188 Chapter IX
intentioned philosophers who came to him with plans for governing the United
States. He introduced John Adams, Jefferson, Paine, and other Americans, as they
one by one followed him to Europe, to the varied and important acquaintance that
he had so carefully built up.
Jefferson followed Franklin as American Minister to France, and though less of
a sensation than Franklin, whose triumph could never be duplicated, he carried on
the same task of publicizing the United States. He was more of an intellectual than
Franklin, and less Gallic in temperament; the need of strictly war propaganda was
over, though French enthusiasm for America remained unbounded; so that much
of Jefferson’s work was in the correction of misconceptions. He published his Notes
on Virginia, which appeared in French a year before publication in English. He
worked carefully with J. N. Demeunier, who was preparing a series of articles on
America for the Encyclopédie méthodique, carefully going over Demeunier’s drafts
and discussing them with him, only to conclude in the end, when they were pub-
lished, that Demeunier still could not rid his mind of errors. When Jefferson’s
Italian friend from Virginia, Philip Mazzei, came to France, Jefferson encouraged
him to write a book on America. The result was Mazzei’s Recherches historiques et
politiques sur les Etais Unis, published at Paris in 1788, in which Mazzei tried to
disabuse the French public of the more farfetched ideas of Mably and Raynal. Jef-
ferson also in these years worked closely with Lafayette, who was conducting a
busy propaganda campaign of his own in favor of the United States. In 1789, at
the time of the fall of the Bastille, and shortly before going home, Jefferson as-
sisted Lafayette on the draft of a French Declaration of the Rights of Man.
During the war John Adams played a similar role in Holland, where he arrived
in 1780.^12 His task was more delicate than Franklin’s in France, in that the Stadt-
holder’s government was anti- American, it being the merchants and bankers of
Amsterdam who were willing, in opposition to the Prince of Orange, to lend aid to
America. Adams therefore fell in with the party of incipient revolution, which in-
cluded the nobleman, Van der Capellen van de Poll, the Mennonite pastor, Van
der Kemp, the professor at Leiden and editor of the internationally influential
Gazette de Leide, John Luzac, and the wealthy young cloth merchant, Peter Vreede,
a future Director of the Batavian Republic of 1798. Adams in fact wrote rather
huffily to Van der Capellen, soon after arriving, that the Dutch should reduce the
power of the Stadtholder in their republic, and do something to separate the
houses of Hanover and of Orange. It was more of a subversive remark than any
that those discreet democrats, Franklin and Jefferson, ever allowed themselves to
make in Bourbon France. Adams, whose main aim was to borrow money, found
that no one would lend to America except those willing to brave British and Or-
ange reprisals. In 1780 Capellen, Luzac, and a few others offered a few thousand
guilders of their private funds. In 1782, as the anti- Orange movement mounted
toward revolution, Adams’ Patriot friends got a majority in the Estates General to
12 For Adams’ role in Holland, and the Dutch reaction, see Adams’ own correspondence; H. L.
Fairchild, Francis Adrian van der Kemp (N.Y., 1903); and W. H. de Beaufort, ed., Brieven van en aan
Joan Derck van der Capellen van de Poll (Utrecht, 1879). Many of the letters to and from Capellen are
in English or French.