6. Known as Lord Stirling, and an old acquaintance: above, XIX, 191 n. He had been commissioned colonel the previous November and a major general in the continental army on March 1, and was in charge of preparing the defense of New York against the expected British attack. DAB.

7. The five were the three commissioners, Father Carroll, and Baron de Woedtke, who joined them that day at New Brunswick—to the considerable amusement of the priest. “Though I had frequently seen him before,” John Carroll wrote his mother, “yet he was so disguised in furs, that I scarce knew him, and never beheld a more laughable object in my life. Like other Prussian officers, he appears to me as a man who knows little of polite life, and yet has picked up so much of it in his passage through France, as to make a most awkward appearance.” Thomas O’Brien Hanley, ed., The John Carroll Papers (3 vols., Notre Dame, Ind., and London, 1976), I, 47. We have found no mention of the Baron as part of the group after April 8: Journals of the Provincial Congress . . . of New York, 1775–1776–1777 (2 vols., Albany, 1842), I, 402. Achard de Bonvouloir, the young French agent whose report is printed above, Dec. 28, is said to have accompanied the party because BF had persuaded him to try to sway the French seigneurs as Father Carroll was to sway the clergy: Joseph Hamon, Le Chevalier de Bonvouloir (Paris, 1953), pp. 60–1. The author cites no evidence, and we have found none.

The stay in New York was longer than BF expected, and in the letter just cited Father Carroll characterized it as disagreeable. The party sailed on the afternoon of April 2: Carroll, Journal, p. [37].