| American Arriviste
Gray, Edward G.
Humanities Magazine, National Endowment for the Humanities,
November/December 2007
"John Ledyard (1751-1789) came to be one of the best known Americans of his time. And yet his life comprised a series of failures, increasingly grand, but failures all the same... What set him apart was his deep understanding of the fundamental social fact of his age: Being somebody in late eighteenth-century America meant being somebody known to the right kind of people. And Ledyard rarely failed at gaining the attention of the right kind of people. The list of famous individuals he came into contact with during his short life comes straight out of the indexes of history: Captain James Cook, on whose last voyage he sailed as a lowly marine; Robert Morris, financier of the American Revolution and Ledyard's one-time employer; John Paul Jones, with whom he struck up an acquaintance and tried to raise funding for an ambitious expedition to the northwest coast of America; Ben Franklin, whom he met in Paris during Franklin's last days as American ambassador there; Thomas Jefferson, Franklin's successor, whom Ledyard also met in Paris... It was in Paris that Ledyard enjoyed his first great social success, when he was accepted into the famous expatriate circle surrounding Thomas Jefferson." Edward G. Gray is associate professor of history at Florida State University in Tallahassee.
Go to the article at:
http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2007-11/American_Arriviste.html
G13/07-07. Posted January 31, 2008
|
