In 1779, a young American apprentice named Elkanah Watson set off from Boston for Paris to deliver funds and correspondence to Benjamin Franklin, who was serving the American Revolution as ambassador to France. Watson was no stranger to revolution. Since the beginning of the War for Independence, he had carried letters to George Washington, armed and sailed an old fishing schooner to rescue American patriots held captive in Boston by the British, and smuggled money, sewn into his quilted jacket, to provision the army in South Carolina. After his rendezvous with Franklin in Paris, Watson remained in Europe until 1784, long enough to witness the stirring of revolution across the continent. He learned that the Dutch revolutionaries, like the Americans a decade earlier, considered themselves God’s chosen people. Watson’s travels abroad put national pride in perspective. Unlike his compatriots who “only vegetated beneath the smoke of their native land,” he had discovered “new faces, new objects, strange customs and languages.”1 He returned to his home in America a believer in the promise of revolution on the other side of the Atlantic, as in the Americas.
In the decades after the American Revolution, freed slaves, poets, and philosophers took to the roads of America, Europe, and Africa and the sea lanes of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean in search of liberty. Some of these transatlantic travelers sought to spread the American Revolution, others to escape its consequences in the new republic that permitted slavery. Many of these revolutionary travelers were chased into exile by invading armies that crushed their rebellions. Dutch bankers, Polish generals, British poets, and American merchants all were drawn to Paris by the initial salvos of the French Revolution in 1789. Black Americans such as David George and Boston King traveled farther. After escaping their victorious masters, they migrated to Nova Scotia and then journeyed on to Sierra Leone in search of “the Priviledges of Freeman,” their quest supported by philanthropic abolitionists and enterprising colonialists.2 Revolutions made for unexpected allies. They made for more enemies.
One revolutionary traveler, the self-described human “book factory” Gerrit Paape, was forced, disguised under wig and hat, to flee his home in Amsterdam when Prussian armies crushed the Dutch Patriot Revolution in 1787. With just a sleep sack and two false passports, Paape crossed the border into the Austrian Netherlands, where another revolution for liberty was brewing. “For me, the world was completely transformed today,” he reflected en route.3 What could be more enticing, he asked his wife, than to join revolutions that promised to humble aristocrats and to dethrone emperors? Watson, Paape, and countless other revolutionary itinerants were convinced, as Thomas Paine reminded George Washington in October 1789, that “a share in two revolutions is living to some purpose.”4 Paape found a share in four.
“The universal cry of liberty”
Between 1776 and 1804, the possibility of revolution loomed large over four continents. Revolutions were erupting everywhere. “Over half of the globe, all men utter but one cry, they share but one desire,” a pamphleteer proclaimed from Brussels. He witnessed “humanity, united in action” all around him, people “rising up to reclaim a majestic and powerful liberty.”5 The call to liberty, he reported, could be heard wherever tyrants oppressed their subjects. It was not just in America and France that revolutions were overturning governments. Revolutions cascaded through all of the continents bordering the Atlantic. From the Americas to Geneva, the Netherlands, Ireland, the Belgian provinces, France, Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, Poland, Martinique, Sierra Leone, Italy, Hungary, and Haiti, revolutionaries challenged the privileges of aristocrats, clerics, and monarchs to claim their sovereignty. Sometimes their insurrections founded independent nation-states that endured. Those we remember. More often, revolutionary movements fizzled out and have been largely forgotten. Empires threatened by change also intervened to snuff out the flames of revolution before they spread, engulfing neighbors. They scattered revolutionaries. Defiant, determined refugees carried latent revolutions into exile in the form of pamphlets and other documents.
The founding fathers of the small set of revolutions we commemorate did not conceive of freedom in isolation. The Atlantic world had never been as tightly interconnected as at the end of the eighteenth century, when Tuscan merchant Filippo Mazzei, Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia neighbor, served as the Polish king’s liaison in Paris, or when Anna Falconbridge, the wife of a British abolitionist who founded Freetown in Sierra Leone, recounted her encounters among the Temne people. Fifty years before red flags above the barricades announced the revolutions of 1848 and almost a century before the Socialists of the Second International assembled in Paris to debate a common strategy, revolutionaries throughout the Atlantic world staked their claim to the rights of man. Two centuries before the Arab Spring, without social media or even an international postal system, revolutionaries shared ideals of liberty and equality across entire continents. Theirs, too, was an international movement connected by ideas that traveled.
