Reviewed by Seth Cotlar | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 66.1

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Reviewed by Seth Cotlar | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 66.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Friends of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, Tadeusz Koåciuszko, 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. New York: Basic Books, 2008. 336 pages. $26.00 (cloth).
Reviewed by Seth Cotlar, Willamette University
The subtitle identifies Friends of Liberty as a story about three men—Thomas Jefferson, Tadeusz Koåciuszko, and Agrippa Hull—but this is essentially another meditation on Jefferson and slavery, though a particularly eloquent and sophisticated one. By braiding Jefferson's life story together with the biographies of a free black veteran of the Revolutionary War and a European antislavery advocate, Gary B. Nash and Graham Russell Gao Hodges convey the complexities of Jefferson's lifelong entanglement with slavery and racial inequality in a manner that will be both accessible to general readers and compelling to specialists. Like Henry Wiencek's An Imperfect God, François Furstenberg's In the Name of the Father, and David Waldstreicher's Runaway America, this book demonstrates slavery's central place in the minds, pocketbooks, politics, and (in Jefferson's case) sexual lives of the founders and deftly intervenes in the world of founders' history, where slavery has too often been relegated to the margins.¹	1
At first glance, this seems like an unlikely trio of subjects for a collective biography, since the personal ties between them were fairly thin. Jefferson and Hull encountered each other once or twice and probably never exchanged words. Hull served as Koåciuszko's personal aide for five years during the Revolutionary War but interacted with him only once after that. Though Jefferson and Koåciuszko first met when they both frequented the salons of Paris in the mid-1780s, their relationship was primarily forged during an intense few months in Philadelphia in 1797–98 when Vice President Jefferson was a castoff from the John Adams administration and Koåciuszko was in town securing his war pension and recuperating from wounds recently suffered in Poland's unsuccessful war of national liberation. Koåciuszko fled the United States under the shadow of the Alien Act, and he and Jefferson never saw each other again.	2
Nash and Hodges get around the problem that these men spent a total of perhaps 6 years of their collective 243 in one another's presence by showing how the vexed relationship between slavery and the American Revolution tied these three very different lives together. Hull's story, masterfully reconstructed from a scanty archive, generates two of the book's key insights. First, his long postrevolutionary career as a debt-free yeoman farmer and respected member of his local community stands in eloquent counterpoint to Jefferson's well-known refusal to imagine black men and women as full citizens of his agrarian republic. Black veterans such as Hull may have been better Jeffersonians than Jefferson himself, yet stories like his have until now been largely ignored. Hull's second and more substantive role in this book is to demonstrate how the brave actions of black soldiers during the Revolutionary War strengthened Koåciuszko's and other sympathetic whites' belief in abolitionism and racial equality, encouraging them to wield their influence in pursuit of a more racially just future.	. . .

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