*In my used copy of Allen French’s The First Year of the American Revolution, I found a letter the author had sent in 1938 to a reader who took issue with him for beginning with the day of Lexington and Concord. French explained: “I committed myself, unconsciously but quite sincerely, to the theory that the active Revolution began when the fighting began,—fighting, that is, that did not stop…. In fact, however, I suppose the Revolution began with the Stamp Act opposition—unless, of course, we wish to begin with John Winthrop.”

*For a note on currency values, see p. 23 below.

* Current value of old currency is an impossible calculation, because there is no “right” answer. There are many legitimate measures—inflation statistics, relative buying power, the historic price of gold, etc. One common estimate is that the British pound of 1770 was worth about 24 livres, and according to another calculation £ 5,000 in 1770 would have been worth approximately £ 444,000 at the end of 2005. This would suggest that one eighteenth-century livre would be worth roughly seven twenty-first-century U. S. dollars. Readers wishing more information can do their own calculations at eh.net and measuringworth.com.

* A paternal descendant in the royal family, directly related to the king, as distinguished from a conferred title.

* In fact, at least one British minister seemed not too worried about it. In a letter to his friend MP William Strachan on May 10, David Hume wrote that he had just run into the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich, who was on a trout-fishing trip with a few fellow lords and a matching number of ladies of the evening. “Sandwich…had passed five or six days there and intended to pass all this week and the next in the same place,” Hume wrote with deep disdain. He was just putting the final changes to a new edition of his six-volume History of England, which may explain his view of this spectacle as one of historic depravity: “I do not remember in all my little or great knowledge of history…such another instance…that the first lord of the admiralty…should, at a time when the fate of the British Empire is in dependence, and in dependence on him, find so much leisure, tranquility, presence of mind, and magnanimity…. What a ornament would it be in a future history to open the glorious events of the ensuing year with the narrative of so singular an incident.”

* Phrase in brackets was later stricken out but is in the letter Adrienne received.

* The first Thanksgiving Day celebrated by all the colonies was in October of the previous year. The last Thursday in November was the date chosen by Abraham Lincoln in 1863.

* A court-martial convicted Lee of disobeying orders in not attacking, of “misbehavior before the enemy” by leading a chaotic retreat, and of “disrespect to the Commander-in-chief” in letters he sent after the event. The sentence was that he be suspended from the army for one year. Virtually all who studied the case later concluded that the sentence was unjust: He had in fact launched an attack, and the retreat left the American army in a better position from which to defend itself. He was clearly guilty of “disrespect” for Washington, however; and when he was similarly obnoxious in a letter to Congress, he was dismissed outright. He spent his last three years spewing vituperation about Washington, and when he died in 1782, of lung disease, he requested burial away from any churchyard or other cemetery—“I have kept so much bad company while living that I do not choose to continue it when dead.” His request unheeded, he was buried at Christ Church in Philadelphia.

* Byron’s fleet did appear off Newport ten days later, only a day after Sullivan, with Lafayette’s help, had taken his force back to the mainland. Had they waited twenty-four hours, they could have been destroyed.

*Burdened with debts he could not repay and by unresolved suspicions of self-dealing after months of inconclusive congressional hearings, Deane moved to Britain. Unable to find work there, he settled ever deeper into obscurity and privation. His brother told him in 1788 that it was safe for him to come home to Connecticut, because “your creditors…have already taken all the property you have in this country; they can take no more.” Deane wrote to Washington in the summer of 1789 that he was “reduced to the extremes of poverty,” but he received no reply. He died penniless in September of that year onboard the ship that was to take him home to America. One of his last friends was the spy Edward Bancroft, who was a chemist of some ability and a specialist in poisons. The distinguished historian Julian Boyd theorized that Bancroft started the rumor that Deane had committed suicide in order to cover up the fact that he had been poisoned, and Boyd suggested that Bancroft had a plausible motive for murder: Deane had vowed to make a final effort to clear his name, and a careful examination of his papers might have incriminated Bancroft. The likelihood, however, is that Deane died of natural causes from one or a mix of the several illnesses that had been afflicting him for years. Bancroft’s work as a double agent remained secret until the British government released its file on him in 1891. Having won the French and British patents to import yellow-oak bark, Bancroft died a rich man.

* Marie-Antoinette was not permitted to receive Lafayette officially for the same reason, but it was arranged that her once laughable dancing partner, now hailed as the “hero of two worlds,” would be at a certain spot in the palace gardens as she passed by in her carriage so that they could meet “accidentally.”

* Washington’s General Orders for August 29,1780, declared: “As black and red feathers have been furnished the Division of Light Infantry to distinguish it from the rest of the Army they are not to be worn by any officers or soldiers but those who belong to it.”

* Gates left the battle in the hands of his second in command, Lafayette’s friend the Baron de Kalb, who led the diehards with him past the point of valor. His head slashed by a saber, he was dressed with a handkerchief and fought on, taking three musket balls and eight bayonet wounds before he fell. His aide the chevalier Dubuysson, another veteran of La Victoire, was with him to the end. Sheltering him from further bayonet and saber blows while screaming that he was a general, Dubuysson sustained injuries to his arms and hands but survived. Kalb was carried from the field by British troops and after his death three days later was buried by his last enemies with full honors. Congress passed a resolution for a memorial, but there was no money for it, and the promise was filed away, along with many others. Lafayette himself finally laid the cornerstone of a monument to Kalb in Camden, South Carolina, during his last visit to America, in 1825.