No single all-encompassing vision united all of the eighteenth-century revolutionaries from four continents into a common party. They were not all democrats, nor even all supporters of republics. In a time of upheaval so turbulent that anything seemed possible, no simple dichotomies divided revolutionaries from counterrevolutionaries, or even radicals from conservatives. Modern divisions based on twentieth-century categories do not capture the full range of compelling plans for a new world to be built on the ruins of an old order.6 A Dutch pastor’s wife writing a novel in a thatched garden shed will have defined liberty differently than did a free man of color storming Grand-Rivière at the head of a hastily mustered militia. They never met at a formally convened congress and rarely signed the same petition. Some of the paths of traveling revolutionaries that did cross were no less unlikely. Ideas entangled, connecting seemingly contradictory movements.7
Most of these eighteenth-century revolutionaries would have understood what French lawyer-turned-philosopher Jacques-Pierre Brissot meant when he alluded to “le cri universel de la liberté”—the universal cry of liberty.8 More than contemporary historians of national revolutions, Brissot saw the continuity that linked one movement to another. In the French campaign to abolish slavery and overturn the race-based hierarchy of their Caribbean colony, Saint-Domingue, Brissot heard echoes of the revolutions he had personally witnessed in Geneva, America, and France. Another French philosopher, Nicolas de Condorcet, not so widely traveled himself, traced the progress of this universal cry across the Atlantic as it was relayed among “men whom the reading of books of philosophy had secretly converted to the love of liberty.” From the center of Europe to the periphery of the Atlantic world, one people after another “became enthusiastic over liberty abroad while they waited for the moment when they could recover their own.”9Theirs was an Atlantic Revolution broadly cast.
Revolutionaries from small states, more freely than the large, long-lived revolutions in America and France that bookmark the era, borrowed and incorporated rhetoric, strategy, and political theory from their revolutionary neighbors. In the shadows cast by their larger neighbors, these insurrections functioned as veritable political laboratories. At the crossroads of travel routes in Brussels, as in Warsaw, Amsterdam, and Le Cap, lively debates raged, unencumbered by an Alien and Sedition Act and not restrained by a guillotine. The author of a pamphlet, the Mercure Flandrico-Latino-Gallico-Belgique, in the newly independent United States of Belgium, explained, “What might pass elsewhere in any other nation as a ridiculous, mixed-up piece of colored cloth, with theBELGIANSconstitutes a useful and amusing variety.”10 Local historical traditions informed an idealistic cosmopolitanism in this now largely forgotten revolution at the center of Europe.
On the periphery of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, too, revolutionaries incorporated and blended together others’ ideas from near and far. A vibrant universalism stoked by disparate experiences often undergirded their ideal of liberty. Traditions of insurgency stoked the rumors that coursed inland from Caribbean harbors. Across the Atlantic, on the west coast of Africa, black loyalists who revolted in Sierra Leone for self-rule claimed a liberty they had witnessed widely in the Americas but never enjoyed. These settlers turned for aid to the indigenous Temne and Mori-Kanu peoples, who had been rebelling over the previous decade against the increasingly harsh terms of enslavement. Labeled thoroughgoing Jacobins by the British, the black loyalists were defeated on the western shore of Sierra Leone by Maroons, former slaves from Jamaica seeking liberty and property themselves.
