Volume 55, Number 11 · June 26, 2008
Jefferson & Betrayal
By Edmund S. Morgan
Friends of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull: A Tale of Three Patriots, Two Revolutions, and a Tragic Betrayal of Freedom in the New Nation
by Gary B. Nash and Graham Russell Gao Hodges
Basic Books, 328 pp., $26.00
Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers
by Richard S. Newman
New York University Press, 359 pp., $34.95
Liberty had many friends in the eighteenth century. Here, in the book by Gary Nash and Graham Hodges, are three who took a stand for it in the American Revolution. Agrippa Hull of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a free black American, fought for it in the Continental Army as an orderly to Colonel Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the Polish military engineer who crossed the ocean to help the Americans against the British. Years later, after fighting losing battles for Polish freedom, Kosciuszko struck a blow for the liberty of America's enslaved blacks, in a pact with the third of the trio, the man whose words still speak for liberty in the Declaration he wrote in 1776.
Review, 3917 words
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