Unlikely Allies Page 18

  Congress, it turned out, had not forgotten him. Deane was very much on Congress’s mind. “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another,” Congress had declared, “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” The Declaration was written in large part to persuade Europeans, particularly the French, of the justice of the American cause. Almost immediately after signing the Declaration, Congress commissioned a copy to be printed and sent to Deane to present to the French king. Somehow, the Declaration was either lost in the mail or intercepted by British naval vessels. Perhaps in hindsight Congress should have found a more reliable courier to carry the Declaration to Deane, or else held off issuing a public declaration until instructions could be received in France.

  That same week, Deane received word that Lee had landed in France and would be in Paris the next day. He quickly scribbled a note to Vergennes, warning him not to receive this interloper. Deane feigned surprise to Vergennes that Lee would venture to Paris. He could think of “no particular affair that might call him here,” and he worried that Lee’s presence as Congress’s agent in Britain would attract unwarranted attention from the British ambassador. Deane was already predisposed by Beaumarchais to dislike Lee, and he was hoping to send off the first arms shipments to the colonies within days. He felt he could handle the arms trade without Lee. Neither Vergennes nor Beaumarchais wanted to meet with Lee, who upon his arrival was vexed to learn that Deane had already secured contracts on supplies worth three million livres.

  Lee’s visit was an inauspicious beginning to the destructive rivalry between the two American agents. Lee returned to London jealous of Deane’s position at the French court and suspicious of Deane’s financial activities and relationship with Franklin. Soon after his return to London, he began writing to his brothers in Congress, Richard Henry and Francis Lightfoot, and to his friend Samuel Adams, cautioning them against Deane and Beaumarchais. Lee falsely claimed that he “had several conferences with the French ambassador,” and that as a result the foreign minister had sent Beaumarchais to London to offer him 200,000 pounds sterling worth of arms and ammunition as a gift to the Americans. He accused Deane and Beaumarchais of fraudulently billing Congress for free arms and warned members of Congress not to pay for the arms.

  As he wrote this, Lee knew it was a lie. He knew that Beaumarchais expected to be paid with tobacco in exchange for the arms. Months earlier, Beaumarchais had written to Lee, reporting that he was about to send a ship loaded with cannons and ammunition worth 25,000 pounds sterling in exchange for good Virginia tobacco. In his reply Lee did not contradict Beaumarchais’s understanding that the Americans would pay for arms with tobacco. After all, that was precisely what Lee had agreed to do when he negotiated with Beaumarchais the previous November at the Middle Temple.

  Lee simply wanted to get even with Beaumarchais and Deane, whom he felt had betrayed him. In Lee’s distorted mind, their betrayal justified his lies. Lee wrote Congress repeatedly, denying that the arms were in exchange for tobacco. While months would pass without a single delivery of tobacco, Deane and Beaumarchais had no idea that Congress was receiving misinformation from Lee. Lee knew that the financial survival of Beaumarchais’s company depended on the tobacco shipment to pay for more arms. Without the tobacco, it was unlikely the French government would continue to send arms. Lee was guilty not merely of bad faith, but of betraying the Revolution itself. From Lee’s deceptions grew an enormous controversy that would divide Congress, jeopardize the French alliance, and place the entire outcome of the Revolution in doubt.

  IN MID-SEPTEMBER troubling news arrived from London. Bancroft often wrote Deane juicy letters filled with small tidbits of political gossip—just enough to convince Deane that he was getting something for his money. Now Bancroft warned that Deane’s name had surfaced in Parliament. Late Wednesday afternoon, September 11, the former prime minister, the Duke of Grafton, stood up in the House of Lords and demanded to know if the secretary of state for the American colonies, Lord Weymouth, knew that Silas Deane was a regular visitor to Versailles. Grafton pointedly asked the secretary of state if he knew that Deane was smuggling arms to the Americans out of Nantes. While Grafton’s purpose was to embarrass the king’s ministers, the implications for Deane were more serious. The British government was now on public notice that Deane was involved in treason, and the British government would be under pressure to seize and prosecute Deane in order to silence its critics at home.

