Revolutionaries without Borders: The Radical Atlantic World

Travelers, black and white, male and female took to the roads of America, Europe, and Africa and the sea lanes of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean in search of this liberty.  “For me the world was completely transformed today,” the Dutch writer Gerrit Paape reflected as he fled his home.  What could be more exciting that to join revolutions that toppled aristocrats and monarchs.   Traveling was slow and sometimes dangerous, but Paape and countless other revolutionary exiles were convinced, as Tom Paine reminded George Washington in October 1789, that “a share in two revolutions is living to some purpose.”   Paape found a share in four.            In the journals and correspondence written during long absences from home, revolutionary travelers professed their friendship for loved ones left behind as they decried the separation that their writing was meant to bridge. Revolutionary virtue was in the air and gender a favorite topic of correspondence.              Like their journeys, the tales told by revolutionary travelers were more often circuitous than direct.   They soared with expectations of individual rights to be won, but also documented the frustrations of unfulfilled promises. “How am I to paint the impetuous feelings of that immense, that exulting multitude?” the English poet, Helen Maria Williams asked the readers of her journal. “It was man reclaiming and establishing the most noble of his rights, and all it required was a simple sentiment of humanity to become in that moment a citizen of the world.”            These revolutionaries without borders gathered above printer’s shops in London, outside castles in Warsaw, in bookshops in Philadelphia, and in Parisian cafes.  Their dense network linked emigres from the Americas, Europe, and Africa to challenge political compromises and to dream of a cosmopolitan citizenry.  Their trans-national movement radicalized Atlantic revolutions as it transformed families.