Elkanah Watson (1758-1842) travelled everywhere and associated with everyone--soldiers, politicians, diplomats, Indians, artists, scientists, slave traders and abolitionists. He met the Marquis de Lafayette, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Paine and many other American revolutionaries. At 19, he smuggled funds for the Revolution from Rhode Island to South Carolina in the midst of the war, while starting diaries he would keep throughout his life. Returning, he moved from New England to France, carrying letters from Congress to Benjamin Franklin in Paris before setting...