All of these revolutionaries evoked the ideal of freedom, even if the call to liberty resonated with different accents across the Atlantic world as it evolved from 1776 to 1804. In its most general sense derived from the Enlightenment, in the words of French philosopher Denis Diderot, liberty meant the freedom to enjoy the “true inalienable natural rights” of humanity.11 More often, to revolutionaries and their critics, liberty meant freedom from oppression. In the midst of a transatlantic crossing from a France he found oppressive, the marquis de Lafayette explained his dramatic decision to leave for America in a letter to his wife. “Having to choose between the slavery that everyone believes he has the right to impose upon me, and liberty, which called me to glory, I departed.”12At the time, slavery meant just the boredom of aristocratic obligations to him, and liberty his reputation. At Washington’s side in America, he learned new meanings for both terms. It is in these variations that the sense of possibility in the midst of a rowdy revolutionary era can be discovered.
Utopian dramas written in the midst of the revolutions played out the shared and ever-changing ideals of liberty, equality, and peace for all to see. Tales of time travel reverberated across continents in the years before the revolutions. In one of the most influential utopias, the prolific French philosopher and author Louis Sebastien Mercier, writing in 1770, dispatched a time traveler into a fictional future. His traveler fell asleep after an argument with a philosopher about the old order and woke up, still in Paris, in the year 2440. Guided by a citizen of the new world, the time traveler encountered a towering statue of a black man, “the Avenger of the New World.” Around the pedestal of the monument lay twenty shattered scepters of deposed rulers, testimony to the revolution that the traveler’s guide said had transformed the world at the end of the eighteenth century, freeing the slaves and restoring natural rights to all citizens. In Mercier’s vivid portrait of a postrevolutionary future, set against the backdrop of “the climate, the soil, the water” that all remained the same, eighteenth-century readers glimpsed a world where “the laws have changed, and men with them.”13 Sheer reason had accomplished the utopian transformation.
FIGURE 1
Louis Sebastien Mercier, L’an deux mille quatre cent-quarante: rêve s’il en fût jamais, 1786. In the frontispiece to Mercier’s utopia, the eighteenth-century time traveler to the year 2440 gazes in wonder at the ordinances posted on the wall of an urban center. Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University, 40516.50.10
Taking up Mercier’s vision in 1776, Dutch novelist Betje Wolff identified the printing press as her instrument of change that would bring women and men together for revolution. In her version of the year 2440, citizens deliberated in assembly halls, surrounded not by sword-carrying aristocrats but by sailors sauntering on the piers of a prosperous republic at peace.14 Instead of listening to lengthy sermons on Sundays, presumably delivered by self-righteous pastors like Wolff’s own husband, families strolled through vibrant villages. Children studied this New World through their own microscopes and telescopes. Each house had its own library, while the state maintained a massive collection of specialized books on every possible subject. How sublime, Wolff’s time traveler exclaimed, to know that mankind had finally discovered universal laws, and that humanity had awakened from its centuries of slumber.
At the end of more than two decades of revolution, Gerrit Paape, who had fled the Netherlands in 1787, published De Bataafsche Republiek, zo als zij behoord te zijn, en zo als zij weezen kan: of revolutionaire droom in 1798 (The Batavian Republic: A Revolutionary Dream in 1798) to suggest that indeed anything was possible in revolution. The host to his postrevolutionary world reassured his amazed time traveler, “It took much less commotion than you might imagine.”15 Mercier described the process of writing utopias as “fictionner,” roughly translated as to make fiction, or less literally, to imagine virtuous characters who would populate societies transformed for the better.16 Philosopher-turned-revolutionary, the marquis de Condorcet explained, “If men could confidently predict what would follow from given principles,” then they would act on their dreams.17 And act they did. Liberty as depicted by the utopias motivated freed American slaves to seek shelter on the rocky coast of Nova Scotia, haunted governors of Caribbean colonies, informed English novelists, and was proclaimed by revolutionary armies marching down the Italian peninsula.
On the eve of his death, former American president and seasoned European traveler John Adams reflected in a letter addressed to his sometime rival and frequent Parisian dinner guest Thomas Jefferson on the revolutions that had completely transformed the world during their lifetime. The real “revolution was in the minds of the people,” not on the battlefields of America and Europe.18 At the end of all of these debates and discussions, some conducted within the confines of the nation-state, but others across borders, people on both sides of the Atlantic understood the world and their place in it totally differently.
