NINE
Revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic heard the “universal cry of liberty” as governments changed all around them. By the end of the eighteenth century, the tumultuous course of the French Revolution and the events leading to the establishment of an independent Haiti governed by men of color had convinced many Americans of the uniqueness of their own political moderation. Revolutionary regimes solidified and returning revolutionaries found themselves homeless, adrift between the new nations.
Benjamin Franklin returned to America from France in 1785. Even the British ships docked at the wharfs of Philadelphia saluted the homeward-bound American diplomat. Philadelphians conveyed Franklin to the three-and-a-half-story brick house on Market Street that he had built twenty years earlier but rarely occupied. Much had changed in the city and its people while he was abroad in Paris, but he would have recognized the landmark taverns and statehouse. Settled back into his library surrounded by his books and scientific inventions, Franklin looked forward, with an optimism characteristic not just of him but of his era, to the day when “not only the love of liberty, but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man, may pervade all Nations of the Earth.” A traveling philosopher would then be able to “set his Foot anywhere on its Surface, and say, ‘This is my Country.’”1 A decade lived in Europe between revolutions had buoyed Franklin’s enlightened faith that the days of universal citizenship were not far off. How wrong he was.
But in 1789, the year of the Brabant and French revolutions, and a year before his death, Franklin expounded on his expectation that the liberty and rights of man launched in America would continue their journey around the Atlantic world. He was not alone in celebrating the diffusion of revolution across the Atlantic. From Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wrote Thomas Paine in Paris in praise of the courage of the bold French revolutionaries, who had demonstrated a “coolness, wisdom, and resolution to set fire to the four corners of the kingdom and to perish with it themselves, rather than to relinquish an iota from their plan of a total change of government.”2 Even the Federalist-leaning Gazette of the United States proclaimed in capital letters: “THE ERA OF FREEDOM—OF UNIVERSAL LIBERTY! She first broke her chains in the Western world, and having fixed her temple in our favored country, she is spreading her salutary reign throughout the world. Europe bows to her sway.”3
Stories from revolutionary France actually garnered more inches in American newspapers than domestic politics. The Pennsylvania Mercury, for example, reprinted Robespierre’s 1789 address to the National Assembly on liberty of the press, telling their readers that the French revolutionary leader believed freedom of the press to be more useful to a republic than a militia.4 Americans avidly followed the course of the French Revolution, initially at least, because the French seemed to be echoing the Americans. That exaltation did not last.
On one side of the Atlantic, violence spilled onto the streets of Paris, on the other, founding fathers framed a constitution in Philadelphia, or so it seemed to Americans in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Alexander Hamilton feared that the example of France might unhinge “the orderly principles of the People of this country” and take America, too, to “the threshold of disorganization and anarchy.”5 Rancorous debates in the halls of Philadelphia that might otherwise have struck Americans as unnecessarily acrimonious appeared civil when compared in the press to massacres on the Champs de Mars. Distinctions drawn on national lines played to the public imagination, increasing the separation already defined by an ocean. “In America no barbarities were perpetrated—no men’s heads were struck upon poles—no ladies bodies mangled,” the once sympathetic Gazette of the United States commented in January 1793, adding for good measure: “The Americans did not, at discretion, harass, murder, or plunder the clergy—nor roast their generals unjustly alive.”6 All the Americans did, it seemed, was argue, and that made them exemplary.
If Parisian Jacobins sent their political enemies to the guillotine, in their colonies, violence had escaped all bounds, with slaves disgorging their masters. And that threat was closer to home. Tales recounted by “the unfortunate colonists from Saint Domingue,” as L. E. Moreau de Saint Méry called them, stoked the already active rumor mills in the United States. The deputy from Martinique to the French National Assembly had himself escaped the guillotine before emigrating to Philadelphia. Arriving on the shores of the United States, “the land of liberty,” in waves in 1793, 1798, and 1804, revolutionary exiles from the Caribbean evoked all the danger of revolution run radical.7 These distinctions stoked an American nationalism rooted in the founding myths of the primeval American wilderness far removed from the corruption of the luxuriant old world.
The fragment of the Bastille displayed in the window of Moreau de Saint Méry’s Philadelphia bookstore attracted crowds. They came to gawk, not to applaud. Benjamin Franklin’s grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache, who operated a bookstore in the same Philadelphia neighborhood, knew that all too well. With the printing equipment he had inherited from his grandfather, Bache edited the Aurora and General Advertiser. No longer an admirer of all things revolutionary, the Gazette of the United States attacked Bache for his pro-French journalism as “the most infamous of the Jacobins … Printer to the French Director, Distributor General of the principles of Insurrection, Anarchy and Confusion, the greatest of fools, and the most stubborn sans-culotte in the United States.”8 A little more than a decade after Benjamin Franklin had returned from France so full of optimism, his grandson was arrested, charged with libel for his criticism of President Adams, and accused of exciting sedition against the United States.