  How could the Duke of Grafton be so certain of these details? Most likely the information had been confirmed by Bancroft himself. Having betrayed Deane to the British government, Bancroft was now sending Deane news of his betrayal as a way to bolster Deane’s trust in him.

  CONGRESS’S LONG SILENCE TOWARD France raised concern among the French court that the Americans—and Deane in particular—were secretly negotiating with the British. Stormont and others probably helped to spread these rumors as a way of discouraging the French from supporting American Independence. Deane wrote Congress, warning that Vergennes was “extremely uneasy at your absolute silence.” Deane tried to reassure his hosts that no such negotiations “would or could take place.” While Vergennes trusted Deane, he remained suspicious of Congress.

  Vergennes was also worried by the increasingly belligerent meetings with Stormont, who was openly accusing France of shipping arms to the Americans. Vergennes warned Deane and Beaumarchais to be more cautious about their smuggling activities. Beaumarchais demurred. It was not their fault, he told Vergennes. He suspected that his rival, Dr. Dubourg, had behaved indiscreetly. “[T]he Doctor is continually writing public works on this subject,” he wrote the foreign minister. “If while we shut the door on one side the window is open on the other, it is quite impossible for the secrets not to get out.”

  In the face of Stormont’s thinly veiled threats of war, and Congress’s silence, Louis XVI became cautious and issued an order forbidding all military shipments to the Americans. France would not risk war with Britain on behalf of a nation that could not even pay its debts. Deane’s entire mission looked doomed. None of the arms they had acquired would reach the colonies.

  In response to this crisis, Deane sat down and carefully composed a long memorandum to Vergennes, setting out in the clearest terms the reasons for declaring independence, though he still had not heard from Congress in almost three months and had not received the text of the Declaration. Deane wrote a powerful brief for the American side: the revolution, he argued, was a broad popular uprising, not a narrow effort instigated by a few ambitious landowners to seize power, as the British Foreign Ministry argued. The Americans “are not an ignorant unprincipled rabble, heated and led on to the present Measures by the artful and Ambitious few,” Deane wrote. Rather, they were “bred from their Infancy in what they conceive to be the fundamental principles of their liberty.”

  Deane’s argument reviewed the events that had led up to independence, justifying the colonists’ action as a last resort. The colonists had not betrayed their sovereign, Deane pointed out. It was George III who had betrayed his subjects. Americans had not declared their independence “[u]ntil they saw their Commerce ruined, . . . their defenceless Towns in flames, their Brothers bleeding, Savages courted & Slaves instigated to Butcher and Assassinate without Distinction of Age or sex.”

  Deane knew better than to suppose it made any real difference to Louis XVI whether the Americans had “rebelled,” or whether George III was politically shortsighted. But Deane offered Louis XVI a point-by-point counterargument to Stormont’s allegations that the Americans were in open rebellion and needed to be suppressed. He appealed to the king’s own sense of dignity: “Divine Will” had placed in the hands of the French monarch the power to determine the outcome of this revolution by deciding whether to grant “Aid or Countenance” to the Americans. It was “impossi
ble that any Events in the Course of human affairs can be more interesting to France,” because of the opportunity to open up the American market to French trade and to deny Britain the power “ever hereafter to disturb her repose on the Continent or insult her on the Ocean.” America was France’s “most natural ally.” Deane’s memorandum may have been one of the most cogent arguments for independence written then or since—and one that history has inexplicably ignored.

  In a postscript probably added by Beaumarchais, Deane directly addressed the French government’s fear that if France entered the war and the Americans sued for peace with Britain, France would be left vulnerable to British retaliation. Deane argued there would be no need for the Americans to reach an accommodation with Britain if they were supplied by France. To the contrary, Deane warned, only if France failed to aid the Americans might they be forced to settle with the British, and if that happened, a more powerful Britain would be tempted to seize the French islands in the West Indies. (This was the same argument Beaumarchais had used before.) The British had already demonstrated their disdain for French sovereignty by imposing the humiliating treaty that ended the Seven Years’ War and stripping France of its North American colonies. Would Britain’s “regard to Justice, and the Laws of Nations,” Deane asked sarcastically, prevent her from taking the French sugar islands merely because Britain cannot prove France aided the Americans?

