“Death cannot frighten us: Our goal has been reached!“
RyleevThe American revolution and its leaders: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, stirred the imagination and hope of the entire freedom-loving world not only in the eighteenth century, but even later, especially when it became clear that the French Revolution, submerging its republican principles in the Napoleonic regime and in the Bourbon restoration, would not fulfill its initial commitments. America alone remained the embodiment of those democratic principles for which mankind had already proved its willingness to fight.