* Although some biographers have passed along the more emotionally satisfying story that Phillips was killed by a cannon ball at the Battle of Yorktown, in fact he died of typhus a month after joining Arnold in Virginia.

* Historians differ on the extent to which Necker’s presentation was deceptive. Some defend Necker as only trying to show that the king’s budget balanced in normal times, specifically excluding wartime, and others believe that Necker’s approach was purposefully evasive. The balance of the evidence points to an intentional ambiguity. In his biography of Louis XVI, for example, John Hardman points to a memorandum from the keeper of the royal treasury to Necker’s successor which demonstrated a deficit even in the ordinary account of 15 million livres rather than a surplus of 10, and pointed out that if the king wanted to repay his debt according to its terms (another function of the ordinary account), the deficit would be 52 million livres. This memo did not reach the king until Necker had resigned some time after the next round of financing for the American war.

* Perhaps this was Cooper’s genuine opinion, but we cannot be sure. The Reverend Cooper had been paid for years to promote the interests of France in America by none other than Charles Gravier de Vergennes, who knew very well that by supporting America’s independence France had contributed to a cause whose spread could represent a threat to monarchy itself.

*To check on things the emperor Joseph himself visited and reported to his brother Leopold, “This is the secret: in bed, he has good hard erections; he injects his organ, remains there motionless for two minutes or so, then withdraws, still stiff, without discharging, and drops off to sleep. It makes no sense…he needs to be beaten like an ass to get him to discharge his spunk. With all this, my sister has little appetite for the whole business, and together they make a hopelessly clumsy pair.”

*The reference is to the fourth chapter of Micah:” And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the Lord of hosts hath spoken it.”

*He did not mention it, but before he left, Mesmer gave him some not-exactly-revolutionary advice for avoiding seasickness through polarity: Hug the mast.

*The Six Nations were also known as the Iroquois Confederacy (though some of them considered the term “Iroquois” derogatory) and comprised the Mohawks, Oneida, Onandaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora tribes.

*It took three more weeks to arrive at a settlement that was soon broken.

*Beaumarchais had nothing to do with Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro beyond providing the inspiration and story line for it. He did not even hear it until 1793, by which time he was hard of hearing and using an ear trumpet, which helps to explain why he said he did not much like the music. He was long dead by the time Rossini wrote his Barber of Seville.

*New Hampshire was actually the ninth and deciding state to ratify, but Washington did not know that for three days.

*“Sir,…I was honored with the commands of the Senate to wait upon your Excellency with the information of your being elected to the office of President of the United States of America.…I have now, sir, to inform you that the proofs you have given of your patriotism and of your readiness to sacrifice domestic separation and private enjoyments to preserve the liberty and promote the happiness of your country did not permit the two Houses to harbour a doubt of your undertaking this great, this important office to which you are called not only by the unanimous vote of the electors, but by the voice of America. I have it therefore in command to accompany you to New York….”

*There has always been speculation that she may have been part of the Orléanists’ plotting, and that her appearance that night was no accident, but the truth of the matter is unknown.

*Originally the game of tennis was played without raquets, thus “game of palm.”

*The gardes-françaises were an elite infantry regiment attached to the king, one of only two, the other being his gardes-suisses. The membership of the gardes-françaises had over the years become heavily Parisian, which helps to explain their sympathy with the Revolution. Many if not most defected in the summer of 1789, and the regiment was officially disbanded in September.

*In fairness to professionals of a later date, the practice of journalism then seems to have been appreciated by its readers more for polemics than facts, and newspapers were proud of their revolutionary-advocate role. As Camille Desmoulins put it, “Today, journalists exercise a public function; they denounce, decree, judge, absolve, or condemn.”

*The compromise appeased Southern opposition by placing the new national capital on the Potomac. Middle state opposition to that was overcome by moving the temporary capital from New York to Philadelphia. Proponents of that move were betting that, given the time and effort it would take to build a new capital from land that was nothing but undeveloped swamp, it would never leave.

*Though the word “Jacobin” eventually became virtually a synonym for “radical,” until this time the Jacobin Club was warmly monarchist and solidly bourgeois, its membership restricted by design. Lafayette was officially a member of the Jacobins until 1791, although he rarely attended meetings after 1789, when his moderate position for the suspensive veto and other issues had alienated him from the leadership triumverate of Duport, Barnave, and Lameth. With some like-minded colleagues—Bailly, La Rochefoucauld, Mirabeau, Sieyès, Brissot, Talleyrand, and Condorcet—Lafayette founded the Society of 1789, which at least at first was more of a social than a political club, featuring very high dues and lavish banquets and presenting no threat or implied opposition to the Jacobins, just a more congenial place to go.

