During the American War of Independence, the Marquis de Lafayette came from France to the United States and offered both his personal service as a major general in the Continental Army and about $200,000 of his private fortune to the American cause. After his return to France, the French Revolution left him in severe financial difficulty. In gratitude for his aid during the American Revolutionary War, the U.S. Congress granted him about $24,000 in 1794 and later some land in Louisiana in 1803. When Lafayette returned to America in 1824, his continuing financial troubles led to an appeal for further assistance, and Congress and the American people, remembering both their debt to him and his continued support of the new republic, presented him with another $200,000 and an entire township of thirty-six square miles to be selected at his discretion. Lafayette chose land near the Tallahassee home of his friend Richard K. Call, Florida's delegate to the U.S. Congress. Colonel John McKee of Alabama was assigned to go to Florida and select the township, and on July 4, 1825, President John Quincy Adams signed a warrant granting Lafayette the chosen tract next to the new town of Tallahassee. Bounded on two sides by the recently surveyed prime meridian and base line, it was designated Township One North, Range One East. Lafayette never visited his Florida land, and by 1855 all of the more than 23,000 acres in Lafayette Township had been sold to individual buyers.