  Deane’s arguments apparently won the day. Less than a week later, after a further intercession by Beaumarchais, Vergennes reversed the order and allowed shipments to the Americans to proceed, albeit quietly. How much longer could Deane rely on Vergennes’s patience? Deane’s ability to persuade France to form an alliance with the new republic would depend on swift action from Congress. But Congress remained inscrutably mute on how he should proceed. What were his colleagues thinking, and how could they have abandoned him on a foreign shore? Deane tried to imagine what had happened. Were his letters lying at the bottom of the ocean? Or had his letters been received and ignored for more sinister reasons? Was Philadelphia occupied by British troops? Had Congress disbanded? Were his colleagues in jail—or worse? Had Washington’s army collapsed?

  Sometimes it seemed as if America were merely an invention of his own fevered imagination.

  TWENTY-THREE

  THE FRENCH OFFICERS

  Paris, October-December 1776

  For Heaven’s sake,” Deane chastised the Secret Committee in a letter, “if you mean to have any connection with this Kingdom, be more assiduous in getting your letters here.” All through October, as Deane purchased hundreds of tons of powder on credit, there was still no word from Congress. He wrote the Secret Committee nearly every day, hoping for a response. Each letter grew more despairing and bitter. News of the Declaration, he wrote, “has given this Court, as well as several others in Europe, reason to expect you would in form announce your Independancy to them, and ask their friendship.” After three months, Congress’s silence had “given me the most inexpressible anxiety, and has more than once come near frustrating my whole endeavors.” Deane could not have known that none of his letters to Congress had been received. The British blockade of Philadelphia had kept both Congress and Deane in the dark as to the other’s activities.

  October’s arrival cast a cloud over Deane’s mood. October felt both comforting and sad, like a visit from an old friend one does not expect to see again. The blazing colors of the Tuileries, the damp scent of leaves, and the long afternoon shadows made him wistful for Connecticut. He missed his young son and his frail wife, Elizabeth. He thought of the view from his front door, across the town commons lined with elms and the profile of the church steeple against a cloudless sky. In the market, the smell of pears and apples reminded him of the puddings and ciders that Elizabeth served their guests. He wondered if and when he would return to Wethersfield, and what he would return to.

  In letter after letter he pleaded with Congress for some sign that they were aware of the difficulties he faced, but he was greeted only with silence. He knew that success “depended on the friendship and aid of powers on this side of the globe,” and the probability of winning the friendship of the Europeans was now seriously diminished. He had tried to make excuses for Congress “until my invention is exhausted,” and when other vessels from America arrived in French ports without a line from Congress, his credibility was undermined. America’s friends were asking if Congress “were in earnest, and unanimous in their Independence.” Even if Congress needed no support from Europe, “common civility” required Congress to announce their independence formally. He concluded glumly that Congress’s lost opportunity risked “the ruin of the greatest cause in which mankind were ever engaged.”

  The one American whose letters reached Deane’s desk was the last person Deane cared to hear from: Arthur Lee. When Lee sent him a code book so that he could encode his letters to Lee, Deane tossed it aside. As Deane had no intention of writing to the meddlesome Lee, he hardly needed a code book.

  Deane was preoccupied by another Lee—Captain John Lee—no relation to the irksome Arthur. News had arrived that Spain had seized Captain Lee, an American privateer, at the port of Bilbao in northwest Spain. Captain Lee was commanding a schooner with a letter of marque from Congress. Letters of marque were written authorizations to privateers to seize enemy ships and their contents. Privateering was, in effect, licensed piracy on the high seas, and it was considered a legitimate way for countries to wage war. Privateers operated like mercenaries for a percentage of the sale price of the enemy’s vessels and cargo.