“He that is not for us is against us”: Revolutionary Justice
In Common Sense, the pamphlet that helped ignite revolution in 1776, Thomas Paine, looking forward, had envisioned an America that would “receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”9 Quite the opposite happened. In the 1790s, the British editor of the Philadelphia-published Porcupine’s Gazette, William Cobbett, spurred a campaign against Paine and his fellow “mongrel cosmopolites.”10 Revolutionary itinerants, especially those who had supported the French, were easily cast as radical foreigners. Traveling abroad aroused suspicion.
Returning to America in 1802, Paine was not heartily welcomed as Franklin had been a decade earlier. In a public letter addressed to the American people, Paine wrote that he was happy at last to be returning “to the country in whose dangers I bore my share, and to whose greatness I contributed my part.” He had expected to come back sooner, he explained, but could not leave France in the midst of its revolution, whose principles “were copied from America.” What he wrote next, though, sealed his fate in America. “While I beheld with pleasure the dawn of liberty rising in Europe,” he added, “I saw, with regret, the lustre of it fading in America.”11 He understood the gap separating the two revolutions differently than did Hamilton. He called American liberty into question.
That Thomas Paine had been named a French citizen in 1792 and elected to the National Convention just confirmed Cobbett’s allegation of dangerous cosmopolitanism. Coupled with political moderation, cosmopolitanism had already gotten Paine into trouble in France. Threatened with the guillotine, from his prison cell, Paine appealed to George Washington for help. The American president refused to interfere in French politics to save the British exile. Ultimately released by the French, Paine very publicly held Washington responsible for his brush with death. In response to Paine’s charges, a number of American newspapers called on their readers to choose between Washington and “that degenerate moral and political monster, Tom Paine.” The editor of the Virginia Gazette pictured Paine in revolutionary Paris, allegedly “displayed during his state of intoxication in a cage along with a Bear and a Monkey.”12
Ignoring the scandalous press, Thomas Jefferson invited his old friend to return home to America. French diplomat Louis Otto reported that despite the invitation, Paine had to wait for eight months in port before he could find an American captain willing to transport him across the Atlantic.13 As described by a witness to Paine’s arrival in Baltimore in 1802, the American revolutionary credited with launching the War for Independence was denied admittance to one inn after another. “In this dilemma Tom was kept wandering thro the town for some time.”14 Equally devastating, Paine, who had vested his hopes in the democratic franchise, was denied the right to vote in New York in 1806. Turned away from the polling station, he was admonished by the clerk, “You are not an American.”15 Although he settled on a farm in New York, Paine did not feel at home in a more religious and censoring America but rather felt himself cast “once more abroad in the world.”16
Thomas Paine was not alone. Many revolutionary heroes seeking asylum were also rebuffed and cast adrift at the end of the last decade of the eighteenth century. Thaddeus Kościuszko, the acclaimed Polish soldier who had engineered some of America’s most significant victories in the Revolutionary War before leading two revolutions for Polish independence, had turned down an invitation to join a Polish Legion fighting in Italy upon his release from a Russian jail in 1796. Suffering from wounds that had festered in prison, Kościuszko hoped instead to retire from politics in America. As he set sail from Bristol, a military band serenaded his ship with a medley of “martial airs from every land where the soldier’s banner had waved.”17 The band played for some time.
Crowds in Philadelphia welcomed the “illustrious defender of the Rights of Man, the unfortunate General Kosciuszko,” unhitching the horses from his carriage that was then “drawn by citizens” themselves through the streets of Philadelphia, according to Benjamin Franklin Bache’s Aurora General Advertiser.18 “Here was the hero on whom “the eye of despotism cast its malignant glances,” other papers reported.19 “I look upon America as my second country,” Kościuszko responded to the Philadelphians’ tribute.20
A few weeks after Kościuszko’s arrival, the Gazette of the United States warned its readers that the Polish general was in league with the French. The Federalist paper cited as evidence a roster of visitors to his rented rooms in a small boarding house on Third Street in Philadelphia. In the Porcupine’s Gazette, William Cobbett portrayed Kościuszko as a mercenary who had returned to the United States solely to claim recompense for his wartime services to the country. Was not liberty truly its own reward, Cobbett asked.21 Kościsuzko was so demoralized by the partisan attacks that he left America under cover of darkness to return to Europe.