“A world in motion”
Today, no one would dispute the obvious fact that ideas travel, revolutionary ideas above all. Protesters in a city park in Istanbul proclaim themselves global citizens, those in Rio de Janeiro declare: “We are the social network.” A banner quotes Bertolt Brecht, “Nothing should seem impossible to change.” The interconnections of a global society are inescapable. So why assume that founding fathers building new nations out of old worlds lived in isolation through a quarter of a century when revolution loomed, ever present on the horizon?
How, though, did revolutions travel in the eighteenth century before computers or even typewriters, and without planes or even railways? Documents left behind by travelers—evangelical abolitionists, cosmopolitan sons of Temne chiefs, novelists espousing companionate marriage, and politician-defying generals—provide an answer. Their pamphlets, letters, novels, and journals reveal a contentious interconnected struggle for universal human rights that spanned the Atlantic and stretched across continents at the end of the eighteenth century. From small city-states located in the heart of Europe to islands off the coast of West Africa, revolutionaries shared their dreams of a new world, filling in the arc of the Atlantic Revolution between the American and the French revolutions.
Then, as now, revolutionaries and their ideas ignored the national borders that figure so prominently on maps and in history books. From Boston to Le Havre, from Paris to Geneva, from Stockholm to Granville Town in Sierra Leone, from Pisa to Warsaw, and from Malembo to Port au Prince, for twenty-five years, men and women, black and white, charted journeys following the revolutionary currents that felled monarchs and drowned the privileged. Amid shifting empires, in pursuit of unprecedented opportunities, revolutionaries set out on journeys, crossing mountains and seas.19 Adventurers pursued economic or political ends, most often both. Exiles were chased from home by the armies that crushed their incipient insurrections. Many travelers relied on preexistingnetworks established by family and commercial connections. Others explored what loomed for them as uncharted territories, bringing their hopes and expectations as luggage with them. Theirs was “a world in motion” not contained within the boundaries of nation-states or empires.20
In the second half of the eighteenth century, for the first time in world history, travel was no longer the exclusive domain of the wealthy and titled for whom the Grand Tour completed their claim to culture. It was now open to men and women of at least modest means, even if it was sometimes dangerous and often uncomfortable. That made for disconcerting encounters, especially for Europeans visiting the reportedly egalitarian American middle Atlantic. French diplomats in the years immediately following the American Revolution were unnerved to find themselves sharing tavern benches with stable hands who had just tended to their horses. Journeying in the other direction in the years before the French Revolution, Elkanah Watson was alarmed by the beggars and ruffians who accosted travelers on the highways of rural France. They almost all shared what the freed slave who explored the North Pole, Equiano, called a “roving disposition.”21
Something set them apart from their friends and family who stayed at home. Travelers saw the world differently, with new eyes as a result of their experiences. Lying awake in their hammocks slung across the deck of the Sensible, a young John Quincy Adams and François, marquis de Barbé-Marbois, secretary to the French legation in Philadelphia and future intendant of Saint-Domingue, replayed the keelhauling of a slave on a passing corsair. In her Paris salon, English poet Helen Maria Williams discussed the Festival of the Federation with French Jacobin Maximilien Robespierre, American poet Joel Barlow, German chronicler Georg Forster, Venezuelan revolutionary General Francisco Miranda, and Polish general Thaddeus Kościuszko. Williams explained: “It required but the common feelings of humanity to become in that moment a citizen of the world.”22
These itinerant revolutionaries, like the Enlightenment philosophers of the “Republic of Letters,” aspired to be “strangers nowhere in the world,” to quote the philosopher Denis Diderot.23 They did not deny their attachment to a particular birthplace. Instead, their multiple and ever-shifting allegiances transcended the boundaries of the nation-state. Librarian and chronicler Georg Förster, accused of treason in Prussia, acknowledged that although born in Danzig, he left the then-Polish city before it became Prussian to travel around the world. “Wherever I was, I strove to be a good citizen,” he wrote. “I am a good Prussian, in the same way I was a good Turk, Russian, Chinese, and Moroccan.”24 Essential to this cosmopolitanism was a refusal to exclude others.25
Many of these revolutionary travelers saw themselves as part of a revolutionary movement cascading from one place to another and leading toward the creation of a world at peace.26 They recognized that the Americans, French, and Haitians could not stand alone as revolutionary peoples in their interdependent world still dominated by empires in conflict.