*In an administrative reform of Paris in the spring of 1790, Paris’s sixty districts were replaced by forty-eight sections, and the Cordeliers district disappeared. By then, however, it had formed its own political club called the Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man, which was and continued to be called the Cordeliers Club. Danton belonged to the Jacobins but was best known as the leader of the Cordeliers, who were the more populist and radical group. In contrast to the Jacobins, which charged 24 livres annual dues at this time, the Cordeliers Club charged only 1 livre, and it was specifically committed to including those who could not afford to join or were otherwise excluded from the Jacobins, including day laborers and women. There were many other so-called popular societies as well, but the Cordeliers was the largest and among the most radical of them.

*The Convention was given its name because it was to draw up a new constitution in the aftermath of the king’s dethronement, which made the 1791 Constitution obsolete. The elections were by universal suffrage of all males age twenty-one or older. The Convention, which lasted through three years of war, was both a legislative and a constituent body. It also drew the executive power to itself and temporary war powers as well, a “confusion of powers” that helped to make possible the Convention’s most egregious domestic initiative, which was the Reign of Terror.

*What separated the Brissotins from the Montagnards is an especially tricky aspect of French revolutionary history. Roughly speaking, some historians see it as a conflict between the bourgeois and the egalitarian sans-culottes, others as an intraclass struggle over power and self-interest. Neither view seems to be wholly satisfactory, but close study tends to dissolve certainty in a confusion of variables; except for the hard core, it is difficult even to know who was a Brissotin and who a Montagnard in the Convention. In general, it can be said that the Brissotins were perceived by the Mountain as moderate and eventually counterrevolutionary, and the Brissotins, or at least some of them, came to view the Mountain as dangerously anarchiste.

*Citizen Genêt never returned to France. Justifiably fearful for his life at the hands of the Jacobin regime, he sought asylum in America, which was granted. Having already married Governor George Clinton’s daughter Cornelia, he took up the life of a gentleman farmer in an estate on the Hudson River, where they raised six children and where he died in July 1834, a few months after Lafayette, at the age of seventy-one. All he wanted, he wrote Cornelia in 1794, was “to settle in a country where a man who obeyed the law had nothing to fear.”

*So called for the date on the revolutionary calendar when the Convention turned against Robespierre, which was 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794).

*The government of the Executive Directory continued the French revolutionary wars in Europe in part as a way of maintaining itself in power, which eventually caused millions of casualties. The Directory’s war policy also prepared the way for its successful General Bonaparte, who replaced the Directory and declared the Consulate in the coup of 18 Brumaire (Nov. 9, 1799).

*One of the exceptions was his co-Mesmerist Nicolas Bergasse. After the king’s flight to Varennes, he became an adviser to Louis XVI. His advice was to crack down hard: The king should, among other things, refuse to sign the Constitution. Later the same year Bergasse married into the old nobility, consummating his acceptance by the social hierarchy he had once so despised. After the king’s dethronement, when his correspondence with Louis XVI was discovered, he tried to flee France. Captured and denounced, he was kept in prison for more than two years until his case was heard before the post-Robespierre revolutionary tribunal, which dismissed the charges against him. He went on to become an ardent supporter of the Bourbon Restoration and the most reactionary policies of both Louis XVIII and Charles X. After the Revolution of 1830, fearing for his safety because he had spoken out so forcefully against popular sovereignty, he withdrew from public life.

*Demonstrations over the XYZ Affair later inspired a more eloquent version of the response: “Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute!”

*Bushrod Washington sold fifty slaves despite his uncle’s deathbed injunction. The rest were freed early, a year after Washington died, except for one whom Martha kept; and when she died on May 22, 1802, she left “my mulatto man Elish” to her grandson George Washington Parke Custis. Small wonder Washington was concerned that his will would not be faithfully executed.

*The whole sorry tale was summarized in February 1824 in a 124-page report on the matter from a Congressional Select Committee of the 18th Congress; and even so the debt was not dealt with until the 20th Congress, which finally passed H. R.252 on April 1,1828: “Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States in Congress assembled, that the sum of one million livres, and the interest thereon, which was charged to the account of Caron de Beaumarchais, in the settlement of his accounts at the Treasury, in eighteen hundred and five, be restored to his credit: and that the sum be paid to his heirs, out of any money in the Treasury, not otherwise appropriated.”

†Provence ruled as Louis XVIII because he had declared from his exile in Westphalia in 1793, when Louis XVI was executed, that Louis’s eldest son should now be recognized as King Louis XVII. On taking the throne, Provence insisted on the title of Louis XVIII in recognition of the uninterrupted Bourbon monarchy. In the meantime, the boy had died of tuberculosis. Rumors persisted for years that he was not actually dead but had been spirited out of France by royalist sympathizers, giving rise to the legend of the “Lost Dauphin.” In the years and decades that followed, many candidates came or were brought forward across Europe, some of whom continue to have adherents to this day. Some of the best known nominees include the naturalist John James Audubon; a Native American missionary to the Mohawks named Eleazer Williams; and Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, a German clockmaker.

*It is no longer there.

†1773–1850; reigned 1830–48.

*The equivalent of more than $4 million in 2007.

*Three monarchs, two emperors, five republics.