The Census

The ledger opens in the other direction: Lafayette, de Kalb, Steuben, Kosciuszko, Pulaski, and Duportail crossed the ocean to fight for a freedom that wasn't theirs, while the exchequers of France and Spain supplied some nine-tenths of the gunpowder and firearms with which American independence was actually won. Every episode that follows is a repayment on this account.

The price: De Kalb took eleven wounds at Camden and died of them; Pulaski built the American cavalry and died leading it at Savannah.

The philhellenes — George Jarvis in his fustanella, Samuel Gridley Howe, Jonathan Miller — answered the appeal from Kalamata that the U.S. government never did. After Missolonghi fell, their movement retooled into America's first foreign-aid operation: relief fleets from Boston and New York, walked past the warlords and profiteers into the hands of the starving.

The price: The fevers killed more philhellenes than the Turks did; Jarvis never went home, dying at Argos in 1828 in a Greek general's rank.

Hundreds of U.S. volunteers — the New Orleans Greys foremost — poured in within weeks; nearly all of Fannin's four-hundred-man command at Goliad was newly arrived from the States. The army defending Texas that March was, to within rounding error, an American volunteer expedition serving under a foreign flag, and most of the Alamo and Goliad dead were recent arrivals.

The price: They died at the Alamo and along the Goliad roads; the Greys' captured banner remains the property of Mexico City's National Museum of History to this day.

American gun-runners and volunteers ran the junta's supply line to the Cuban insurgency aboard ships like the Virginius, a worn-out former blockade-runner under fraudulent American registry, captained by the ex-U.S. Navy officer Joseph Fry.

The price: After the Virginius was taken in 1873, Spanish drumhead courts shot fifty-three men in five days — Captain Fry and thirty-six of his ship's company among them.

Some ninety Americans marched to the Legion's depots in August 1914 — Alan Seeger among them — followed by the 38 pilots of the Lafayette Escadrille, the 269 of the Lafayette Flying Corps, and roughly 2,500 American Field Service ambulance drivers. Together they manufactured the emotional case for an intervention Washington had not yet chosen.

The price: Seeger kept his "rendezvous with Death" at Belloy-en-Santerre on the Fourth of July, 1916 — one year to the day before an American officer stood at Lafayette's grave and said, "Lafayette, we are here."

Some 2,800 Americans reached the Lincoln and Washington battalions past a State Department wall — passports stamped NOT VALID FOR TRAVEL IN SPAIN — to fight fascism three years early, in the first racially integrated force under American officers.

The price: Nearly 800 died in Spain, and the survivors were investigated for decades as "premature" in their antifascism — the Attorney General's list, the FBI files, the subpoenas.

One hundred American pilots, recruited, shipped, and paid while the United States was formally at peace, flew for Chennault's American Volunteer Group against Japan. The book prints both scores: 296 credited victories against roughly 115 that survive the audit.

The price: Twenty-two of the hundred died in the Group's service.

Between 3,500 and 4,500 overseas volunteers from more than forty countries — about 1,250 of them North Americans, overwhelmingly veterans — crewed the Aliyah Bet blockade-runners from 1946 and built the new state's air force. The IDF's first general was a Brooklyn-born West Pointer serving under a false name.

The price: Roughly forty of the North Americans died — Colonel Mickey Marcus among them, shot by his own sentry hours before the truce — and the survivors went home to prosecutions for having served.

Within days of NATO's bombing campaign, Albanian American men were enlisting openly at tables in Yonkers and the Bronx; in April 1999 roughly four hundred flew out aboard a chartered airliner — the purest diaspora mobilization America had produced since Haller's Polish army of 1917.

The price: At least sixteen died — and the three Bytyqi brothers, who stayed after the war to escort a Roma family to safety, were executed by Serbian special police and recovered from a mass grave in 2001. No one has been convicted.

Several thousand Americans have served in Ukraine's International Legion since the 2022 invasion — the tradition's largest mobilization in generations, running, as ever, ahead of their government's own commitments.

The price: At least fifty Americans were dead by February 2024 and more than ninety by late 2025; when Zachary Ford fell near Pokrovsk, no government negotiated for his body — a private foundation did.