John E. Hall, the editor of the Port Folio magazine, had recently written of Carlo Botta’s Storia della Guerra dell’ Independenza degli Stati Uniti d’America that “In consequence of the high estimation in which this work is held by Mr. Jefferson, it has been suggested in one of the daily papers that a translation might be worth the attention of some of our booksellers.” Hall doubted that the subscription project then being advertised would succeed financially and remarked that “We do not agree with Mr. Jefferson that this is the best account of the revolution, but it deserves to be naturalized in our country. It is a copious, though not a brilliant narrative.” He noted that Botta “was, at one time, a member of the French national councils, under the fallen Napoleon, and therefore he could not indulge in that boldness of thought and freedom of expression which the subject demands. If we are not mistaken, it was written under the immediate auspices of the monarch.” Hall conceded nonetheless that the work’s numerous speeches “might be introduced in schools, with infinite advantage, in the place of some of those which are now repeated by our young declaimers. In our next we shall endeavour to give a specimen of the work, and the terms on which it may be published” (Port Folio, 4th ser., 7 [1819]: 78).