During the Revolution, freeborn black New Englander Agrippa Hull served Brigadier General Thaddeus Kosciuszko as an orderly, and the two became fast friends. When Kosciuszko returned to America from Poland in the 1790s, bearing the wounds of his own failed revolution, he and Thomas Jefferson forged an intense friendship. They made a blood compact whereby Jefferson would liberate his slaves upon Kosciuszko's death, but as this history recounts, the author of the Declaration of Independence hesitated at the key moment.