Cincinnati. And last but not least is Lafayette’s comparison that France might have fared differently had 1789 “kept its original direction,” which makes the tour feel less like a triumphal victory lap than a final, insistent argument for liberalism.

The Last Adieu is, finally, a generous gift for readers who want to walk the route, see the arches, hear the bands, and meet the people—veterans and politicians, reformers and merchants, mothers and schoolboys—who made a continental party of gratitude. The research in correspondence, newspapers, and municipal ephemera is tireless; the portrait vivid and exhilarating.

The affection has proved enduring. Across the United States, towns named Lafayette, counties styled “Fayette,” and innumerable streets, squares, schools, and colleges attest to a sustained habit of gratitude. In 2024–25, the American Friends of Lafayette retraced the route with partners in all twenty-four states, reviving ceremonies and teaching the principles Lafayette championed. The Lafayette Trail continues to map and mark sites nationwide; in France, several efforts are led by the Fondation Chambrun. Forthcoming commemorations from 2026 through 2033 promise deeper public engagement on both sides of the Atlantic.

Taken together, these projects underscore the very point Cole presses: commemoration can do civic work, not just ceremonial work. If, as he shows, Americans in 1824–25 used Lafayette to remember who they had been, our task today is to use him to think about who we might become. The durable lesson of the Farewell Tour is not simply that a republic can crown a hero for a year, but that liberal ideals of constitutionalism, civic equality, the rule of law, and representative government can be taught, argued, and renewed. This book, abundant in scenes, sturdy in reportage, candid about what it leaves up for debate, helps that renewal along. Now, in 2025, with America 250 approaching, Lafayette’s story offers a guide: commemoration can be more than ceremony—an occasion to elevate constitutional ideals and recover a sense of common purpose.