Of course, not all itinerants at the end of the eighteenth century were cosmopolitan revolutionaries, nor did experience abroad always radicalize revolutionaries. A case in point is William Cobbett, the British editor of the widely read American newspaperPorcupine’s Gazette. Cobbett had sought discharge from the British army after service in Nova Scotia. He fled England after lodging accusations of military corruption against his superiors, arrived in France to witness the massacre of the Swiss Guard at the Tuileries in August 1792, and sailed to America later that year as a refugee in search of liberty. He returned to England in 1800 a loyal patriot and a conservative. He wanted nothing more to do with the “liberty, of which, out of its infinite variety of sorts, yours unfortunately happens to be precisely that sort which I do not like,” he wrote upon departure from America.27 The liberty “tainted with democracy” that he had witnessed in revolution alarmed him because it threatened to “flatter and inflame the lower orders of the people.”28
Alternative Political Sphere
French Jacobin Jean-Paul Marat, a more avid democrat when he returned in 1776 from London than when he left Paris several years earlier, celebrated the dissemination of ideals beyond the political elite, reaching down to the common people. If the tradesmen and artisans “know their rights, they owe this advantage to Philosophy.” Marat believed that widely circulated pamphlets and newspapers proclaiming liberty and equality “had removed the blindfold of error imposed by despotism.”29 This alternative political sphere inhabited by the so-called popular classes was a rowdy world full of revolutionary possibilities.30 Some schemes advanced by political outsiders appear today as far-fetched as Don Quixote tilting at windmills or as futile as Sisyphus rolling his rock up the hill. Others would be adopted decades later as eminently sensible.
Returning from his European travels, Yale graduate Abraham Bishop demanded to know why his fellow Americans would not intervene in Saint-Domingue in 1791 to win “the rights of black men” and were instead among “the first to assist in riveting their chains.”31 The English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, dining with delegates from Saint-Domingue at the marquis de Lafayette’s hotel in Paris, reminded his French hosts that their revolutionary rhetoric would ring hollow if they failed to extend the rights of man to citizens of color in their colonies. Bishop and Clarkson were just two of the travelers who challenged more settled revolutionary leaders to confront questions that might more conveniently have been buried in expedient compromises.
Itinerants viewed “objects comparatively with a foreign eye,” in Elkanah Watson’s terms.32 In their confrontations in shifting spaces between new societies, they were exposed to ideas and customs previously foreign to them. As a result, traveling revolutionaries often grasped contradictions inherent in the implementation of the ideals of liberty and equality, both abroad where they alighted and at home when they returned. Their compatriots who stayed at home assumed the choices made by their governments to be natural. They did not see the alternatives. Traveling revolutionaries, exposed to other possibilities, returned home to challenge the perpetuation of slavery in an era of freedom, to probe the limitations of private domesticity in a society where virtue was publicly defined, and to question the national and racial limitations on citizenship imposed by self-proclaimed universal republics.
Grudging though the welcome extended to newcomers was, politics was no longer the exclusive province of the privileged. In March 1793, “the new citizens of Guadeloupe” blamed the “odious faction, enemy of the French Revolution, that misled us about the extent of our rights” as they helped the newly arrived French troops plant trees of liberty.33 The mix of access to travel and the opening of an alternative political sphere rendered itinerancy revolutionary. Few common travelers would have ventured so far from home earlier in the eighteenth century, nor would they have expected any say within parliaments or the counsel of monarchs. By the age of revolutions, they could make their voices heard, sometimes more readily abroad than at home. They dropped into Jacobin clubs, wrote their own pamphlets and translated others for the press, and sent letters to be read aloud to assembled friends and family. Their ideals reverberated throughout the Atlantic basin.