Even as the Gazette of the United States reminded Americans in their postrevolutionary republic that “he that is not for us is against us,” they prided themselves on their civility.22 Cobbett, the English reformer turned counterrevolutionary, drew a contrast between their free press and court-driven justice and the mob violence that riddled the waning years of the French Revolution. In America, itinerant cosmopolitans who dared to disparage national leaders might be sent packing, but in France they frequently found themselves carted away by tumbrel to the guillotine.
That was the fate of some other traveling revolutionaries. When he lived in England in the decade between the American and the French revolutions, Jacques-Pierre Brissot had dreamed of assembling the Confédération universelle des amis de la liberté et de la verité (Universal confederation of the friends of liberty and the truth). In November 1792, he was denounced in France by two journalists with whom he disagreed, the Jacobin Louise de Kéralio and her husband and fellow journalist François Robert. Placed under house arrest, Brissot escaped but was recognized in the provinces. He was guillotined as a counterrevolutionary on 31 October 1793. The marquis de Condorcet, accused as a traitor to France and driven into hiding for half a year, was also arrested as he fled Paris; he died in prison in 1794.
In 1795, two years after Anacharsis Cloots had foreseen the future of “the Republic one and universal,” where “factions would be crushed by the weight of universal reason,” he, too, was charged with treason by French Jacobins.23 Unlike Thomas Paine, his cellmate in the Luxembourg Prison, Cloots died at the guillotine. Until the end, Cloots held to his belief in the universalism of revolutionary nationalism. As he mounted the scaffold, Cloots cried out, “Hurrah for the fraternity of nations! Long live the Republic of the world!”24 The decree of revolutionary year II had purged foreigners, including Cloots and Paine, from the National Convention. The revolutionary French defined citizenship by political beliefs, not birthplace. Cloots and Paine did not hold the requisite beliefs and were cast out as foreigners.25
The reach of French exclusionary justice extended across the Atlantic to the colonies in the Caribbean. The revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture, arrested by General Leclerc in 1801, was forced to board a ship ironically named Le Héros bound for France. The hero of Saint-Domingue was imprisoned by Bonaparte in the Jura Mountains. He died there in 1803, a year before Haiti won its independence.
Few of the pamphleteers, journal writers, editors, or even diplomats who strayed from their homelands ever fit comfortably back into the politics they had left behind. Itinerants in a revolutionary age, they had ventured abroad, as did Elkanah Watson, “biting my lips with astonishment, exclaiming in silence … what a contrast in customs & manners among Nations.”26 Contemplating comparisons, a few returned counterrevolutionaries, but more came home more committed revolutionaries than before, unable to settle down at home or abroad. Franklin was unusual in his ability to engineer elegant compromises in the Constitutional Convention soon after his return to Philadelphia. He would be remembered as a founding father. Most of the other revolutionary travelers found themselves out of step with national politics. Everything had changed so dramatically at the end of the eighteenth century.
The Irish revolutionary Wolfe Tone, after sailing with French troops, did return home. He died in Provost’s Prison in Dublin in 1798. Louis Otto, the French diplomat who had married América Francès de Crèvecoeur, also returned home. He was arrested twice by the French when he arrived in Paris. When time restored his diplomatic reputation, he served out the revolution abroad in Europe. Offered a post in America, Otto claimed that his wife’s health prevented their transatlantic crossing. They did not return to France, either.
Thomas Jefferson’s secretary, William Short, left Paris in the last years of the French Revolution to return home to Virginia. He assured Jefferson that he had given up all hope of ever settling in a home together with his French lover, the duchesse de la Rochefoucauld. She had survived the revolution in France and joined her estates to those of a French marquis in a second marriage of convenience. Short visited her en route to Russia, but returned to America alone and politically adrift.
