Europe and the American Revolution 185
Of the Poles who fought in America, Pulaski was killed there, but Kosciusko
survived to lead an attempted Polish revolution in 1794, in which national inde-
pendence, and even emancipation of the serfs, were unsuccessfully asserted against
the Russian and Prussian armies. British officers naturally brought home unfavor-
able impressions of the rebels, but it must be remembered that some pro- American
British officers, like Major Cartwright, the parliamentary reformer, had refused to
serve in America at all. The German auxiliaries to the British probably remained
largely neutral in spirit, but General von Riedesel, the commander of the Bruns-
wick contingent, was favorably enough impressed by the advantages of America to
recommend that his soldiers simply stay there at the end of the war, and a young
officer named Gneisenau saw a military value in patriotically inspired militia, and
tried thirty years later to introduce certain features of a democratic kind into the
Prussian army.
It would be interesting to know more of the experience of enlisted men who
fought in America—French, British, and German—since in this way we could
trace an American influence among the lower social classes of which the enlisted
ranks were then composed. An interesting attempt has recently been made in this
direction.^8 It has been shown that a high proportion of the 7,000 soldiers in Ro-
chambeau’s army came from those parts of France in which agrarian insurrection
and peasant revolution were most in evidence nine years later, in 1789. From this
geographical coincidence it is argued that French peasants, as soldiers in America,
saw how well off American farmers were, through ownership of their farms with-
out manorial or feudal restraints; and that therefore, back in their native villages,
they took a lead in stirring up revolt when the Revolution came in France. This
thesis would be important if it could be more fully proved, as evidence of an actual
link between common people of the two countries. It seems equally likely, how-
ever, that the geographical coincidence may be due to a third factor; that certain
regions, because of bad conditions in agriculture, might both send more than an
average number of men into the army, and revolt when revolt became possible. As
for the 30,000 German troops who went to America, some 12,000 remained to
settle there. We can only guess what was said by those who got back to Germany.
Neighbors very likely heard a great deal about America from German soldiers, as
well as from British and French. This may be one of the early firsthand sources of
the generally favorable view of America that long characterized the working peo-
ple of Europe.
A good deal of deliberate propaganda was also in the air. The British govern-
ment and its sympathizers scored various successes, particularly in Holland and
parts of Germany. The Dutch publicist, Isaac de Pinto, who drew part of his in-
come from British connections, stirred up a small international controversy by two
pamphlets of 1776 in which he justified the British policy toward the colonies.
Since the Orange family and its adherents were as warmly partisan to England as
their adversaries were to America, the American Revolution had a seriously divi-
sive effect in the Netherlands. In Germany the British view was most fully set
8 F. McDonald, “The Relation of French Peasant Veterans of the American Revolution to the Fall
of Feudalism in France,” in Agricultural History, X XV (1951), 151–61.