  Captain Lee had seized five British ships and their crews. When he arrived at Bilbao, the British captives charged that Captain Lee was a pirate—rather than a duly licensed privateer—and the Spanish government decided to arrest him. The incident raised fundamental questions about the sovereignty of the United States under international law. Since Spain had not recognized the United States, it did not regard Captain Lee’s letter of marque as official. His mission to seize British ships looked like the crime of piracy, and under Spanish law it would be punishable by death.

  The situation threatened American relations with Spain, which government Deane hoped would support the Americans. If Deane had had some instructions from Congress, formally appointing him ambassador for the new republic, perhaps he could negotiate for Captain Lee’s release. Deane fretted: “I confess I tremble to think how important a question is by this step agitated, without any one empowered to appear in a proper character, and defend.” Compelled to improvise, Deane approached Vergennes. Deane promised that American privateers would avoid French and Spanish ports in the future. In exchange, Vergennes agreed to intercede with France’s Bourbon ally, and eventually, Spain agreed to release the American.

  Hoping to evade the British spies who continually monitored his front door, Deane changed residences. He moved to a spacious apartment occupying the first floor of the Hôtel d’Entragues at numbers 2-4 rue de l’Université, near the Pont Royal. Despite this move, British agents continued to trail him. Meanwhile, French police kept an eye on both the British agents and on Deane. Deane’s new flat was large enough for a live-in valet. Beaumarchais helped him find a servant who spoke fluent English and could assist as a translator and bodyguard. Deane thought the valet fiercely loyal, if perhaps excessively suspicious of anyone who came near him. He never suspected that the fellow’s education and language ability probably indicated that he, too, was an agent for the French government.

  AS NEWS OF the Declaration of Independence spread, many French military officers wanted to enlist in the Continental Army to fight the British. Both Vergennes and Beaumarchais persuaded Deane of the need to send French-trained military engineers and artillery men as well as arms to the Americans. Vergennes saw this as an opportunity for France to consolidate its influence over the Americans without having to commit French troops. He proposed to Deane that Congress appoint the Comte de Broglie, who had led the French army—to defeat—in the Seven
Years’ War, to replace Washington as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army.

  Deane agreed to meet General Broglie only as a courtesy to Vergennes. Broglie brought Baron de Kalb with him as his translator. De Kalb had visited America and spoke fluent English. He was a large Prussian who hid his peasant origins by calling himself “Baron.” During the meeting in Deane’s flat, Broglie imperiously presented Deane with a list of sixteen French officers whom he wanted Deane to commission, and he insisted that they should receive ranks and salaries above their equivalent ranks and salaries in the French army. Broglie explained that this was how Europeans purchased the services of a foreign military officer. Deane had no authority from Congress to commission any officers, but he felt obliged to accommodate Vergennes, who insisted that he issue these commissions. Deane commissioned Baron de Kalb as Major General, the rank just below Washington, which would ordinarily have required a vote of Congress, and Kalb was given the handsome sum of 6,000 livres for expenses and another 6,000 livres as an advance (totaling about $92,000 today). As far as Vergennes and General Broglie were concerned, Kalb’s principal mission would be to explain to Congress the absolute necessity of replacing Washington with General de Broglie.

  Whatever Deane thought about the value of commissioning these officers, he must have recoiled at the suggestion of replacing General Washington. Deane idolized Washington, whom he regarded as the living embodiment of republican virtue. Washington had been a guest in Deane’s home in Connecticut. It is unlikely that Deane actually agreed with Vergennes’s proposal to replace Washington, but Deane was desperate to maintain good relations with France, and he believed that he was obliged to communicate the French government’s views to Congress. Therefore, Deane wrote to Congress passing along Vergennes’s suggestion of appointing General de Broglie commander-in-chief. Deane explained that the appointment of a French nobleman with the experience and acumen of Broglie would solidify the French alliance and alarm the British. He was quick to add, “I only suggest the thought and leave you to confer with Baron de Kalb on the subject at large.” This was one of Deane’s letters that managed to slip through the British blockade. When it was received in Philadelphia, many of Washington’s admirers were outraged. Deane’s letter only served to undermine his support in Congress.