JOHN ADAMS.
P. S. There is an article in the Amsterdam Gazette of the 2d of May, taken from the Hague of the 30th of April, that "Mr Faucet, General in the service of the King of England, has set off from his residence, and we learn from Dort, that the English vessels are at last arrived there, and that the recruits of Anspach and Hanau will be embarked in a little time to go to America."
This Mr Faucet is the officer (they call him General in the papers, but I believe he is not more than a Major or Lieutenant Colonel) whose whole time and service are devoted to picking up the recruits for the German regiments in the British service. He constantly fills all the newspapers of Europe with his motions from place to place, and gives his accounts an air of mystery, which leaves the world, both in Europe and America, to magnify the numbers he raises at discretion, or rather according to their imaginations. But Congress may rely upon this, that the service is very unpopular and odious in Germany; that they are put to great trouble and expense, annually, to raise the recruits whom they have sent, who have never been enough to repair the breaches, and that this year they have not been able to get more than last, and these will arrive as late as those last year, and in all probability as sickly.
J. A.
TO THE PRESIDENT OF CONGRESS.
Paris, May 8th, 1780.
Sir,
The English have a faculty of deceiving themselves, which has lost them thirteen colonies, has brought them into a war, first with France and then with Spain, has nearly lost them Ireland, and has at last put them in a fair way of uniting all the other maritime powers of Europe against them. Yet they are still able to deceive themselves.
There is an example of this in the Hague Gazette of the 1st of May, in the article Great Britain.