Lafayette came to us first. This is the ledger of the Americans who repaid him.

On July 4, 1917, an American colonel stood at Lafayette’s grave in Paris — a grave covered in soil carried back from Bunker Hill — and said the sentence that gave this book its method: “Lafayette, we are here.” It was not a boast. It was bookkeeping: a debt acknowledged in public, with a hundred and forty years of interest accrued.

Repaying Lafayette is the full accounting. Fifty times between 1775 and this year, private American citizens have crossed oceans — without orders, often against their government’s explicit advice — to fight in other people’s wars for other people’s freedom. They sailed for Greece with Byron’s poetry in their sea chests. They died at the Alamo within months of stepping off boats from New Orleans. They flew for France before their country would come, for Poland when their country would not. Three thousand went early to Spain to fight fascism and were investigated for decades as “premature.” They built Israel’s air force and were prosecuted at home for it. They filled a brigade for Kosovo from the Bronx, and they are dying this year in the trenches of the Donbas.

They are not a footnote. They are a parallel foreign policy — a foreign policy of conscience, conducted by citizens, that has repeatedly run ahead of the official kind and dragged it forward. This book audits all of it honestly: the glory, the frauds, the gray cases, both columns kept visible. The ledger opened by a nineteen-year-old marquis in 1777 has never been closed out. On the republic’s 250th birthday, this is what the count says.