Revolutions without Borders not only recovers the idealism of these eighteenth-century revolutionaries, but also probes the uncertainty and disappointments they experienced in the search for liberty. Their shortcomings, contradictions, and inconsistencies not only were constituent of the transnational revolutions that upended the Atlantic world at the end of the eighteenth century, they endure as testimony to the daring of its vision. This is a history of the variety of visions from an era when anything seemed possible. Ignored by historians focusing on the big two or three national revolutionaries, America, France, and Haiti, ideals and schemes spun at the crossroads or on the periphery of the Atlantic Revolution also changed our world, even if they did not establish a nation-state that has endured to the present.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but historians do. Having privileged successful revolutions, we look for our founding fathers’ plans for democracies everywhere in every subsequent upheaval, from Romania to Egypt. We are then inevitably frustrated. Without an understanding of the rich variety of revolutionary possibility in the past, we are condemned to judge the present through the blinders of a limited set of national narratives. Searching for new exceptional national revolutions, we neglect the men, women, and children of the Arab Spring who struggled, but who will not be cast as the heroes of a new democracy. Revolutions without Borders reminds us that revolutions travel easily across national borders and that many roads have led in different directions, not straight to the present.
At the end of the eighteenth century, only the rare revolutionary defining citizenship could imagine extending the vote to women, but some philosophers such as the marquis de Condorcet did.34 A few more lent their voices to the campaign for the abolition of slavery. Although most of the revolutionaries demanding their rights on both sides of the Atlantic advocated the gradual emancipation of those in chains, others owned slaves themselves. Many revolutionaries in central and eastern Europe settled for compromises with the nobility; the Polish hero of the American revolutionary war, Thaddeus Kościuszko, for example, preserved serfdom in revolutionary Poland. Some revolutionaries looked to kings to restore rights, while others brazenly denounced monarchy. Some looked to Christianity for salvation, while others denounced all religious practice as fanaticism.
Absent in Revolutions without Borders are the deeds and writings of most of the now famous but stationary figures from the American and French revolutions. Many of the revolutionaries who are included, conversely, could not make a convincing claim for their lasting fame. Lots of them were previously disenfranchised, newcomers venturing into politics for the first time. Their ideas often appear to us to be full of contradictions, neither traditional nor progressive. From out-of-the-way places or uprooted in the midst of their struggles, these travelers defined paths not always taken into the present. Overturning an old world is inevitably messy. That their ideas for moving forward were not always echoed in subsequent eras, however, made them no less significant in their own time.
Documents with Legs
Revolution traveled at the end of the eighteenth century because pamphlets and newspapers, novels and letters, and even rumors had legs. Revolutionaries, from founding fathers to insurgents, invested the printed word with unprecedented powers of persuasion; written documents carried weight. They were also portable. Some could be carried in a pocket, others posted on a wall or read in a coffee shop. Long after the revolutions have passed, they survive as evidence of public discussions of revolutionary liberty that crossed borders. They convey the magic of a past that would otherwise be unknowable. These documents form the foundation of Revolutions without Borders.
A few of the revolutionaries whose posted letters and widely disseminated pamphlets are included in this book stayed in one place themselves. Nancy Shippen, the duchesse de Rochefoucauld, the marquis de Condorcet, and Joan Derk van der Capellen served as conduits, often literally translating the work they received from others abroad, sometimes trying to cope with conflicting customs imposed by itinerants, and other times purposefully speeding along the transfer of ideas to new places. Translation was an important skill, as few men and fewer women had mastered all of the languages spoken around the Atlantic basin. Most of these “static” revolutionaries operated outside of formal institutions, and all helped transplant transnational ideas.
In following trails left by the itinerants ranging over four continents, Revolutions without Borders brings to the fore the archival work of the historian. Besides telling a good story, it demonstrates how historians use sources. On exhibit in the following chapters are pamphlets that were originally written in Dutch and collected for John Adams and newspapers translated from Polish for Jacobins in Paris. Many of the documents on which this history is based have never been published. The remnants of many of the protests had been relegated to the realm of rumors, now to be read only between the lines of official correspondence.