The Barlows, who stayed in Paris longer than most other expatriates, finally sailed home together to America, as Ruth had always wanted, but only for a brief respite. In 1811, Joel Barlow accepted an appointment as minister to France to negotiate a treaty with Bonaparte. Ruth accompanied Joel to Paris, where she once again waited as he traveled alone to central Europe. He died in Poland of consumption; it took two weeks for the news to reach Ruth in Paris and another three months for word to get back to America. She returned home, this time alone, to a country that seemed to resemble more her husband’s pessimistic portrait of a chaotic democracy where “ye live united, or divided die” than the universal republicanism Joel Barlow had idealized when they lived in France.27
The transformation of the revolutionary decades that displaced so many travelers was illustrated by Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” the well-known American story of a “simple, good-natured fellow” of Dutch descent who falls asleep in the Catskill Mountains of New York in the 1770s. Rip travels through time, not space. When he awakens twenty years later, everything has changed. Described from Irving’s postrevolutionary perspective, Rip van Winkle’s world has changed as drastically as the societies visited by other revolutionary time travelers, such as those sent by Louis Sebastien Mercier and Betje Wolff into the year 2440. Rip van Winkle awakens after the revolution to discover that even the sign above the inn “was singularly metamorphosed. The red coat was changed for one of blue and buff, a sword was stuck in the hand instead of a scepter, the head was decorated with a cocked hat, and underneath was painted in large characters, GENERAL WASHINGTON.”28
Two centuries later, in 1968, Martin Luther King, in his last Sunday sermon, delivered in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., reminded his listeners of Rip van Winkle standing under this transformed sign. In this new society, Rip “was completely lost. He knew not who he was,” King preached, in slow sonorous tones. Such was the power of a revolution. The whole world had changed while Rip van Winkle slept. As King spun out the allegory for his time, “All too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses that the situation demands.” The great civil rights leader called on his people, all of his people, to remain awake, not to “sleep through a revolution.”29
The eighteenth-century revolutionaries who traveled across mountains, oceans, and national borders were wide awake. It was the others, their neighbors, who slept, at home. Transformed by the revolutions they witnessed and joined, itinerants who tried to return home did not find the familiar landmarks as Rip did. Their neighbors, some of whom slept—as, King reminded us, people do during a revolution—failed to recognize the travelers or to countenance their beliefs.
This revolutionary dislocation at the end of the eighteenth century was perhaps most dramatically symbolized by John Frederick, son of Naimbanna, the Temne king. Influenced by the black loyalists settling along his west African coast, Naimbanna sent his three sons away to be educated, one to France, one to England, and the other to Turkey to study with Muslim clerics. The twenty-three-year-old John Frederick traveled to England on the Lapwing with Anna Falconbridge in September 1791.
Onboard ship, Falconbridge taught the prince to read; in England, he was tutored by teachers chosen by John Thornton of the Sierra Leone Company and the abolitionist Granville Sharp. They guided him in journal writing so he could record his travels, both physical and moral, as he converted to Christianity and monogamy.30 John Frederick recorded his visit to hear debate in the House of Commons on the slave trade. He told of his self-imposed restraint when confronted by a slave trader. Although he had learned the principles of Christian forgiveness, he could not “forgive the man who takes away the character of the people of my country,” he noted in his journal.31 Escorted a few weeks later by his guides to the top of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, so close to the wrathful English God, he wrote, he was scared, but he hid his fear from his English companions. He was careful not to appear too much in awe of English institutions and practices. He did not want to reinforce popular English contempt for Africa and its customs. As for many of the other journal writers in this revolutionary era, his path abroad was a solitary one. John Frederick struggled to hold onto his African heritage while adopting European ways.
On news of his father’s death in 1793, John Frederick, now a devout Protestant, boarded a ship intent on bringing his newfound Christianity back to Africa, fulfilling the hopes of his English sponsors. En route from Europe to Africa, confined by storms to a cabin washed over by waves, the prince came down with a fever. As he lay delirious in his waterlogged cabin, his English shipmates concluded that John Frederick had fallen ill because he had been away too long from the African climate. His body had lost its ability to tolerate the tropical heat. John Frederick, the son of a Temne chief, had adapted to Europe too completely to return to Africa. Ever a foreigner in England, he had been rendered by travel an outsider in Sierra Leone, too. The man who was to be the next king of the Temne people expired the day after his return to Sierra Leone from England. The colony’s Anglican minister performed the funeral services, but John Frederick was buried according “to the manner of the country.”32
Only the rare itinerants could shift identities seamlessly as they moved from place to place. The articulate former slave Equiano was among the most agile, identifying himself in his narrative as both an African and an Englishman. Another writer of memoirs, Dutch Patriot Gerritt Paape, returned home in the company of the French after a decade abroad and secured appointment as a civil servant in the Dutch ministry of education. His use of satire against all manner of enemies and allies abroad had redounded to his favor. It could just as easily have gone the other way. When shifting politics finally stabilized, itinerants were among those least able to conform.
