The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. 10

These are the actual letters - unpolished, urgent, sometimes desperate - from the men who fought to keep the American Revolution alive. Volume 10 centers on the Marquis de Lafayette's diplomatic mission to France, where a twenty-something French aristocrat essentially served as an unpaid lobbyist, pressing his government to send more troops, more ships, more money to a cause that seemed perpetually on the edge of collapse. The correspondence reveals what official histories often smooth over: the army was starving and unpaid, the French were threatening to leave, and American diplomats were reduced to begging European powers for survival. Yet threaded through the formal diplomatic language is something remarkable - the conviction that a new kind of nation was worth fighting for, even from thousands of miles away. This is primary source history at its most raw, showing the founders not as marble statues but as exhausted, resourceful men trying to win a war with almost nothing. Anyone who wants to understand how America actually survived its first years, rather than how textbooks remember it, will find something indispensable here.