In each of the nine chapters in Revolutions without Borders, I pursue a different set of documents, most generated in the alternative political sphere beyond the official institutions of government. Pamphlets are the subject of the first chapter, memoirs and narratives of the second and third, newspapers and clubs of the fourth, rumors of the fifth, novels of the sixth, family correspondence of the seventh, and diplomatic correspondence of the eighth chapter. The chapters make transparent the use of sources for asking questions and deploying evidence as it was understood in the eighteenth century. In the second and third chapters I ask what distinguishes the perspective of journals written on the spot from narratives compiled for publication years later. In the fifth chapter I show how historians read rumors “against the grain,” in the seventh chapter how seemingly sentimental letters can be read “between the lines.”35 How, I ask, do historians read novels, the subject of the sixth chapter? Do they reflect or recast families during revolutions? Can it be both simultaneously?
Although not a chronological survey of all of the revolutions constituent of the Atlantic Revolution, the narrative of Revolutions without Borders moves forward chronologically in its exploration of geographically dispersed revolutions, small and short-lived as well as large. The first chapter begins with the American Revolution in 1776 and the last chapter ends with the Haitian Revolution in 1804. The pamphlets of the first chapter are American, Genevan, Dutch, and Belgian; the rumors of the fifth chapter from the Caribbean; and finally the diplomatic correspondence of the eighth chapter is French, German, Italian, Irish, and Haitian. The history begins in 1776 with the American Revolution, and ends in 1804 with Haitian independence. That is not to suggest the insignificance of debates leading up to the American War for Independence. Ideas have roots and revolutionaries are influenced by their forebears. Nor does it mark an end to revolutions in the Atlantic world. The leaders of juntas and movements for independence in the two decades after 1804 traced connections back to earlier revolutionary decades. A second revolutionary period began in 1808 and extended, once again, on both sides of the Atlantic to 1848.36
A few of the sources for Revolutions without Borders are as familiar as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense or Abigail Adams’s letters to her husband, John. Other revolutionary remnants have collected dust in ancestors’ attics or in municipal archives.37 Finding them has been its own story. For example, in contrast to her well-known father’s letters, collected in official depositories including the Library of Congress, and her husband’s diplomatic correspondence, carefully catalogued in the archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, América Francès de Crèvecoeur Otto had all but disappeared from the historical record, other than the certificates of her birth and her marriage. The family of the Boston merchant who rescued her as a child from snow drifts in upstate New York apparently once possessed letters sent to them from Paris and Vienna by América Francès, the new wife of Louis Otto. They had gone missing.38 Queries sent to local archives in New England retrieved several letters in Connecticut referring to her convalescence from a mysterious accident or illness, after the rescue and before her marriage.
In contrast to the voluminous and partially published correspondence from Louis Otto’s earlier but unsuccessful courtship of Nancy Shippen, no letters between América Francès and Louis Otto, who was often dispatched on diplomatic missions, were to be found in any of the obvious repositories on either side of the Atlantic. The only trace led to a great-great-nephew who was reported to have showed a set of letters to the editor of Otto’s diplomatic correspondence. They then disappeared without a trace. Finally, at the Library of Congress, an incredibly helpful librarian adopted my cause as her own and found a note in her files suggesting that Crèvecoeur family papers had been put up for sale in 1976, but at a price too high for archives on either side of the Atlantic, so they were sold off at private auction. Eventually, an Internet search revealed that the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs had recently acquired a few letters.
Once located, these letters between América Francès de Crèvecoeur Otto and Louis Otto testify to the expectations and disillusionment in what they imagined as a revolution without borders. In their world, as in those that followed, revolutions of all sizes had varied, unpredicted outcomes. The documents that crossed borders are evidence of the Atlantic Revolution, dead ends, unrealized dreams of liberty, and forays into a new world where “the laws have changed, and men [and women] with them.”
Some of the revolutionary travelers venturing out into this rowdy world are well known. None is as venerated as that irascible son of an English corset maker who called on Americans to use their common sense. Thomas Paine’s best-selling pamphlet guaranteed his place in American history. The other subjects of Revolutions without Borders were adventurers, too, who fortunately left us documents that tell those stories well.