Cosmopolitanism on the Atlantic, “the world’s highway”
Nationalism marginalized many of these itinerants who had incorporated ideas and ideals from various nations and cultures. Even those revolutionary travelers who sought to “find a peaceful retirement [in America]from the tempest which agitates Europe,” Noah Webster charged, could not secure a place in a nation that was convinced that it “alone seems to be reserved by Heaven as the sequestered region.33 Still fewer travelers lasted out the decade in Paris. In France, revolutionary fraternity implied submission to the “grande nation.”34
Richard Price, the articulate British supporter of the American and Dutch Patriot revolutions, saw nationalism as a stage to be transcended. While acknowledging “the love of our country” as “certainly a noble passion,” he hoped that it would “give way to a more extensive interest,” promoting “universal benevolence.” In his future world, “every man would consider every other man as his brother, and all the animosity that now takes place among contending nations would be abolished.”35
Similarly, in September 1791, a month after the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue, a white abolitionist, Jacques-Pierre Brissot’s friend Claude Miliscent had compared exclusive nationalism with his own cosmopolitan ideal. In the newspaper that he edited in Saint-Domingue, Le Creuset, Miliscent complained that it was unnatural to “prefer one people over another.” For him, “The true philosopher was a cosmopolitan, the friend of all men from whatever country.” In the century of the Enlightenment, it should have been clear to his readers that “nationalism leads to egoism and to slavery.”36 Cosmopolitanism, in contrast, favored the universal liberty that crossed not only national borders but also racial divides. It embraced others.
This cosmopolitanism was very much a part of the worldview of many revolutionary itinerants at the end of the eighteenth century. Paine, campaigning for international recognition of the freedom of the seas in his 1792 pamphlet Letter to the Abbé Raynal, depicted the Atlantic as “the world’s highway.”37 Eight years later, from Paris, undeterred by all that had conspired to drown out his internationalism, Paine persisted in drawing up plans for an “unarmed Association of Nations” that would boycott the economies of aggressor nations.38 Other resilient cosmopolitans, too, many of them homeless between nations, continued through the more contentious 1790s to be inspired by their visions of a universal citizenship undivided by hostile nation-states.39 At the same time that Webster defined American exceptionalism, the Independent Gazetteer encouraged citizens of new republics to shed “partial prejudices respecting nations, names, and colors” and to “advance the increasing welfare of the human species of every class without exception, in all quarters of the globe.”40
In 1795, the philosopher Immanuel Kant from Konigsberg defined a federation of free, republican nations in his Project for a Perpetual Peace.41 Based on the right of hospitality, individuals as world citizens would nowhere be foreigners. As his inspiration, Kant cites the satirical inscription on a Dutch innkeeper’s sign, upon which a burial ground was painted. Besieged by the wars of revolutionaries on a mission, many of Kant’s contemporaries envisioned an era of peace based on universal right that transcended borders.
Throughout the cascading Atlantic revolution, cosmopolitanism coexisted, however uneasily, with emerging national citizenship in the pamphlets, papers, clubs, correspondence, and treatises with legs.42 In common with Peter Ochs from Basel, who had observed the Festival of the Federation with his sister in Strasbourg, these revolutionary travelers were convinced that “the revolutions of America, France, and Poland obviously belong in a chain of events that will regenerate the world.”43 This regeneration was noted by the writers of travel journals and memoirs and echoed in rumors. Its effects were read in novels. Correspondence documented the transformation.
Itinerancy encouraged eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism. It depended on translation and transplantation, on travel among national cultures rather than dwelling within a single one.44 Cosmopolitanism, like the itinerancy that nourished it, belonged not so much to the largest republics that endured into the nineteenth century as to the peoples of smaller states who knew changing governmental regimes. Theirs were ever-changing and unstable lives; in that upheaval lay the openness of itinerancy.
Writer Mary Wollstonecraft, traveling to Sweden to escape the violence of the French Terror directed at foreigners in 1794, condemned the settled ways of some of her English compatriots. “Travellers who require that every nation should resemble their native country, had better stay at home,” she suggested. The few travelers in French coaches, who instead could be merrily sustained by “a cold roast capon, 2 bottles claret, a little salt and a loaf of excellent bread,” were the only ones open to “inquiry and discussion.” Wollstonecraft cited that open flexibility as the most admirable “characteristic of the present century.”45 Thus nourished, she expected the cosmopolitan understanding of these travelers might someday “in a great measure destroy the factitious national characters which have been supposed permanent, though only rendered so by the permanency of ignorance.”46
Wollstonecraft’s words from the end of the revolutionary eighteenth century continue to reverberate. In this global era, they remind us that the roots of internationalism are as old as the nation-states. Struggles for human rights have connected the Atlantic world for more than two hundred years. Like the pamphlets, journals, memoirs, newspapers, clubs, rumors, novels, correspondence, and diplomatic proclamations that chronicle them, the struggles remind us of the impermanence of the borders that obstruct the travel of restless itinerants and their ideals.